‘Live is Life’: the Europop song that Laibach twisted into an industrial classic
Beneath their martial posturing and nationalist aesthetic lies a gleefully, and dare one say, silly core of deconstruction humour in Laibach’s industrial, neoclassical pummel.
Formed in the dying days of Tito’s Yugoslavia, the Slovenian group sought to examine ideological dogmas and the nation’s scarred history with fascism via deeply subversive antics.
They presented Laibach, the musical wing of the Neue Slowenische Kunst, as less a post-punk band and more an underground political movement, replete with paramilitary uniforms, invented insignias, and multi-media stunts from smoke bombs on stage to projected socialist propaganda reels cut with pornography, ensuring constant hassle with the state censors and even the Yugoslav People’s Army.
Laibach would find greater fame once in the UK. 1986’s Nova Akropola, released via Cherry Red Records and Wax! Trax in the States would cement their idiosyncratic penchant for delving into music’s rich litany of songs and works and hammering them into new, corrugated forms befitting their gargantuan, electronic muscle. Starting out with artful lifts from Bernard Herrmann and Gustav Holst’s The Planets suite, Laibach would move away from such lofty pieces and dive straight into one of Europe’s biggest pop numbers of the day for their politically-charged theatre.
Here’s where Opus enters. Having been in existence since 1973, it would take another 11 years for the Austrian pop group to finally find continental fame with their defining hit. Recorded at a concert and featured on their first live album in 1984, ‘Live is Life’ was largely created during a show in Oberwart to celebrate their passion for playing live and performing for the audience.
A sugary stomp of a song that glitters with a dash of The NeverEnding Story’s enchanted keyboards and some of the most insufferably earnest fist-pumping crowd love committed to record, Opus’ ‘Live is Life’ nevertheless topped the charts across numerous countries, peaking at number six in the UK and climbing to a respectable 32 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Their monster hit wasn’t obvious fodder for the industrial avant-gardists. Yet, spotting the potential for a stripped-down, Teutonic reinterpretation of ‘Live is Life’s’ Europop, Laibach similarly rustled up their biggest and defining hit. As well as coyly appropriating Queen’s ‘One Vision’ for ‘Geburt einer Nation’, Laibach would nail no less than two different takes of ‘Live is Life’ for 1987’s Opus Dei—a sly reference to the Austrian group as well as the Catholic Church’s controversial internal institute.
Lifting the ‘Live is Life’s’ plastic, anthemic rousal, ‘Leben heißt Leben’, and the more notable title track, both twist Opus’ soft pop to regimented commands of Völkisch realism and nation-state virility in a queasy blast of absurdism, equally disquiet and hilarious. Helped with a gripping video shot in Slovenia’s stunning natural vistas and mountainous landscapes, ‘Opus Dei’ marches with infectious energy and stands as one of the MTV era’s most arresting videos.
Laibach would continue to play the dry iconoclasts, desecrating everybody from The Rolling Stones, Prince, Pink Floyd, Europe’s ‘The Final Countdown’, and even an audacious reimaging of The Beatles’ entire Let It Be album. Yet, despite a long and successful career in performance, including a world-first show in North Korea’s Pyongyang in 2015, their twist of Opus’ ‘Live is Life’ documents the band at their most comically inventive. A pivotal record for the Slovene agitprop destroyers that balances being brilliant and preposterous with just the right amount of fraught waver.
