Let Your Body Learn
Nitzer Ebb—Control, I'm Here (1989 / Electronic Body Music)
Hello internet pals of music. Today we’re remembering Douglas McCarthy, shouty singer of the EBM group Nitzer Ebb, that passed away this week.
The closest I felt to God was listening to “Join in the Chant”1 —Andrew Weatherall
I first heard the massive track “Join In the Chant” in the middle of a pasture, at night, throbbing from an 18” subwoofer jammed into the back of a blue 1987 Honda CRX. Imagine it: a teenage beer party in small town Texas, open car hatch blasting out the sinister grunts, muscle and hate to an otherwise empty field of twenty kids and some confused cows.
That’s a long way from Essex.
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I wonder how Douglas McCarthy would’ve reacted to see that. I imagine there being many stories like mine—at least across the US, where the group had toured with Depeche Mode.
After that weekend night in the field, I returned to the city where we actually lived, Houston, and called every single record store in the phone book, looking for a copy. It took several calls but I found one at a Camelot (or a Sam Goody) in Sharpstown mall and talked my mother into taking me to pick it up—I was still too young to drive. Houston was a huge sprawling city even then—this was an act of sacrifice I’ve never forgotten, like the day she let me pick the movies on one of our weekends and so we watched Attack of the Killer Tomatoes and Surf Nazis Must Die!. I wish I still owned that record, the whole story of it makes it so special to me.
Houston probably doesn’t come to mind when it comes to important dance music cities but along with Austin and Dallas, Houston was at the vanguard of tying MDMA to dance music.2 I read somewhere that the summer before Texas criminalized MDMA, a Houston dance club whose name I can’t remember actually had a bowl of free pills at the door. So before The Second Summer of Love took over the UK in the late 80s, Texas had already had its own, smaller version a few years before. There were great clubs in Houston that I was too young too get in to like 6400 and Power Tools—although we had an all-ages club called Club Soda, where I would self-consciously move to this, Skinny Puppy, Gary Numan and on and on.
None of this is has anything to do with Nitzer Ebb—I’m only saying that in Texas, people weren’t bumpkins…even if the first time I heard music like that was in a cow field.
And while I will always love “Join In the Chant”, with its menacing mantra of Fire Fire Fire WHAOOOO3, “Control, I’m Here” is better. Because everything about Nitzer Ebb is here to untangle.
They, as well as other EBM groups like Front 242, were often accused of quasi-fascism. Laibach do something similar, and have confused and angered people since 1980. Maybe what bothers those Nitzer Ebb critics is the music’s refusal of overt politics, implying that if you’re going to use the visual ghost of fascist-past, that you’d better be explicit about why.
I disagree. I’ve never liked art to be spelled out for me, and I appreciate that can be messy. I like overtly political music, but too much Crass and Billy Bragg and you start coming off like Rick from The Young Ones. It’s not very sexy. And the thing that I’ve always found alluring in Nitzer Ebb’s music is the way their image and their sound works to challenge fascism as not a political issue, but a sexual one—at its core, fascism is about power structure: control, desire and the desire to be controlled. Nitzer Ebb’s musical goal, to liberate listeners from their bodies, attempts this with punishing militance. The control they exert is on the dancer, and the dancer gives up to the ecstasy it promises, the same way the state exerts power to deliver “freedom”. The details of policy are only malleable details, which is why fascism is so hard to politically define—yet like obscenity, you know it when you see it. The strength of what Nitzer Ebb did comes from that kind of murkiness maybe. Honestly I’m not educated enough, or even brave enough to attempt to write about the sexual dynamics of fascism—but it’s fascinating and I know there’s been plenty of attention put to it, from the films of Passolini to certainly thousands of books and doctorates and so on.
Back to the song, McCarthy’s vocals on this track are incredible: defiant shouts paired with the sickly honey of a throaty growl. It’s unsettling. And the synth line is the best they ever came up with, as classic as Front 242’s “Headhunter” or the memorable “Join In the Chant”.
We’re in a dark age. And while I want the Fuck Politics, Let’s Dance crowd to keep playing “(We Don’t Need) This Fascist Groove Thang4, maybe something a little edgier better sums up the dungeon that we are in. McCarthy’s death comes at a time when the reunited group was about to tour—they were scheduled to play Houston this September.
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https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/jun/12/douglas-mccarthy-nitzer-ebb-dies-aged-58
https://maps.org/news/media/playboy-ecstasy-was-legal-in-1984-and-it-was-glorious/
For anyone who knows their heavy metal enough, Douglas McCarthy’s WHAOOOO is the dance music equivalent of Tom G Warrior’s OURGH. He absolutely owns his grunt.
I prefer the Fire Engines cover to Heaven 17’s original: The World Is Run By Uncool People