Come sit down

By my side

Play the drum

Share my bread

Taste my food

Try my rope

Sing a song

Come along

All night long

Sit down and rest

Goat, Try My Rope

There are three great bands that derive from Sweden: Marduk, ABBA, and Goat. Goat present themselves as a mythical collective, and as the myth goes, they originate from a commune from the high north of Sweden that practices a voodoo cult. Although they leave it open to debate whether this could be true or only a legend. The band members remain anonymous and prefer to hide behind masks and extravagant costumes. They claim that they are only a fraction of a vaster collective that predominantly resides in the far north and that there have been numerous incarnations of the band over the last decades. To the larger world at least they surfaced with their debut album in 2012 and have been an international success within the alternative music scene ever since then. Goat play psychedelic fusion with heavy ingredients from afrobeat, funk, psychedelia, krautrock or middle eastern sonorities. They claim to play World Music, as is the title of their debut album. Goat seem to strive for the highest endeavour in art: universalism, and creating a universalist notion and culture.

How can you achieve universalism? You will need to be able to grasp the abstract as well as the individual, the idiosyncratic, the detail; the abstract and the concrete are the poles at the end of the great spectrum. And truly, the music of Goat is quite abstract and, seemingly, theoretical. But it is also very idiosyncratic and peculiar. For the more practical purpose, universalism requires openness and mutuality. Out of their community spirit, the Goat collective is fond of sharing things, inviting people and practicing a politics of open doors. A politics of open doors and dismantled borders they also display in their eclectic, explorative and experimental approach to music. According to the band´s spokesperson, Goatman, Goat are a reflection that the world has become more intertwined and more mixed up. Also musical styles become ever more mixed up, finally amalgamating into a “world music”. Big mainstream artists like Beyoncé come up with such a sophisticated mix of styles. However, and as particularly the case of Beyoncé seems to illuminate, this mix of styles can also appear very calculated, sterile and pretentious. Nothing that Beyoncé ever does seems to truly be fluent and come out of fluidity. Goat, on the other hand, do not actually create a pretentious mix out of everything, involving half a dozen of professional composers on each song, as does Beyoncé. Goat rather dwell in recombination and juxtaposition. And, what is crucial: in friendly recombination and juxtaposition. Although Goat are quite handy with their instruments and with what they are doing in general and appear quite meticulous in their craftsmanship, they do not at all radiate the annoying, sterile professionalism that you have in most of today´s mainstream music. Goat appear amateurish, ill-designed, incremental and improvised. That makes them likeable. If you´re likeable, you have won over people. If you are universally liked, you have become universal. Reason, as they say, is universal. But reason is not necessarily likeable. You have to become both reasonable and likeable to become universal. Goat are very likeable. And there is also some reason behind their enterprise.

In western philosophy, reason (and concepts like human rights, that is to say mostly concepts that stem out from enlightenment) is thought as universal (before the enlightenment age many philosophers considered Christianity to be universal and what should be inflicted on the entire humanity). But, to say the least, also the existence of countless cultural peculiarities is universal. The existence of individuality and idiosyncracy is universal. The norm may be universal (in its appeal). But derivation from the norm is a universal occurrence all the like. Therefore, if you want to be universal, you likely should be reasonable – because reason is indeed the most universal and transparent medium and method to sort out problems –, but you should also be a bit irrational, divergent and peculiar: because this is what makes you human, and what makes you human, respectively humanity, is the common denominator, i.e. the universal. If you want to get in touch with a stranger, you also need to debase yourself a little bit; by shaking hands you demonstrate that you do not hold weapons in them. Therefore, also universalism needs a bit of such a friendly self-debasement and demonstration of harmlessness to get in touch with each other. Universalism needs some sacrifice. Goat also debase their individualities through their anonymity. According to them, this anonymity is a sacrifice the individual member of the collective has to make for the common good, for the possibility of the shared experience within the collective. The sacrifice you make for the universal will rewarded infinitely however. Nevertheless, what is also needed when getting in contact with others is that you can stand your ground and that you are firm. Goat are, at first glance, clumsy and obviously harmless. Goat appear as clowns and as fools. Yet as we know from Shakespeare, only fools tell the truth. Only fools are sane. Only fools dare to stand up against the king. Only fools can be trusted. Humour is universal, and the humour of the fools is universal, and may function as a universal glue. In being clownish and apparently fools, Goat serve as perfect messenger for the highest of truths.

Goat are surreal. The surreal is good. Grasping and understanding, being able to mimic the surreal should get you into a firmer touch with reality. Reality, as they say, is, to a good deal, surreal; be it in the annoying and trivial sense, as a stubborn resistance to progress or mutual understanding, or in the lofty sense, insofar as reality also serves as an extension of itself, is a realm where possibilities and opportunities pop up, where that what is considered impossible time and again becomes reality. To the surreal you primarily connect yourself via imagination. Goat are not only very imaginative. They truly represent imagination. When you look at a Goat performance, you seem to gaze into the pure realm of imagination itself. Goat are truly creatures from the spheres and seem to reside there. Imagination is creative, and with seemingly representing imagination itself, Goat´s outlook on life is simple: There is only one true meaning of life and that is to be a positive force in the constant creation of evolution – as they proclaim on their second album, Commune. Not the final product, not the artwork, is what truly represents imagination, but the ever ongoing process of creation, the potential to create, creation ever being in flux. It is the eternal openness that goes in hand with radical imagination. And openness goes also hand in hand with the universal. It is a prerequisite for achieving the universal. Goat exhibit an extreme openness and they seem to be in a state of constant flux and transformation.

Creation means dislocation and getting you to another place. True imagination means starting from another place than which you are currently in in the first step. Philosopher Gilles Deleuze claims that all the good books and true undertakings in literature are written “in some kind of foreign language”. He also advocates literature and art that identifies with a “minority” position and expresses itself in a language that derives from a “minority”. This does not mean that one should simply apply the language of a collective that happens to be a minority. Being a minority is nothing particular in quality; and a minority collective in some place can be the majority in another. What Deleuze refers to is discovering some subversive potential within a language that may become the language “of a coming people that yet does not exist”: a utopian people. Deleuze is fond of “Becoming”, of an evolution of positive qualities. Goat, with their mythical, almost indigenous origins in Korpilompolo in the isolated far north of Sweden, embody that spirit of eternal evolution and openness – of joyfully “becoming minor” and expressing themselves “in some kind of foreign language”. They refer to themselves as a minority in their own culture, dispersed and difficult to catch, seemingly on a “line of flight” (another Deleuzian term) forever, a reminder for Swedish mainstream culture that the cultural “other” resides in the own mainstream culture itself, as a breeding ground for something new and yet ancient, for a new territory that is home nevertheless, for a fresh sense of place. In the wider context, Goat´s music and overall performance seems to be addressed at a people yet to come – a utopian people. The true artist, according to Deleuze, “calls for another earth”. With their world music, Goat apparently also call for another earth.

Speaking of Goat, I absolutely need to address that I am super fond of the delightful dancing and chanting girls that front the band. I could marry them on the spot. Swedish women usually are very beautiful, but the Goat girls hide their beauty behind the obligatory masks. Beauty nevertheless is also a vibrating subjectivity, and that is what the anonymous Goat girls radiate to the fullest. The identification mark of subjectivity is, however, not beauty (since beauty highly refers to objective criteria), but grace (Anmut) and dignity. If you want to portray subjectivity in an idealised way, it will be by the means of grace. Grace does not refer to objective criteria, as beauty highly does, but remains subjective, magical, perfect from deviance of (clinical standards of) perfection, perfectly fitting in somewhere because it does not seem to fit by pure objective criteria or expectations. With their amateurish dance moves the Goat girls achieve maximum grace (whereas the many professional dance collectives accompanying superstars may astonish and enchant, but hardly ever achieve grace). Their equally amateurish chanting in unison seems to be the voice of the ultimate calling that the band seemingly wants to achieve. Despite its slight eeriness there is warmth and appeal in it; despite its somehow distant and forlorn Gone with the Wind character it is energizing and activating. The Goat girls give me one of the highest notions of the divine power of the feminine I have ever encountered. Unfortunately, the Goat girls did not joyfully wave and wag their motley flags and accessories this time in Vienna. But they played with pipes. I need to see them again. I will then marry them on the spot.

The happy universalism of Goat stems out from the 2010s. But the world seems to have become a darker place again. Dreams of ever ongoing globalisation and cultural amalgamation, into a world culture and a world music, have suffered a backlash. Nationalism, mental retreat and a sense that particular cultures, or aspects within cultures, can truly, and in essence, be antithetical and antagonistic to each other (i.e. nothing that can be mediated away by means of reason or a happy come together) and therefore should be left segregated from each other have risen again. Like a sinister little brother of Goat, the remarkable Swedish film Midsommar from 2019 – as well as its ideological forefather The Wicker Man (from England 1973) – seem to illustrate that indigenous cults and native stuff are not necessarily something positive and likeable, but also something irrational, stupid and outrightly dangerous, that should better be ended (which, however, would likely necessitate the use of force, which may not be anything better than that against which it is directed against). Yet, on the other hand, just these examples illustrate how important universalism, intellectually and emotionally outgrowing the limitations of one´s own culture is, just like a friendly attitude to strangers and outsiders to one´s own culture, instead of sacrificing them in obscure ancient rituals.

Another thing that has risen is a sensibility for “cultural appropriation”. Could one accuse Goat of cultural appropriation and blackfacing? Well, cultural appropriation would mean to steal from the other to make it yours. But Goat´s otherness is so extreme that it surely would confuse any other that tries to rest on a solid identity. There are some artists (like M.I.A. or Clyfford Still) that want to make art for the “other”. And their own otherness, and the otherness of their art and thinking, is nothing of any usual sort. It is distinct, it needs to be sorted out and explained for that purpose. In general, there is Me, and there is the Other. That makes, in a nutshell, the world. When you befriend the other, or marry the other, you form a union, you feel like you are “a world”, a duad that expresses the world, or that is a world in itself. If you remain mutually hostile to the other, you remain the Other. Even when you try to overemphasize the I over the Other, be racist against it or try to eradicate it, behind this narcissism likely will remain some depression: Because you cannot relate to the other, and therefore you remain incomplete. Most people like to see themselves in the other, or align with others that are like them. This creates stratifications and milieus, and is directed against the universal. Happy are the people who like to get to know what is different to them, what is truly other to them. By uniting with the other, their own boundaries become larger and more elusive. That will feel good. People are hindered by borders, and they are hindered by borders inside them: commonly referred to as neuroses. Goat want to eliminate borders and establish a global state of anti-neurosis. In their radical otherness, they seem to express a positive otherness, not a negative one. They express the otherness that lies within any entity, either in itself or via mutuality, that any I is necessarily an Other for any other person. The essence of Goat´s otherness is eternal openness to Otherness. And this is the essence of being superhuman. Via eternal openness to the Other you become the Overman. And the Overman is, according to Zarathustra, the meaning of the Earth. The meaning of the Earth will necessarily be universal. The radical Other, the positive Other, will, like the Overman, be overflowing. It will naturally try to share its goods and make universal connections via sharing. He we are again with the basic idea of Goat: Establishing a collective that is based on sharing.

The universal might not be very popular, because people think the universal will be very strict and demanding. Of course the universal will need to rely on some rules and regulations. But it will also inherently need to remain somehow loose. The universal deals with the cosmos, with the All, and the All is uncountable, non-denumerable. Therefore, if the universal was strict and little else, it would need a non-denumerable number of rules and regulations. And that is impossible. But the true universal is loose anyway. There are some qualities in any entity that are universal of some sort, and others that are not. Therefore the universal only refers to that limited number of qualities (the universal however also reflects on the non-universal qualities, whereas they, in turn, not necessarily truly reflect on the universal but may remain self-saturated). And the universal is loose because it is eternally open. Borders can be closed, but the universal is borderless. It needs to embody openness, like Goat. That sounds complicated. But it is actually very simple. Being universal means: that you are able to take everything serious, and take you take nothing completely serious. As is most obvious, this is also what Goat are doing. In the end, it is likely a minority programme. It will also likely suffer from inner contradictions, like everything else, and any other approach. This happy universalism likely only applies for cool people with a soft spot. But most people are hard and unforgiving. We can, however, say, that this is not a problem of universalism, since they are not likely to enter its celestial realm. They will remain nationalists of one sort or another. We, the happy universalists, will, at any rate, kill them with kindness. We will put flowers on them and equip them with masks to leave their stubbornly egocentric personalities behind when they should dare to enter our realm, the universal realm of the Goat.

Impaled Nazarene is a black metal band from Finland who is also very serious and widely exaggeratory at the same time, and you cannot exactly tell either where one of these qualities begins and the other of the two ends. Since they are satanists, one of their trademarks is to have a song with “Goat” in its title on every album. These are their “goat songs”. Band leader Mika Luttinen says about them:  The thing is that when you are doing a goat song, the song is called “Goat Sodomy”, you can be sure that it’s not going to be deep social commentary of our problems. The goat songs will have Satan, the goat songs with have goats, the goat songs will have bleeding rectums, they will have blood, shit, all things that we all love and like. On their landmark album Suomi Finland Perkele they sing I have sworn the Oath of the Goat. Well, I have also sworn the Oath of the Goat.