Hunziker Like the Wolf
Welcome to the second week of a two-part series on the White Power music scene in the United States and elsewhere. Last week's column gave a brief overview of the racist music underground's rise to prominence following the popularization of the Internet, its growth and expansion into different genres and a reference to the film 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.\ As promised at the end of that column, this week's deals with more specifics of the current scene, including its marketing and distribution. If we're lucky, there'll be another excuse to bring up James Mason.
For a music scene primarily associated with the reactionary right, music for the White Power crowd boasts an ironically progressive distribution model. For obvious reasons, most music retailers won't carry albums by bands with names like ""Angry Aryans"" or ""Swastika,"" or anything released by a label with known financial ties to a neo-Nazi organization. This puts White Power labels in the position of having to rely mostly on the Internet for album sales and advertising, but where most mainstream music conglomerates fear the freedom that the Internet grants consumers by allowing them to exchange songs for free, these labels have embraced it as a marketing strategy.
Byron Calvert, the co-founder the Minnesota-based WP label Panzerfaust Records, says, ""We're probably the only genre of music I've heard of that really couldn't give two sh... couldn't give a damn if somebody came along and wanted to bootleg and download a million of our songs. I mean, it's going to get the music to more kids.""
According to Calvert (and this is where Recording Industry Association of America executives should begin taking notes) allowing costumers to exchange songs for free has been an extremely successful strategy. ""At [Panzerfaust] we did over $1,000 a day in Internet orders alone, not counting hundreds of dollars everyday in snail-mail orders as well as bulk orders to European distributors (and we sold more CDs to European distributors than we retailed in the States). As far as the business side of things, we had a debt/equity ratio and a profit margin that virtually any other business would die for.""
Not confined entirely to the realm of Google and Boba Fett collectibles, WP music has also invested a good deal of effort in the more old-fashioned advertising strategy of giving out sampler albums. In late 2004, Panzerfaust Records made headlines (and drew a sharp critique from schools and anti-racist groups) when it spearheaded ""Operation Schoolyard,"" an attempt to distribute 100,000 copies of a CD filled with tracks from WP bands at middle and high schools across the country. According to Calvert, Panzerfaust at least succeeded in handing out its first run of 20,000 CDs in 12 days.
On the subject of children, not all WP music is directed at white adolescents and adults with racist sympathies and a preference toward punk, hardcore or metal. If Panzerfaust's roster represents the outwardly angry, hate-fueled side of WP music, then the Olsen twin doppelgängers Lamb and Lynx Gaede (performing under the title ""Prussian Blue"") are the less angry, hate-fueled side of it. Making their live debut when both girls were only nine, the pair have been performing folk songs praising Nazi war criminals like Rudolf Hess and advocating apocalyptic race war (""Victory Day"") ever since.
Even before an ABC Primetime story made ""Prussian Blue"" the most famous WP band in the country, the two had already amassed enough of a following to be taken on as an opening act for former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard (and near-miss for governor of Louisiana in the early '90s) David Duke. However, as the girls' notoriety has increased, so has the public backlash against them. Many venues refuse to let them perform, demonstrating once again that the best way for people to stand up against hate is to expose it.
Damn, no James Mason references after all.
Heil Hunziker at hunziker@wisc.edu.
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