8/2/2023 0 Comments Darkwood band![]() On the other side, Nazis sang songs glorifying street-fighting brownshirts during their rise to power, and eventually made folk music an integral part of the Hitler Youth curriculum.Īfter the war, a bedraggled British fascist movement looked for a new face. “There were fascist and anti-fascist songs from the beginning, which played an important part in resistance during the ’20s and ’30s, and during the war,” Bray said, pointing to the Spanish Civil War songs that served as anthems for anti-fascists. ![]() Mark Bray, author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, traced the battle over fascist music to the movement’s beginnings, in early 20th century Europe. The problem is older than neo-folk and neo-Nazis. Neo-folk has always had a far-right presence, with almost no left-wing one, until more recently.” “But if they were, neo-folk might qualify, since it almost entirely originates with a single band, Death in June, who it appears crafted their aesthetic approach specifically based on fascist political themes. “I'm not sure that any music scenes are ‘inherently’ political,” Sunshine said. Spencer Sunshine, a neo-folk fan and researcher focusing on the far right, said the imagery can be tightly interwoven with the scene. And while the band and others in its circles have dismissed their Nazi references as harmless provocation, anti-fascists argue the musicians are trying to build a safe space for true extremists. ![]() ![]() The group has released multiple albums with Nazi imagery on the covers and takes its name from the Night of the Long Knives, a 1934 Nazi purge to eliminate possible rivals to Adolf Hitler. But some of the genre’s founding bands, like Death in June, traffic heavily in fascist iconography. Neo-folk, which mixes traditional music with industrial and gothic influences, can be wildly experimental, a space for reinventing old genres and telling sweeping stories. The far right doesn’t own them in any real way.” “We have the right to heavy metal, we have the right to neo-folk, and industrial, and those genres. “We want a romantic art form that’s our own,” he said of the left’s claim to neo-folk. And as far-right violence soars in the U.S., with recent incidents including a massacre at a Pittsburgh synagogue and a car attack at a white supremacist rally, some music fans on the left are looking for ways to save their scenes from the people they can’t stand.įor Burley, author of the book Fascism Today, that meant launching the anti-fascist neo-folk website A Blaze Ansuz late last month. Still, the communities have become organizing hubs for the far right, some of whom adopt Nazi imagery. None of the genres are inherently political neo-folk artists are more likely to sing about nature than Nazis. “I want to go to neo-folk shows.”īut neo-folk music-along with a handful of other genres like black metal, industrial music, and some spheres of the punk scene-has a white supremacist problem. That was the dilemma facing listeners like Shane Burley, a writer covering far-right extremism. The music was good, if you could overlook some artists’ fixation on Nazi death skulls.
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