January 23 - Final Solution

All rules are there to be broken - and I am about to break one of my own rules, as the song I am about to share has not been officially released in this particular version - however, it needs to be (Trent Reznor, are you listening?). In 2005, Nine Inch Nails had released With Teeth, and ten years after they went out on tour with David Bowie, for the summer amphitheater part of the tour in 2006, they invited the legendary goth (in my mind, the goths of the 80s are todays emo kids) band Bauhaus with them, along with relative newcomers TV on the Radio. The electronica/performance artist Peaches was the final support act.

However, Trent Reznor must have gotten along splendidly with Peter Murphy, the lead singer of Bauhaus, because throughout the tour, they had several sessions recording and performing songs they had written themselves, as well as cover versions of songs by Iggy Pop (their version of Nightclubbing is outstanding), The Normal and Joy Division - and then there is Final Solution, originally by Cleveland avant-garage (their own description) band Pere Ubu.

When I first heard the song Final Solution, it was sung in the very particular Swedish dialect found in Skåne. Skåne is one out of two places in the world I have been asked if I wanted a Coke with my meal at McDonalds and not been quite able to understand what I was asked - the other place that happened was in Scotland, which should give the English speaking reader some idea of what Skånsk sounds like compared to Swedish. When I heard the song, I was working in Studentradioen in Bergen, and the people I worked with there was completely up in arms over the Swedish band Bob Hund (Bob Dog). I tried my best to like them, but in the end, there were only a few songs of theirs that really clicked with me, and Et Fall Och En Lösning was one of them. There is a good chance that one of the reasons Bob Hund didn't quite work for me was that I never saw them live, as their live shows were things of legend, but nevertheless, they weren't quite my thing.

Fast forward quite a few years, and I decided to look up the song. First I had to remember that Et Fall Och En Lösning was a cover version. Then I figured out it was by Pere Ubu. And then I used YouTube to find the song. I had to sift through WWII documentaries and crappy "melodic death metal" to find Pere Ubu's version - but then I stumbled across Trent Reznor with Peter Murphy and TV on the Radio from their 2006 Radio Sessions. While I still think there is something about Bob Hund's version that really resonates with me, the version below is now probably my final version of the song. Peter Murphy did his own version of the song back in 1986 on his album Should the World Fail to Fall Apart, but this version is, in my opinion superior to it. However, I will let you judge for yourself - here are Peter Murphy, Trent Reznor, and TV on the Radio: