800! If 800 is celebrated somewhere, then that is usually associated with a medieval festival and the hustle and bustle of jugglers and minstrels. With the Musikexpress it’s different, thank God, the old bagpipe stays in the closet – resp. may write a column as an anniversary serenade! 800 issues Musikexpress. This is a house number. Or a word. In any case: lots of books. And when I think about how many of them I was allowed to contribute to, it fills me with a certain pride…
Oh what, jerk! I am extremely proud! Or better: It’s more of a velvety, full-bodied blend of emotion, humility, solemnity and pride that washes through me. And, of course, bewilderment at where all this time has gone. And all the books. I don’t want to calculate it that precisely here, otherwise someone else will come up with the idea of putting me in formaldehyde and putting me in the ME Museum.
slides and paper photos
Just this much: In this editorial office I was still working on a DOS computer with a green monitor. Or was it amber? In any case, it was the last of its kind and as an intern I was entrusted with creating an internal index of keywords and names of all (then) previous ME editions. A mammoth project that was soon abandoned in favor of more urgent tasks such as evaluating the postcards sent in for the reader charts and helping out with sorting photos back into the photo archive. Yes: slides. And paper photos.
Digitization was only slowly making its way, and the editors were already working on ultra-megamodern Macs, but the special rulers with which they had just recently measured and glued the ME text columns were still lying in the desk drawers. When external authors deliver texts, they don’t do so by email – which wasn’t the case until recently – but by fax. Shorter ones were quickly typed into the system by the intern, longer ones were faxed on to a student typist in town (Dagmar, are you still there?), from where a 3.5-inch disk with the recorded text files was returned to Giesing once a day during peak times . The call “Courier from Kazmaierstraße!” meant: Now there’s material to edit. Exactly. That’s how it was back then. And also completely different.
Can you wish it could go on like this forever?
Speaking of MEseum: Not that I don’t belong there (which would also be a great honor) – at least according to the old interpretation. In the mid-90s, however, a turning point was underway here, too, and the derogatory term “rock dinosaurs” began to be transformed into an honorific. The astonishment was still great that the Rolling Stones were actually on tour again in 1995, accompanied by the editorial internal – and somehow meant outrageous – saying “The Stones can still do it at 60!” Well. Now they’re still making it at 80. And the ME with 800. Can one wish that this could go on forever? Good luck, Musikexpress! You can do it!
This column first appeared in the Musikexpress issue 08/2022.