German Joys

Krautrock of the First Water

I note with delight that Krautrock pioneers CAN are releasing remasters of their legendary 1970s albums:

Spoon Records, in collaboration with Warner Music (for Germany/ Austria/ Switzerland) and Mute/ EMI Records London (for the rest of the world, excluding Japan), is releasing remastered versions of the classic CAN albums. Included are exclusive unseen photos from the time and new sleeve notes.

The albums were all remastered from the original master tapes and were overseen and attended by Holger Czukay, Irmin Schmidt and Jono Podmore, so that they finally sound on CD how they were always intended to sound. These releases follow the recent success of the DVD release, CAN DVD, which marked the 35th anniversary of the founding of the group.

I've picked up a few so far at zweitausendeins, and they sound fabulous.  If you're looking to cheaply dip your toe into the most accessible (but really not the most exciting) part of CAN's oeuvre, you can't go wrong with a CD called The Legendary CAN, which costs only 3 Euro at your local zweitausendeins store.

Tokio Hotel Storms American Malls

Elisabeth Vincentelli on Tokio Hotel's American debut:

While Nena may have climbed up the charts with "99 Luftballons" in '83, German music has never made a dent in the American mainstream—like everything else that's not in English. (If Shakira needs to abandon Spanish, you know there's no hope.) And so it made sense that Tokio Hotel's debut U.S. release, which came out on Sept. 11, would be a CD single of "Ready Steady Go" (originally "Übers Ende der Welt") and "Scream" ("Schrei"). It made even more sense that it would be sold only in Hot Topic stores—an association with the titan of goth-lite mall fashion is natural for a band whose image is a crucial element of its success.

...

Even as Tokio Hotel prepares for its next moves—master English, start drinking legally—it will be interesting to see if more European acts, emboldened by its success, realize they can cross borders despite shunning the pop-rock mainstream's lingua franca. They won't mean much to insular England and America, but they could have more impact on future identity politics in the European community than all the Brussels bureaucrats put together.

I'll stick with Manu Chao (G), who sings in every language but English (except once in a while), and is just about to release an album recorded in cooperation with patients in an Argentine insane asylum.

Born in Bavaria

To hear how country music sounds when sung by someone who's got two umlauts in his last name, visit the homepage of Germany's most gifted musical entertainer, Daniel KÜblbÖck, and turn up the volume.

The Heintje Never Stops

It's official. If I die, one line of my obituary will read "In 2005, Hammel unwittingly created an online forum for people who love the 1970s German child star Heintje. This turned out to be his most significant contribution to public discourse."

No other post has gathered such a consistent and varied stream of worldwide comments as my ruminations (rather rude ones, I might add) on Heintje.

In a desperate bid for more website hits, and to help Judith the Heintje fan, let me promote the latest Heintje comment to the main page of this blog.

Hi Heintje fans

Heintje cds can be found on www.amazon.co.uk.

I have been trying to find a dvd of his film "Ich sing ein lied fur dich" which I saw at the cinema in Hong Kong in 1970.

Does anybody know where I can find one?

Judith

Go visit the post to find Judith's email, and help her re-live her fond memories. 

One question: What on earth was a Heintje movie doing playing in Hong Kong?

The Texas Bohemians

You should all probably run right out and buy volumes one and two of Texas Bohemia, a compilation of live and recorded performances by the Bohemian and German bands of south central Texas.

A German fellow named Thomas Meinecke got excited by the existence of this cast-off bit of Central European folk culture, and visited Texas himself to record bands and buy records. He and his group released two records in the mid 1990s -- In Germany as well as the US. Not only is there all the beer-soaked oompa-ing you can shake a stick at, the liner notes to both albums are beautifully-written mini-essays conveying Meinecke's passion for the Texas heritage of this odd, sleepy part of the USA and the "unbelievably strange farmer-swing" it produces.

Herewith a translation of the first few paragraphs of the Texas Bohemia liner notes. Below, you'll find a link to a song. 

The Country

As we rolled into the little town of Frelsburg in 1992, our fuel gauge had been on empty quite a while. The sun had already begun to go down, but in Heinsohn's General Store (Gemischtwarenhandlung!) the light was still on. We drove behind the building and filled up our tank with some cheap gasoline. We could hear old Heinsohn there at the cash register, debating the merits of a new kind of cow feed with a few local farmers. In an unmistakable Lower Saxony dialect. We joined the conversation, asked about the background of the locals, and learned that their great-grandfathers had come from the Bremen area. For dinner, we can recommend Hackemack's nearby beer hall, and Keiler's renovated hotel in Fayetteville.

The next day, the oppressive heat continued. After breakfast in Orsak's Czech Cafe, we bought a package of fresh kolaches at Chovanek's. In Warrenton, behind Oldeburg and Walhalla, be visited the old wooden Harmonia Liederhalle, and in the tiny town of Round Top an old gray-haired fellow named Herr Knutzen recounted to us, in absolutely perfect Holstein idioms, about coyote hunting and that unfortunate shoot-out in the old saloon that had driven his father 'round the bend 60 years ago. In Sacks' spic and span mom-and-pop store, we got some ice-cold refreshments, and behold, Ronny Sacks, only 41 years old, conversed with us in the most fluent German you could imagine. We'd read here and there that Germany is in Texas, but the fact that even two world wars weren't enough to exterminate the German language in the USA was news to us. As with the Cajuns in Louisiana, it was also here the television-driven uniformization (Gleichschaltung) of the youth culture in the 1960s that put an end to the all-too-lovingly cultivated old-country habits of the various individual ethic groups.

In contrast to the Cajun country of southwest Louisiana, the German and Bohemian enclaves in Central and South Texas are less well-known. I heard a reference years ago in an interview with Ry Cooder to the diversity of the musical cultures of the Texas-Czechs and Germans. The fundamental influence of the accordion-driven polkas and waltzes of the German immigrants on the Tex-Mex music along the Mexican border had already been explored by Cooder on his own records, not least through his collaboration with conjunto-accordion great Flaco Jimenez.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Texas bands like the Sir Douglas Quintet or Brave Combo repeatedly brought German and Czech elements into their music, and even the Texas Swing of the 1930s (Bob Wills), as well as the beer-soaked Honky Tonk music of the 50s (Hank Thompson) was clearly based on the central European two-step, the Polka. In the 1980s, the California folk label Arhoolie/Folklyric brought out two albums which made the Bohemian music of Texas a bit better-known: one collection called Texas Czech-Bohemian bands, based on early shellac records from the 1920s to the 1950s, and a collection called South Texas Swing, with historical recordings from the Western-swing pioneer Adolph Hofner. I grabbed up both records, and was thrilled -- as with Cajun and Tex-Mex music -- by the aesthetic bonus of European folklore music gains overseas (rhythm, soul, booze, and electrification), and could not wait to visit Bohemian Texas myself.

And now, for your musical enjoyment, the Knutsch Band with "Zwei Wie Wir Zwei".

FT Interviews the "Wholesaler of Entertainment"

Bertrand Benoit of the Financial Times tries to penetrate the mystery of German Volksmusik:

Ten years ago I spent an evening with German relatives in a vast beer hall housed in a tent overlooking a snowy valley. The beer was good, but the musical accompaniment - bouncy, folksy brass- and-accordion fare played by four moustachioed men wearing lederhosen - was a violent assault on good taste. Or so I thought until I discovered that my companions were immersed in a powerful trance, tapping their feet, hugging strangers, and raising their tankards skywards every 20 seconds.

This was my first brush with Volksmusik, a melodic form whose mysteries are beyond the reach of anyone not born in Germanic culture. To the unitiated, it is the pinnacle of kitsch, bucolic nonsense put to simplistic, sickly sweet music. It is the tonal equivalent of wooden cuckoo clocks.

Like most non-Germans, he comes to the conclusion that an ability to tolerate the many forms of German Volksmusik is probably an inherited genetic predisposition that non-Germans will never be able to acquire. He interviews Volksmusik impresario Hans Beierlein, who charmingly refers to himself as a "wholesaler of entertainment," and who has interesting things to say about why Volksmusik sounds the way it does, and why certain Germans love it so.

I learned from the article that Beierlein rescued the career of one of my personal favorites, Heino, "who, because of his strange albino looks and persistent (but incorrect) rumours about his reputedly right-wing leanings, had suffered from a near universal media boycott."

Reason Magazine on the 'Red Elvis'

His name was Dean Reed. He was an American who became a Communist, settled in East Germany, and became a minor rock 'n roll star. They called him the 'Red Elvis', but I prefer the moniker 'Socialist Cowboy', since he acted in East German cowboy movies (cowboys rapacious capitalists, Indians peace-loving naive socialists). This is the genre known as 'Westerns From the East'.

Reggie Nadelson has now written a book about Reed called 'Comrade Rockstar,' and Michael Moynihan reviews it in Reason (a libertarian magazine). As you might imagine, Moynihan is not very fond of Reed:

After a short and largely unsuccessful stint with Capitol Records, Reed abandoned California for South America, where, inexplicably, his singles were outselling those of Elvis Presley. Possessed by his newfound ideology, he underwent a transformation among the bitterly impoverished natives: He shed his "false consciousness" and subsumed the artist's prerogatives beneath those of the Party. After a few years, Reed was expelled from Argentina for agitating against the government and moved to Italy, where he landed a string of minor film roles, including the lead in Karate Fists and Beans, billed as the world's first western/kung fu cross­over film.

Nadelson's account offers few details of what motivated Dean's political journey. Like many radicals of his generation, he claimed to have been inspired by that common inventory of 1960s grievances: Third World poverty, the Vietnam War, CIA machinations in Latin America. So when, in 1966, Reed was approached by a friendly Russian apparatchik offering a truly socialist variant of fame, he boarded a plane for the Soviet Union as an Officially Approved Rock Star-the genuine American article, playing ersatz rock 'n' roll.

Moynihan distrusts Ostalgie and therefore has his suspicions about why Reed was considered an appropriate subject for a book. The review's worth reading, however. [Hat-tip: SK, a Liberty-Loving Slovene].

Someone Help Susan Wenzel find Heintje Records

Over a year ago, I posted about Heintje, a German singer. When he was a child star in the late 1960s, Heintje sang a lot of songs about how much he loved his mother.

I said some rather unkind things about Heintje. I called his voice a 'spine-cracking metallic falsetto' and compared it to 'colony of enraged wasps stinging the listener's eardrum into pulp.' I stand by those characterizations.

However, others seem to have a more nuanced view. Against all expectations, this post has attracted more comments than almost anyother. There are, apparently, hordes of people who remember Heintje fondly, and are eager to relive golden moments they spent listening to his records. The comments come from as far away as Canada, China and New Zealand!

The latest is Susan Wenzel, who writes (you'll have to forgive the all-caps):

SEEMS AS THOUGH ONLY OUR FAMILY KNOWS OF HIM BECAUSE WE GREW UP LISTENING TO HIS WONDERFUL ALBUM "MAMA" (ENGLISH VERSION) YEARS AGO WHEN I WAS VERY LITTLE MY FATHER HEARD HIM ON HIS RADIO STATION (WGN-CHICAGO,IL) HE SEARCHED FOR HIS ALBUM FOUND IT, PLAYED IT OVER AND OVER. I STILL REMEMBER THE LYRICS... JUST BEAUTIFUL!

Go read her touching comment, if you can TOLERATE THE FACT THAT IT'S ALL IN CAPITAL LETTERS. Ms. Wenzel is desperate for a CD of Heintje singing in English. Why don't you write her and tell her how to find one? Something tells me we're not dealing with an Internet connoisseur here, so maybe you should just send an email to MITZEE@AOL.COM.

Yes, Anglo-Saxons Can Love Eurovision

Mike Atkinson defends The Eurovision Song Contest from sneering British snobs, and explains why Americans should like it, too (in fact, he reports, the U.S. is about to begin a similar contest among the 50 American states):

Full disclosure: I'm a longtime Eurovision fan, with a deep affection for the show that stretches back to childhood. As such, I have frequently had to defend it against the cultivated sneers of friends and colleagues. For while the contest is taken deeply seriously by the rest of Europe, whose popular music it can reasonably be said to represent, it is mostly regarded in the United Kingdom, where I live, as a camp joke. Unashamedly populist in nature, Eurovision's relentlessly upbeat, major-key feel inevitably jars with sophisticated British notions of creativity and cool. After all, didn't we single-handedly invent modern pop music? How dare these foreign upstarts try to sell a second-hand reading of our own culture back to us!

After describing the many odd, frenetic charms of Eurovision, Atkinson notes how refreshingly wholesome and non-commercial it is:

For my part, what I like best about Eurovision is its charmingly unspun quality. It has never become overcommercialized; sponsorship is present but discreet. It has never been co-opted by the major record labels, being largely organized by a federation of national television companies. And touchingly, there is still a sense of adherence to almost quaint notions of international harmony and cooperation; competition remains largely good-natured and untainted by overt greed.

Ye Gods, he's convinced me! If I happen to be indoors and sober on the 20th of May, I'll watch it and live-blog it.  Promise (subject to those two important conditions, of course).

Erdmöbel's apolitical pop

A few days ago, Peter Unfried of the left-leaning German daily taz interviewed Markus Berges, singer and songwriter for the German pop band Erdmöbel. I've raved about Erdmöbel before in this blog, and here's a short summary: the lyrics are drenched with longing, but not sentimental; the music is graceful, hook-ridden, and elegantly orchestrated.

In short, Erdmöbel are the most interesting pop band in Germany.  If they sung in English, they would be beloved of pop conoisseurs worldwide, as are Beth Orton or Everything But the Girl. But for now, only those of us boneheaded enlightened enough to have learned German can fully enjoy these gems. (But yes! Buy the records for the music alone, if you don't understand German.)

The goody-two-shoes green/socialists of the taz are suspicious. Isn't it a little frivolous to just make lovely pop songs? The title of the article, "Rock against Nothing At All", is almost an accusation.  Like a dog worrying at a bone, taz writer Unfried tries to get some sort of political opinion out of Berges. 

Berges is much too clever for that.  He toyed with punk when he was younger, he admits, but quickly found it a dead end; people who have to demonstrate their principled rejection of bourgeois conformity box themselves into equally boring little ghettos of non-bourgeois conformity, and end up just whining about the world in general.

Well, fine, the taz writer says.  But aren't you then just producing relaxing adult pop that permits high-IQ capitalist drones "to go out next morning and pursue [their own] individual economic goals full of elan?"

You can almost hear Berges sigh.  "You can't just pull an Ermöbel song out of an automat to satisfy a certain need," he objects.  Unfried visits a concert.  The music is gorgeous, he admits, but Ermöbel have short hair, don't call attention to themselves, and seem focussed on the music.  Suspicious, Unfried resumes the inquisition.  Can taz readers be sure that Berges doesn't vote for the conservative party (CDU)?  Berges smiles: "I understand the impulse.  I'd also like to be sure that someone whose art I treasure doesn't vote CDU.  But that's all nonsense.  Because I know that art has its own independent existence, even if it's just a pop song."

I ♥ David Hasselhoff

Indeed, David Hasselhoff, like Paul Auster and Jim Jarmusch, is a much bigger star in Germany than in the U.S.  I don't know exactly why, but perhaps this video for "Hooked on a Feeling" helps explain it.  Let me quote from an email I wrote to a friend after he sent me this link:

I will tell you something, without a drop of shame.  I enjoyed the hell out of the song and the video.  All of it.  The angels, the Masai warriors, the inexplicable detour to Alaska, the foreshortened background featuring dancing businessmen.  It was catchy, irresistible, and not without a disarming dose of self-deprecation.  A frothy, senseless celebration of lighthearted, lightheaded love.

And I stand by that.  David, ich hab' dich gaaaanz lieb!!!

Blitzkrieg Bop; or Bubblegum-Nazis

The campus newspaper rarely contains much more than mundane hints about student aids and endless griping about tuition fees.  But the latest issue contained something very special.  Excerpts follow (my translation):

Girlie-Band makes Nazi Music

Right-wing radical music.  In Germany, one thinks generally of raw, loud music with simple-minded lyrics.  While you cannot buy such music on the open market in German, the situation is completely different in America. 

There, the two siblings Lamb and Lynx Gaede, 13-year-old girls from California, formed the nationalistic band "Prussian Blue" to, as they put it, honor their German heritage.

The two twins, who look like thoroughly normal American teenagers, believe in a nationalistic idea.  They grew up in a radically right-wing family whose youngest daugher is named "Dresden," and appear to be completely indoctrinated in right-wing thought.

Earth Furniture Sounds Good

A few months ago we had a fruitful discussion of German pop music. The name Erdmöbel ("Earth Furniture") came up, in the comments, and I decided to visit the nearest record store and buy their first CD, Altes Gasthaus Love. I immediately became hooked, and thus was among the first in line for the second release, für die nicht wissen wie.

Erdmöbel is a German pop band. They make hummable, delightful pop music -- 4 or 5 minute songs.  They will never compose a suite for symphony orchestra on the theme of the Nibelungen. They will never create a political concept album with dense, threatening music clumsy lyrics sprinkled with words like "oppress" and "exploit."

Why you should be listening to Element of Crime

German pop music rarely catches the rest of the world’s attention. Unless you live in Germany, your notions of German pop are likely defined by fleeting memories of Nena’s 99 Red Balloons, Falco’s Der Kommissar, or Trio’s Da-da-da.  Good (or bad) for a couple days’ humming, but not much more. 

Many Germans, on the other hand, will harbor fond memories of the early 1980’s Neue Deutsche Welle (“New German Wave”) flowering, featuring bands like Markus and Geier Sturzflug.

No, you English-speakers have never heard of NDW.  Although the lyrics of some NDW bands could be clever and political, the music is little more than casio-generated, tinny, foursquare early-80s dance pop.  Think Flock of Seagulls or Bananarama, recorded in someone’s bathroom, and produced by their uncle.

After 8 or 9 of these numbers, with their repetitive, pounding march-like tempi, you’ll be thinking: Jesus, I’ve heard more syncopation in a Brahms symphony. On the other end of the scale are the genius-freaks at the fringes, such as the inimitable 70’s electro-glitch-click pioneers Kraftwerk (who come from Düsseldorf), operatic wild woman Nina Hagen, and industrial nutcases Einstürzende Neubauten. The icy genius of Kraftwerk, in particular, hasn’t dated at all.

But where, you ask, where is the middle ground between lollipop, chainsaw, and drum machine?Where’s a German band I can pop into my CD player, and enjoy even if I don’t understand the lyrics?