In the late eighties, Jim Marcus and his partner Van Christie were working as individual performance artists in Chicago, Illinois. Their early shows as the band kept their performance art roots and were less about music than destruction and visual mayhem, garnering attention from fans, members of the press, and police officers. Fiction Records, distributed in the United States by Polygram and at the time serving as home to bands like The Cure and Eat, added Die Warzau to its roster after a particularly destructive show created a minor public relations blitz in the city. In 1988 the band's first single, "I've Got to Make Sense," reached number twenty-three on Billboard's dance chart and topped college club charts across the country. Their next single, "Land of the Free," climbed to the top spot on the Billboard dance charts and stayed on the import charts for a record thirty-six weeks. Since Fiction was an English label, the record was classified as an import release. Despite a racy video that was banned on major media outlets and only played in clubs after midnight, the next single, "Welcome to America," reached the number twelve spot on the Billboard dance charts. Later releases have gotten various degrees of play on various stations and channels. Songs such as Funkopolis, Red All Over, Liberated, and All Good Girls mystify straightforward musical consumers even while becoming commonplace on dance floors. The band is well known for its lack of subscription to any particular musical genre and refusal to accept label-level censorship. Marcus has worked with all sorts of artists as well, outside of the band, including the Supergroup Pigface. On the Invisible Records Website, Martin Atkins says this:
Notes from thee Underground - A wide array of participants, as Pigface began to pick up steam. Louis Svitek of Ministry, Jim Marcus of Die Warzau, Ogre, Genesis, Flea for fuck's sake! I think one of the landmark tracks on Notes... has to be Asphole. The Pigface experience on every level, in multicolored 3D scratch-and-sniff. Originally called Taiko, it was just a mad, mad, afternoon out at Halsted St.'s Chicago Trax. We hired 6 Taiko drummers to ceremonially perform in the big live room, along with a backing track we created. Jim Marcus was instrumental and catalystic in the tracks inception. I remember sitting back in one of the chairs watching all these guys hammering away on the huge drums, and thinking how lucky I was to be enjoying this moment.
Politics
He leans politically far to the left and has been an outspoken proponent of gay rights and civil disobedience. He is well known for not playing shows sponsored by alcohol or tobacco companies and openly advocating that young men not register for the war, which Marcus considers illegal. He has spoken out openly against the death penalty and organized religion and, in the early Nineties collected 1200 signatures urging the Pope of the Catholic Church to disband the church due to offenses against human dignity. He is a proponent of sex education as a means to promote consensuality and safety. His vast experience of adult education on the topic includes, in 2011, a guest presentation for a college-level human sexuality class at Northwestern University.
2013 Music for Military Torture, Pulseblack Records
2015 Napalm Baby, Pulseblack Records
2016 American Jihadi, Pulseblack Records
2018 Tokyo Sexwale, Pulseblack Records
Solo
2007 Wonderland, Pulseblack Records
Typography
Jim Marcus has designed over 100 commercially available typefaces for various foundries but has a concentration of work available through , a font foundry in Chicago founded by of with which he has been involved with since its inception in 1992. His designs, including such staple designer fonts as , , and , have been used for many book covers. He is credited with being one of the first "grunge" typographers, developing fonts such as , , and that encouraged artists to step outside of comfortable design approaches and develop more uniquely troubled and chaotic works. His typefaces are used generously by artists such as Dave McKean, whose work mixes multiple media and is a good example of this sort of chaotic refinement of artistic energy.
