you are what you perceive
teutonic robot kultur
schlager-decadance

Pop and Terrorism
who we are

 
You are What you Perceive
Baader/Meinhof: Blind faith as a way out of dead end - Popculture as the ultimate redemption.

The Baader-Meinhof-Group were never seen as a piece of performance art or pop in the dominant media of their time. Out of the mid-1970s, the story enters our time. Punk brings the Baader-Meinhof-Group into their own: They are one of the four pre-1976 groups - DollsStoogesVelvetsRAF - that will be admitted to the pantheon. The group became a rock as well as intellectual journalist's touchstone: the subject of discographies, esoteric research, myth-making in articles by Jean-Paul Sartre and many others. This is only natural, as English punk combiened with Teutonic underground Terrorism going mainstream, is a fantasy of the Warhol Factory, proletarianized and transported to West Germany 10 years on. From 1980 onwards, the whole period becomes part of an established history .







  Now we have a positive industry: books by established authors, biographies of Baader, Ensslin and Meinhof," RAF discographies", passionate fan hymns like What goes on magazine. And the idea is picked over until only the bare bones remain. The 1rst Generation went for the glamorous Berlin nihilism, with minimalist tendencies, while the post-1rst Generation Groups went for the terroristic quiddities and bomb mantras of the late 70s/ mid 80s. And then, no one had any new ideas for about 15 years: as successive generations of indie terror groups diluted the RAF's 1rst Generation, it became hard to listen to either by the early 1990s.
Everything in POP is over-exposŽ! d now, isn't it? Each accretion brings a slow shutting down of the RAF'S original strangeness, original promise. Once they shocked; now the "shocking" is at the media industry's heart. Once they sounded like nothing else; now they sound like everything else. Fixed like flies in amber, whether they re-form and bomb is almost irrelevant, except in the individual transactions between terrorists and audience. But should this be regretted? Isn't this inevitable? Isn't it better to know that the Baader-Meinhof Group were major liberators?  
  The first Baader-Meihof's appearance on stage is such a concentrated package that it is not suprising that pop culture took 30 or so years to catch up. The whole 1rst Generation straddels pop and the avant-garde with the decisive quality of a pre-emptive strike.
Reflecting this wealth of esoteric materials is one way to recapture the first, taboo thrill of reflecting the Baader-Meinhof Group, and is one way of disentangling the group's activities from its legend. The simple fact is, to take part in the group in the late 1960s was to be let into a secret world, once you've got past the first frisson of pure evil. ( Like contemporary flyers say, 'the flowers of the evil are in full bloom with the Exploding Plastic Inevitable'.) Like any other great pop formation, it changed your life.  
  So what did Baader-Meinhof do? They helped to enfranchise women as terrorists in pop groups, as opposed to featured underground-activists; introduced a whole strain of contemporary modern German classics to a wider marked; laid down a marker which no performance-art group has since been able to ignore.
The Baader-Meinhof Group stand at the point where the archaic, immediatley post-war culture of repression and exposŽ! meet the full implications of the 1960s: sexual freedom, social mobility, pop as the motor of the culture industries. If tragedy stalks their history, it's because they, and many others at the same time, were exploring uncharted waters.  
  Now that we think we know everything about pop, it is easy to tie up their story into a neat, Late Show, style package: this omits any account of the group's first time courage, which is the reckless courage of all those who, both then and now, refuse to be content with the world as it seems.