by Noah Well, this'll piss off those smug cretins at FOX "News." It seems that a German band named Weimar was given the ol' pinkslip jackboot to the ass once their record company (Universal) finally began to become suspicious that the band was composed of nazis. What tipped them off? Was it the name of the band? Nah. Weimar is a German city and the name of Germany's Weimar Republic lasted from the end of World War 1 until 1933 when Hitler really got rolling. The Weimar Republic was known as Germany's first reich not its third. I'm sure it was just a name that sounded swell, not unlike here where bands have named themselves Boston, Chicago, or The Atlanta Rhythm Section, not to mention a personal fave of mine, The New York Dolls. You see it wasn't the name. It was that someone started listening to the band's lyrics and started looking into the past activities of the members. Oh, oh! I mean, suppose we had a band here in America that basically used the thoughts expressed on Tucker Carlson's shows or even worse, Sean Hannity's old radio shows as its lyrics? Or maybe just about any of the speeches of today's republicans? I hate to tell you but it happens. Even in the 1960s there was a label that actually specialized in putting out rockin' tunes by and for KKK members. Here's one that you can probably still purchase in any southern gas station or in republican hellholes like rural Michigan and Indiana. What are the odds that it's number one on the charts in the campaign bus of Ron DeSantis?
But what about the biggest music companies in the world? Now, in 2023? Well, duh! Yeah! Can you say the magic words "Kanye West," the anti-Semitic Trump pal now known as the real black klansman? Hell, multinational companies now even give nazis shoe deals! The FOX broadcast team at this year's Super Bowl even proudly showed Elon Musk and Rupert Murdoch sitting together in their private box watching the game. And let's never forget that Roger Goodell and his NFL banned a black quarterback named Colin Kaepernick for having the audacity to publicly protest the killing of black people by nazi cops. The band Weimar uses some ugly cliches about media people being "bought puppets" and wolves and rats, all of which was part of the vocabulary used by nazi Germany to whip its people into a frenzy of distrust and pathological hate. According to the German magazine Der Spiegel, one of Weimar's members previously played in a band that featured outright anti-Semitic lyrics. Another member, the interestingly named Christian P, was once in a band named Murder Squad that featured holocaust denying lyrics and a swastika on its album cover and has more recently been accused of weapons possession and spreading neo-Nazi propaganda. These things are forbidden in Germany and have been since the end of WW2. Here? Not so much, obviously. But, here's the punchline: Universal was very late in acting. Hey, I'm glad they did eventually, but they had already put the album out and it got as high as #5 on the German album chart before they said so long, goodbye. Meanwhile, a rival to Universal in Germany, BMG, has recently dropkicked French rapper Freeze Corleone after signing him knowing the aforementioned Universal had already dumped him for being a nazi like labelmates Weimar. Unlike Universal, at least BMG dropped Freeze before his record even came out. At this point, I guess just don't sign these nazi pigs to begin with is the best we can hope for. All this reminds me of an experience I once had in the music business. You see, I was once asked by an artist manager to drive out to Pennsylvania with him to see a band he managed. This was in 1989. I knew and liked the manager so we decided to make an evening of it and go even though his band was actually from some place in Connecticut. We arrived in PA at the club earlier than we had expected to, just in time to unfortunately see and hear the opening band, a local outfit that was, as we entered, singing a song about zyklon B, the gas used in the showers at the German death camps. The local PA audience was saluting them with straight arm nazi salutes. We hurried backstage to the dressing room of my manager friend's band and found them practically in tears and worried that I would hold it against them. Neither they or their manager had had any idea what they were walking into because, well, why would you? We hustled the band and their gear out of there, told the club owner to go fuck himself and drove back to civilization where I arranged a more suitable showcase for them a couple of weeks later. When the subject of what had happened in Pennsylvania a couple of weeks earlier came up, I reminded them of the ending of the movie "Chinatown."
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