Now by German War Tank

Schlock ‘n’ Awe
Robert Slattery

Ah, to reconcile the blunt-force idiocy of this project from my early 20's with the political realities of now, let alone the ways I've changed. I still find the sound fun, but christ if I don't regret the name, even if it was always intended as a bit of snark-garbage.

"German War Tank." I really do not care for this name. 95% do not care for it, lets say. Maybe higher. At the time, though, there were a few things I couldn't get past in the music I was seeing around me, couldn't just stomach or cut out. Endless b-tier noise, power electronics, and (occasionally) grind records with real corpses on the cover, Nazi imagery, misogynistic pornography collage, et cetera. What to do when you generally like a sound but hate the wrapper it comes in?*

I can distinctly recall getting a CD in trade that suits this moment well. GWT may have begun before this point—I can't exactly remember—but it is relevant enough time-wise. It was perfectly whatever album with a photograph of a school girl's crushed head in the booklet. First I took the art and reversed it so I didn't see it. (I was quite anal about things being complete, together, etc.) Threw that fucker out after a day or so (all of it, completely). Unpleasantness as a concept is worth exploring, sure. But this wasn’t simply unpleasant. It was disrespectful, objectifying of actual human suffering not an exploration into it by either the artificial or meaningful consideration of the real. It was, in effect, a kind of cruelty, and remains so. This kind of content remains the template for the my-first-(challenging!)-aesthetics play kit bought by so many stay-inside outside thinkers. So I jokingly recorded the first two German War Tank EPs (I believe they were recorded within the same week), the name attempting to embody the self-serious cartoonery of what I felt was so prevalent without being too on the nose. Some song titles had a bit of goofy-gross to them that belied the less than serious nature of things, but that was it. (Never mind that these titles were barking up a different tree than the band name.) There was no shock art or mockery of it. Simply, as a piece of satire or criticism it was thin.

What I am describing is a major failing on my part to take that frustration and do something meaningful with it. There was no targeted commentary. Nothing even remotely sustained so that one could, in observation of the whole, say "oh, I see what he's getting at." I did not scrutinize, consider, break down, or reconstruct with snarl what I was seeing. GWT probably would have been something of a one-off or something that ran the "take" stale, had this been the case, but it would have been free of any ambiguity. Instead, I trusted that the combination of a too-serious-to-be-serious name and the goofy character of the music would convey a meaningful counterargument to that pervasive strain of “extreme music” aesthetics.**

By not putting in the work and making something a little more pointed (obvious, even), while outright enjoying the process of recording the music, I wound up binding myself to a name I disliked for years, one that misrepresented the political and aesthetic values I was discovering and enjoying. Yes, I could have dropped it, but I didn't because it was by and far my most successful project.

These are hallmarks, then, of immaturity: not thinking through, expecting to be understood when not putting in the work, and not willing to pay a cost and course-correct to align more with my wants and values. (There was, too, the immaturity of that have-it-both-ways name, which, in hindsight, I see surely gave me a bit of the same rush that the shock bullshit twits I was displeased with were enjoying.) GWT was a one-off joke built to be understood by friends who knew (and, in some cases, shared) my gripes and so understood where the name came from. What it wasn’t prepared to be was anything put out further into the world. I simply wasn’t aware of that then. That I had to explain the name at points to clarify what my intentions were and that I was not sympathetic to Nazism wasn't a mark of success. Not that I saw it as success then—I simply didn’t process it. That I just continued forward with the name and its baggage rather than giving myself license to be happier with the project overall has amounted to a lesson for myself about wanting my work to represent me accurately, even work as puerile (in the best way) as this. (Thus the corrective nudge of this essay.)

To then have all of this in the background and to then say "I'm going to release another album under this name" in 2017—well, fuck. There's no need to recount where America and internet culture is as we near the end of 2017 in terms of fascism, grotesquery, and nonchalant cruelty. It is necessary to call out, though, that whatever humor (however sardonic) informed "German War Tank” and its mild use of gross and its hesitations toward shock has some shared, ancestral DNA with the effluence that defines the worst of the internet, and that DNA isn’t, for what it’s worth, that terrible cover art and the hand-me-down shock aesthetics I was seeing in front of me. It was the possibility space for ambiguity and how that inclined one toward pushing the other (the recipient of that violent ambiguity) to make a determination as to whether or not anything was sincere, satirical, purely to incense, et cetera. That trend of shitty album art reveled in ambiguity, but it did so within its own little community that, for better or worse, understood that it generally wasn’t ambiguous (save those truly sallow individuals). It was an aesthetic of shock that occasionally interrupted the outside with “guerrilla” art tactics—always the aim, always the fantasy—but was communicating within its own particular guidelines and margins and in doing so was for all intents and purposes safe from being misunderstood. What it was not, though, was an open playfield with forever-adjustable sidelines.

It would then seem to be a good time to pursue an aspect of German War Tank that interrogates all of the current material: MAGA shit, the appropriated cartoon frog, et cetera. But that then would exchange the fun of it for the criticism because—and certainly I’m not looking at a larger cycle of things, caught up in the panic of the moment—there’s really very little fun to be made of the most corrosive elements of this time, at least as I can envision through music. (Maybe this was never my strong suit.) And what is “trolling” of troll culture? Just more corrosion. The fun, too, is why I’ve come back.

So where do things go from here? Hard to say. GWT releases have slowed incredibly. I kind of imagine this to be the last. I spend more time ticking on a keyboard then grunting into a microphone, let alone any other kind of audio noodling. If I come back to this sound (however dated and chintzy it may be), it may not be with this name. Maybe it will, my having found peace in this exorcism. Fuck knows, but I’ve grown up, at least a bit.


*Let’s not lie to ourselves and say that these things make a whole, unassailable package. You can certainly record some meditative, bleak shit, but you’re likely doing it in your home or in a studio, and you’re doing it through any constellation of instruments and effects that are immutably neutral. Wrap your output in different colors and imagery and music changes state quite easily—particularly if the vocals are unintelligible or simply don’t exist. (This album, for example. What is it innately, before this essay and it’s cover art? What is it if we look at only the music paired with the meaningless song titles?)

**I am by no way positioning myself as anything like a first to mock this kind of stuff. There was plenty out in the world that spoofed, played at, picked on gore and porn artwork. (The cover of the first Nikudorei album comes to mind as a choice example.) A hearty vein of this material, though, wound up devolving (or maybe always being) simply another acceptable bit of misogyny or misanthropy (see most anything tagged "splatter") masked as button-pushing. I saw enough of this at the time that there was a template of sorts. The playing at fascist imagery, though, was a trend that I, in my narrow space, didn’t see mocked for the high school character it had. I'm sure there are exceptions, and I’m sure they existed then, too. (Hell—maybe they were more subtle satire, and I misread them?) It’s just that nothing seemed to cross my view that said what I felt need to be said (and imagined that I was saying) about that particular trend.

Hand-copied edition January 2018, Digital January 2019

Label for experimental music started in 2001.