“Welcome to half an hour of choral music,” says the man on the radio, and seriously, what kind of stupid name is THAT? Waahaha. Yes sorry. I warmly welcome you to 45 lines of brain fibrillation, but of course that’s far too complicated, now you say: “Greetings.” Not “Hello”, “Welcome”, “Grüß Gott”, “Yes, servus, oide Fischbixn , do you live aa no?” or something similar, but: “I greet you.” So you describe what you intend to do resp. would do if you hadn’t already said so.
Modern greeting dialogue: “I greet you!” – “I greet you too!” – “We greet each other!” And instead of “asshole!” you could also say: “I insult you!”, and in case of doubt a lot of trouble spare For example, a carefully escalating argument: “I insult you!” – “Me too!” – “I’ll punch you in the face!” – “I’ll call the police!” All good. Ah, the mindfulness. Right now everyone is very sad and upset because Helge Schneider spoke so badly about the discourse on cultural appropriation. In German main evening talk show television! Of course, where else are such sound bites extracted so professionally.
Ui ui ui, is that still possible with Helge?!
Sandra Maischberger, apparently still looking for a bit of pizzazz, turns to the topic and confronts the passionate jazz musician Schneider with a pointed look with what is perhaps the most marginal of the many more or less sensible “points” of the discussion, namely that “white people shouldn’t play jazz”. Hardly anyone takes this seriously and I think it’s about as witty as saying that Africans shouldn’t play football because the English invented it.
Schneider, of whom one probably would not have expected to say something Dadaistic in a mumbo-jumbo voice, after a quite nice speech about the cross-cultural power of music, lets himself be carried away, the discussion cool and in the end somehow lame from the hip shot as “dirt”. The people: shocked. Ui ui ui, is that still possible with Helge?! Please discuss! *sigh*
Now, of course, one could have considered whether, in a week in which, in addition to a raging war of aggression, a natural disaster is also bringing terrible suffering to hundreds of thousands in relative global proximity, one could have given a little peace in the sense of the attention economy – but hey! The bohei must go on. And then FDP Panzerkampfer Strack-Zimmermann in the Bütt: Can you talk about the opposition leader like that? flying dwarf. Well, that wouldn’t be my choice of words either. I would think of a few different words for Friedrich Merz, but I’ll tell you that over a beer or nine. My suggestion: Until then this spring, watch less internet, listen to a lot of linear television and let Tom Verlaine be a good man. peace of his ashes.
This column first appeared in the Musikexpress issue 04/2023.