Not exactly the KMFDM I remember but it would be dishonest to say that they were on my radar back then. I was a different person in 1984 and it would be difficult to say exactly who that person would be because it’s entirely dependent on my memory of the people whose expectations and hopes I was trying to meet. Yes, it was like that, but anyway. KMFDM hadn’t been settled in my memory as… this. They only existed at all in some later incarnation that was decidedly more accessible. This may have caught my attention otherwise. Maybe. Maybe not.

It would be easy enough to rewrite my own history to portray the past me as one thing or another. There aren’t too many people from back then who are still around, and those that are may either not remember or be entirely unwilling to mess with an narrative that may also portray them as better than their actual truth. Get what I’m saying? It’s not that truth doesn’t exist, but the past is definitely a malleable substance, like a soft clay.

But enough about me. KMFDM is some weird shit.

But enough about them. Let the music stand on its own, or not.

Or not.

Taste is a very subjective thing, unless you are invested in taste as identity and then it’s something quite different. Having been in that place I do feel sorry for people whose relationship to the world is founded upon fitting in. They miss so much. Not fitting in is something to be celebrated. Alienation is the only path to identity. You don’t find yourself by trying out multitudes of other people the way you would go into a shopping center and try on clothes. You find yourself in isolation and we have ample evidence of this through the experience of ascetics and spiritualists from throughout history in every single culture. People don’t spend enough time alone. Or just sitting in the dark. Why are we still afraid of the dark?