Hands up who’s stumbled into a gay club by accident and ended up having one of the best nights ever? Admit it—we’ve all been there. I fondly remember my first time, spending a balmy Sunday afternoon in July down by the rail tracks at Ost Gut, the dingy bunker beneath the famous Panorama Bar in Berlin. We drank Sekt and danced outside to frisky disco as the sun set surrounded by friendly leather-clad muscle Marys and couldn’t have wished for a more pleasant evening.
Being straight and a little naïve, I imagined it would be like those brutal opening scenes of Irreversible down in the Rectum club: a dirty brown mist of wall-to-wall fist-fucking and cock-sucking, of bobbing heads grunting and groaning, of blood, sweat and cum. I thought it would be a total homo cliché, in other words, but it wasn’t because the DJ was spinning a lot of my favourite records and that always helps. Similarly, go to weekly gay night The Cock in London and you’ll hear DJs such as Erol Alkan, Black Strobe and Wolfgang Tillmans playing hard cutting-edge electro and techno.
Now there’s Zeigenbock Kopf. They’re this fake gay German industrial group from San Francisco who set out to make the most male music imaginable—and succeed. Using cheap equipment and horribly distorted feedback, ZK produce a nauseous, pummelling electronic scree over which moustachioued frontman Hans Bunschlapen (AKA ex-Pink And Brown hetero John Dwyer) barks every homoerotic S&M cliché ever invented in a thick Kraut accent: “Polish my boots/ fulfill my needs/ cruise the scene/ fuck/ dance” etc (from “To Do List”).
Their latest release, the 13-track, cliché-packed Nocturnal Submissions, arrives hot on the heels of their debut mini-album I.D.M. (I Dig Men), and already some uptight fags are calling for an end to ZK’s deliberate, if affectionate, piss-taking, claiming it ridicules their lifestyle and wasn’t funny in the first place. Whatever. This is the unfeasibly macho music that square straight people desperately want to believe gets played in the world’s nastiest gay clubs, even if it doesn’t.
Where’s the harm in that?
SUBURBAN DWIGHT
Nocturnal Submissions is out now on the world’s straightest record label, Tigerbeat6.
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