“Listen, you gender disciples / I’ll give you some advice” … Linus Volkmann enthusiastically chooses the most terrible piece of the year. Nobody can help you with this column anymore.
Watch comparison! We are in June, we have almost reached the middle of the year. That means that soon I’ll be dancing naked in the forest again to hypnotic drums around the fire of the solstice celebration. Of course, the year after that continues, but even if 2026 will certainly still have a few (poison) arrows in its quiver, one thing can already be stated: the race for the very worst song is over for this year.
All further submissions are unnecessary, we have lifted gold (read: invincible super chair), bow to the king. Mike Krüger gave us “The Gender Disciples”. How did he do that? I tried to find out the secret.
17 Things It Takes to Make the Worst Song of the Year
01 A terrible topic
If you want to really annoy people with music, the choice of topic obviously plays a big role. Because under general terms like Spaghetti ice cream or Puppy petting enclosure It might be difficult to bring up the ugliest feelings. But don’t worry, that’s what the piece has in mind – and what could be more caustic in 2026 than this ritualistic nonsense about gender? Simply nothing! I know this very well because I gender the spoken language when recording podcasts, for example. Sorry to everyone who just sputtered their drink on their device in horror. Indignant listeners regularly write to me about how terrible they find this and, in the process, also about me, my work and my entire line of ancestors. But it gets even worse: Gendering has also been possible in the magazine form of the Musikexpress since the 2020s. Some authors use this, some don’t. There is no compulsion. This is still a free country – at least until Wagenknecht and the AfD finally handed it over to Putin. In any case, since the gender option in the Musikexpress, the person who pre-sorts our readers’ letters has had to cry a lot. Because how often is the feedback not about music, but simply about this topic?
“It doesn’t matter, the main thing is traffic!”, the brave Microsoft assistant Karl Bracket (RiP) would say, but the fact that the mere desire to make the female form visible in language triggers so much hatred can get you down in dark hours.
02 Poking behind the expiration date
Unless your own household is still connected to a leaky ISDN, you can certainly agree on the following: The novelty aspect of the topic of gender has been completely over for several years. Fantastic idea, but I definitely want to break it down AGAIN now. Something like digging around in moldy yogurt for a bite that isn’t already green, hairy, and soupy.
03 Of course the look may not be right either
Why isn’t this song released on a real vinyl single, but only in streaming? That’s definitely a minus point in the doghouse of the enemies of progress! But even digitally you can still be frightened when the cheeky boomer hawk beams at you from its cover.
04 Don’t waste any time
Sorry, but you haven’t lost anything in the singing competition for the worst song of the year if your piece doesn’t dispel any doubts about sanity with the first line. “Gender Jünger” solves this in an exemplary manner and opens with the words that could be the introduction to any troublemaker fan fiction against any achievement of the last 500 years: “I’m sitting in front of the radio and listening to a comment”.
Sure, you sits in front of one radio set and write then indignant mail with your gnawed savings bank pen. Let’s get you back to bed, grandpa.
05 Every single joke has to fail
“Suddenly it’s no longer called suspenders, but suspenders” – anyone who can smile while listening to this piece shouldn’t be surprised if Mario Barth even looks at him or her with pity at some point.
06 Music as a burden
Also great idea to have the music made by a free music AI app. The prompt may have been: “Please create a storky country song that sounds like Friedrich Merz looks.”
07 Humor as punishment
In the podcast “The Supernoses”, which Mike Krüger had with Thomas Gottschalk until the end of last year, the former tells the following joke: “Which doctor does Pinocchio go to? The wood nose and throat doctor.” The awkward silence afterwards showed that even Thomas Gottschalk was uncomfortable. Slowly again: Even Thomas Gottschalk was uncomfortable with that.
08 Every rhyme must feel as if the family dog Seppel had written it
“Many great German poets are currently spinning in their graves / And in our neighboring countries they are also laughing their heads off.”
I have to admit that I’m not a necroscientist or an expert on prominent grave rest, but I rather believe that the poets concerned here would roll their eyes in the afterlife if they saw the disproportionate number of filler words like “even” that are supposed to fill gaps in the metrics here. And while we’re at it: Goethe would have shot with impure rhymes like grave on limp.
09 Garbage has to mature
If you read the text to “The Nipple” (1980) by Mike Krüger, you can already feel the delicate bud of a rejection of modernity. Cared for by him over the decades, it was now able to ripen into the capital stinking fruit that we can enjoy today.
10 Garbage wants to grow
For the continuation of this generational hit, I recommend the “BILD” columnist Harald Martenstein as a lyricist, who today fills the deep gap left by Franz Josef Wagner, who died last year, with fresh madness. His most recent text on the topic of language change “Hello, you Diggers!” definitely proves him worthy.
11 The pee has to stand up
And again the podcast “The Supernoses”. Here too, the theme of anger towards young people (i.e. everyone under 70) is firmly anchored. “I get pee in my eyes,” for example, is framed there in a derogatory way as “as young people say today.”
Yes, that’s how we know the kids, when they go to the local Walkman dealer with their gaiters and their frock coats, they still find time between two hits of laughing gas to talk about how they “have pee in their eyes” because Reli has broken down again.
12 Confidently passes the target group with everything
Okay, this podcast again because it was so nice: It was discontinued, supposedly because the two protagonists were repeatedly misunderstood. However, if you look at the access numbers, you might get the impression that the project has not “arrived on the market” at all. Well, instead of trying something suspiciously current like a podcast, perhaps a chain letter (“If you don’t send this letter to ten people, Satan will wipe you off the face of the earth”) or cave painting would have better suited the target group.
13 Irrelevance is mandatory
The best-clicked episode of “The Supernoses – the Podcast” was the very first. However, even this only generated three comments from listeners on Spotify. One of them was the vomit emoji, another was “Please say hello!” The rest (i.e. one) sounded quite positive.
14 Grammar should also be your enemy
In the last point here the gerund is used. Seen? There was talk of “those who hear”. This is a way to change without a colon or asterisk. The song thought about that too. Because that too is obviously seen as a shame and illness in Lex Krüger. Represented in the lyrics by the terms: demonstrators (sounds legit to me) respectively pharmacy end. The latter is of course not a gerund, but a joke. Well, who among us doesn’t like to laugh!
15 Very important: bitter aftertaste please
Of course, the worst fun song of the year doesn’t have to be fun at all and ends up being bitterly serious. It would be unthinkable if “The Gender Younger” were just a humorous pensioner gag that could be understood with a wink. Fortunately, another new song by Mike Krüger dissolves this concern in toxic saliva: “Vote for the EWP” (less than 5,000 views on his own YouTube channel). There he postulates his own protest party, which promises, among other things, “You can continue to drive cars with carburetors / And anyone who changes won’t get a school leaving certificate.” So what! It becomes clear here that in the end it’s about gender bans and some other hot topics from the AfD’s brainstorm session. And sorry about all the anglicisms here, Mike. Brainstorm In this case it means something like a brain stroke. Nothing to thank for.
Editorial recommendations
16 To hear this music is to learn to die
By the way, my personal take on this rear-end collision song is this: In the end, the problem isn’t gender at all, but rather that damn death is breathing down your neck and that all the changes in the world are a sign of the past. If there were no changes, everything would remain the same (“carry on as usual”), then you would still be young and, in the case of Krüger, would just barely make it into the hit lists of Dieter “Thomas” Heck in the ZDF hit parade with his attempted gag songs. But instead there is frailty, loss of meaning and death. Hand on heart: Who wouldn’t be mad about gender?!
17 No chance on the charts
Anyone who has acquired a taste for Mike Krüger’s worst songs through the “Gender Youngers” should consider a section in the podcast “Die Supernasen”. In it, our protagonist tried to throw old nonsense pieces of himself into the race again. Krüger called this section: “Songs that didn’t make it into the charts”. In the last episode, Thomas Gottschalk was surprised when he heard this title and said that he always thought the section would have been called “Songs that no one wanted to hear”. Where he is right…