This week on Yeah Nah Pasaran! we talk to Kirsten Dyck about her book Reichsrock: The International Web of White-Power and Neo-Nazi Hate Music (Rutgers University Press, 2016):
Reichsrock shines a light on the international white-power music industry, the fandoms it has spawned, and the virulently racist beliefs it perpetuates. Kirsten Dyck not only investigates how white-power bands and their fans have used the internet to spread their message globally, but also considers how distinctly local white-power scenes have emerged in Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Latin America, the United States, and many other sites. While exploring how white-power bands draw from a common well of nationalist, racist, and neo-Nazi ideologies, the book thus also illuminates how white-power musicians adapt their music to different locations, many of which have their own terms for defining whiteness and racial otherness.
In her examination of the Australian web, Dyck takes note of pioneering white-power band Quick & The Dead which, along with ‘Open Season, White Lightning, and the especially extremist Fortress, followed the Quick & the Dead and White Noise onto the Australian scene before the end of the 1980s. In particular, Fortress—led by vocalist Scott McGuinness … —has become an internationally popular white-power band’. In great news for fans of reich ‘n’ roll, Fortress has recently returned to recording and touring (Europe). On the other hand, while the ‘Southern Cross Hammerskins’ — McGuinness helped found the local franchise of ‘one of the oldest and most stable neo-Nazi organisations in the world’, outlawed in Germany and Portugal) — is still up and running on teh Intarwebs, for unknown reasons the websites for ‘Blood and Honour Australia’ and ‘9 Percent Productions’ are down at the moment.
See/hear also : Nazism, Neo-Nazism and Music (Spencer Sunshine, Luca Signorelli, Shannon Foley Martinez, Kirsten Dyck, Edward B. Westermann), YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, November 18, 2021 | The re-emergence of white supremacist pop, Ludovic Hunter-Tilney, Financial Times, August 17 2018 (‘Music as a vehicle for the message of the far right is again emerging from the shadows — and seeking new audiences’) | Review of Reichsrock, Julian Schaap, The French journal of popular music studies, Vol.14, No.2 (2018) | Promoters cancel Australia tour of Norwegian metal band Taake, accused of far-right sympathies, Mike Hohnen, The Guardian, January 6, 2023. These ‘far-right sympathies’ are further detailed in Why are fascist, Nazi and racist bands still being booked to tour Australia in 2023?, Ben Hillier, Blunt, January 9, 2023. For a token, historical blast see : A Brief History Of Neo-Nazi Music In Australia (December 2, 2010) and for a contemporary, scholarly account see : Heavy Metal Music, Texts, and Nationhood: (Re)sounding Whiteness, Catherine Hoad (ed), Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. /// Who is Australibus Tenebris? (February 6, 2023) | Ian Stuart : Zero of the White Race, Skrewdriver, and “The Battle of Waterloo” (September 25, 2006).
4.30pm, Thursday, February 16, 2023 /// 3CR /// 855AM / streaming live on the 3CR website
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