Laibach!

I think we should build altars and write hymns and psalms praising St Youtube, The Patron Saint of All Things Visual!

Honestly, it seems like there is no boon youtube won't grant us ... except maybe that really creepy press conference last week with Stanley Ho and Wife #3 ... although I'm betting that, within only a few more days, some nice person somewhere will put it up and thus we'll all be able to see once again what looks creepily like a poor sad old man, either senile or on drugs, obviously being suckered out of his billions by a scarily avaricious young trophy wife, and thus everyone who missed it first time around can stop kicking themselves and join in the on-going nth-degree analysis and discussion of each nano-second of that footage to work out what we think is really going on!

However, that is still to come! And, yes, we will be checking youtube OFTEN hoping to find it there, and, yes, we will post it here when it is!  Since this latest Nancy Kissell retrial is behind closed doors, and such interesting real-life soap operas don't come around often enough for Hong Kong's taste, this is something we will be following avidly for many months to come.

However, that isn't what I wanted to talk about.  I wanted to tell you how, once again, youtube delivered. And that really should be DELIVERED!!!

 What happened was that, over a decade ago, I heard a song on the radio that left me awestruck with a loosely hanging jaw and a boggling mind.  HAD to get it only ... well, I missed the name of the band and no one ever knew what I was talking about.

Then, yesterday, I was in youtube looking for something ... OK, OK, I was looking for the Stanley Ho footage ... when I accidently stumbled across something that made me go mmmm!, and exactly like an ADHD rottweiller I forgot what I was doing and went after this new rabbit and ended up ...

... tada!

... finding that song I went searching for all those years ago.  And here it is:



I first heard this song - the Stones version naturally - back in High School and, totally nauseated by the usual "Yummy, yummy, yummy, I have Love in my Tummy" and "Me and You and a Dog Named Boo" on Radio Fiji One, thought it was amazing!  So clever and erudite and all that stuff missing from the bubblegum garbage that Radio Fiji One endlessly pumped into in my life!

Naturally this was before Morris Hedstroms got Fiji's first Import Record Bar where I discovered Leonard Cohen and David Bowie and John Lennon-without-Paul-McCartney and Moody Blues and Jefferson Airplane and Marianne Faithful and Patty Smith and ... well, you get the idea.

But anyway ... back to youtube and this amazing discovery:

LAIBACH!!!

Excited to finally have a name for that really dark and creepy version of the Stones classic, I spent yesterday hunting down all I could find on this Slovenian - SLOVENIAN!!!  Who even knew that Slovenia had music!!! - rock band.

And once I got over the "OMG, Borat has put out a rock video!" and the "Do all Slovenians look like serial killers?", I was seriously impressed!  And the more I found of their music the more impressed I was.  Like, have a listen to this:



It's all so slick and sophisticated and erudite and wonderful, isn't it!, but coupled with that wonderful strange mispronouncements like "sleether as they pass"!  Pure bliss!

But I found out they were most famous for this: 



But decided, after only 30 seconds, that I wasn't very impressed and clicked it off, wondering if maybe the songs only worked if you knew the originals, so I dived again into youtube to hear the original Opus version of "Life is Life" ...



... and it was so ditsy, creepy and 'happy-clappy', I had to go back in to listen to Laibach's take ... and I listened to it all the way through and it built into something that completely blew me away ... and now I'm a massive fan!

But being a fan of a Slovenian rock band? Where is that even? The Balkans? And here I am, a Fijian living in Hong Kong, and I'm madly loving a Balkans band, and it just seems so perverse and off-beat ... but that's youtube for you.  Saint Youtube makes global citizens of us all!