This is going to be very longwinded so, since a video is worth a million words, I'll invite my gentle reader to check out the following two clips on YouTube. First, we have Queen's classic rock anthem "One Nation", about how we should all link hands and live in happy harmony:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=XJvNvBYTsGw

You don't need to suffer through the whole thing, just watch enough to remember what it sounds like as you've probably heard it before. And now, here's what a band called Laibach did to the song:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=1YE_j0xIsJA

Intrigued? Settle down and read the rest.

Before I can explain why on earth I'm flying halfway across the world from Singapore to an obscure suburb of Ljubljana that I've never visited before and know nobody in, I'm going to have to twist the history dial back to when I was 14 or so. I've always had a thing for music, wigging out to Kraftwerk and Max Headroom on MTV before I had the faintest idea of what genre they represented, but I violently resisted my parents' futile attempts to expose me to classical and was equally unsatisfied with the steady diet of Guns'n'Roses, Metallica and other flavors of the day in school. Somehow, in those pre-Internet days, I found my way to the Usenet group rec.music.industrial, obtained a CD player and starting buying recommendations pretty much at random. And my very first CD was Kapital, a then-new release by Slovenian cult band Laibach.

It would be an exaggeration to say that Kapital blew my mind. No, it took me a long time before I could start to appreciate this crazy quadrilingual mishmash of movie samples, electronics, all in support of an elusive message, but I was intrigued enough to invest some more of my allowance in another Laibach release, Nova Akropola, which was one of their very first:

And the last track of that CD, "Država" (The State), did blow my mind. It starts with the speech above, plays a horn loop "like Radio Minsk before announcing the monthly potato harvest quotas" (to quote r.m.i regular Al Crawford) and builds a brutal drum track to a pitch of feverish intensity. But what did it all mean?

Laibach started their career in the 1980s, when Slovenia was still a part of communist Yugoslavia and under the iron fist of Josip Broz Tito. As any dissent would have been brutally crushed, Laibach adopted a different tack -- they adopted the symbols and trappings of authoritarianism and repeated choice bits of Tito speeches and the state's own turgid propaganda, goose-stepping around on stage and, without ever cracking a smile or breaking the facade, poked fun at the pomposity of it all. By the time the authorities woke up (aptly) in 1984 and banned Laibach, they were among the most popular groups in Slovenia -- and for their next concert, they just put up posters with a giant black cross, a time, and a date, and drew record crowds anyway.

Soon enough, Yugoslavia collapsed and, after a ten-day war, Slovenia wrested its independence in 1991. While it would be a bit much to give Laibach all the credit, they certainly played their role and have continued to skewer anything they can get their hands on, including issueing their own passports, producing the full-length opera of Krst pod Triglavom (Baptism on Triglav) and producing some of the bizarrest cover songs ever, including the entire album of Beatles' "Let It Be".