Perhaps it is a myth that the German national team sang “The Nipple” loudly on the plane after winning the 1980 European Championship in Italy. Apparently a flight attendant explained the safety precautions with quotes from Mike Krüger’s joke – and then there was no stopping her.
But the anecdote quickly points out what this amazing piece of German pop history is actually about: the insanity of German instructions and instructions texts. With his song, which came about by chance, Mike Krüger wanted to make fun of the German packaging craze and, above all, overcomplicated (and therefore legally unsound) usage and operating instructions.
“The Nipple” has retained its idiosyncratic charm
“All you have to do is pull the nipple through the tab / and turn it all the way up with the small crank / an arrow will appear immediately / and then you press it / and the tube opens!”, it says Refrain. The lyrical self fails when it comes to opening a tube of mustard and operating a coffee machine at a gas station. Not much has changed since 1980, when “Der Nippel” was released and stayed in the German charts for 26 weeks. Behind the clever, clumsy text there is still a hint of the German obsession with wanting to do everything right and thereby making life difficult for everyone.
However, at the beginning of the 1980s, advancing technology was perceived differently than it is today; the complexity of some machines and increasingly sophisticated everyday objects seemed monstrous to an entire generation. You jump out of a plane and you can’t get the parachute to open because the instructions are too difficult to read – that’s the essence of Mike Krüger’s “The Nipple”, which of course is because of its suggestive connotations (in the somewhat 70s schoolgirl report raunchiness). resonates) immediately became a household word.
Musically, the song is almost exemplary in a series of stupid hits by Otto Waalkes about Jürgen von der Lippe and Karl Dall. The supposedly straightforward, wholesome hit bubble was punctured with peppered irony, sometimes just plain nonsense. Basically, this movement is the complement to the New German Wave, which broke the German pop craze from the other side.
In the years following its release, “Der Nippel” was hardly missing from any party compilation. Mike Krüger was “damn”, his hit, which was not the only one of his career (the comedian had already had a big one with “Mein Gott, Walther” in 1975). achieved success) to perform in many TV appearances. Music always remained a part of his comic acting, which also caused notable low points in German comedy culture in the 80s alongside Thomas Gottschalk in numerous film duds such as “Piratensender Powerplay”.
And in some households people still joke today that when a glorious fight against an unruly everyday object threatens to fail, all you have to do is pull the nipple through the tab.
Follow the author of these lines if you like Twitter, Facebook and on his Blog (“Melancholy Symphony”).