Rammstein - unafraid of noise

I’ve mentioned Rammstein in an earlier post – they’re one of Germany’s more famous exports, an eccentric hard rock/very hard rock band, singing in German. Which is rare – there’s no on-air quota here for German music, sadly for local bands. But Rammstein have marketed themselves with gargantuan pomposity and simple but impressive-sounding lyrics (if you don’t speak German).
They made it big overseas in the late ´90s, thanks to a few soundtracks like David Lynch’s Lost Highway. Every now and then they put out a new album such as this year’s Reise Reise, which includes the songs Amerika, a sarcastic take on the USA’s global dominance and tendency to invade other countries, and Mein Teil, a comment on the German cannibal case that was in court earlier this year.
I saw them in concert twice in New Zealand and they were received positively, if with a little head-scratching. The indoor pyrotechnics, silver costumes, sunglasses and inflatable dinghy for crowdsurfing added to the bemusement.
Their lyrics are simple and can either be viewed as lame or genius. One of my teachers thought the latter - he used one song as an example, Du Hast Mich (You have me), which when you hear it can mean Du Hasst Mich (You Hate Me), until he sings “Du hast mich gefragt”, which means “You asked me”. Yup, pure genius. Perhaps my teacher was biased by the fact that he knew the bass player. Anyway, I was impressed by the words before I understood them and now I find them amusing. It’s good listening practice, though.
Example from an oldish song, Bestrafe Mich:
Bestrafe mich
bestrafe mich
du meinst ja
und ich denk nein
schließ mich ein in dein Gebet
bevor der Wind noch kälter weht
Means:
Punish me
punish me
you mean yes
and I think no
include me in your prayers
before the wind blows even colder
Rammstein are not afraid to tackle the awkward issues, whether they be sado-masochism, incest, America, cannibalism. What an export.
But mostly German prefer to import, and most of the songs on the radio come from the US. Others prefer World Music. Some theorists believe this stems from some kind of cultural cringe. Attempts this year to introduce a music quota (France has a 40% local content quota, for example) were shouted down by accusations that people wanted to hijack the airwaves and constrain Germany’s media freedoms. “We’ve had limitations on what we could and couldn’t play before, when Goebbels was Minister of Propaganda during the Nazi era,” some said. “Do we really want to have that again?”
So that doesn’t look like changing anytime soon. But it has to be said, when a country embraces David Hasselhof as a singing sensation, perhaps radio restrictions would be in the people’s best interests!