SOTD #715 – Bernays Propoganda
Words. Pah. What are words, but bricks laid in sequence? We learn the patterns from the people we meet, and we mimic those patterns to communicate with others who build the same designs. I see people who don’t so much speak as deploy barracks, whole chains of bricks, and thus safeguard themselves from thinking, from deconstructing those walls into bridges.
When you can’t understand a language, you can’t see the bricks. There’s no telling what’s being stacked up, what’s being torn down. That’s terribly disorienting in a conversation, but in music the landscape shifts. Expression radiates from outside the bricks: anger, purpose, patience, wit. Such is the righteousness of Bernays Propoganda, that even when the jagged range of Dischord-like riffs sink into submarine synths and Morse code basslines, those searing emotions still shine through. Politika is the sound of a band expanding their territory, yet still guarding the boundaries of their radical self; and while the city remains invisible to me, I can still lose myself in the land’s awesome beauty.
Even when translated, “Lazi me, lazi me” is a township shrouded in mystery. “Lie to me, lie to me,” the refrain and title say. “Make me an addict, make me an addict / and then cure me, and then cure me.” They sound sedate, but does the ebullient pulse that courses behind them suggest submission? The fantastic cut-up collage video offers no answers, as it shouldn’t; but when two lovers try to kiss and a stack of coins blooms between them, you realize that those clever Bernays are on the offensive after all.
You are in the presence of minds that search for resistance. You need not even see the walls to feel them fall to the ground.
You can download “Lazi me, lazi me” (and eventually pre-order Politika here.
