Animals made from safe materials and simple statements about the ability to rap – Josef Winkler’s new column.
The radio presenter says that “it used to be said” that if you were on the Internet and left comments here and there, then you might get into a shitstorm and be insulted, but today there is a heightened awareness of the problem. Hmm. Funny. I remember it completely differently. “Back in the day” there was no internet at all. And I remember it was said “keep it short” when you used a public telephone because there was often a queue in front of them, and when it was finally your turn you couldn’t find a second dime and you envied those tech-savvy checker types who already had a fancy phone card in their wallet. And then maybe someone knocked excitedly on the window, but they wouldn’t have let themselves be insulted, where are we? Someone like that would have been considered stupid, scribbling around like that; poor madman.
In today’s digital world, everything is much easier. You simply send a voice message if you don’t have a dime. And you no longer have to make a fool of yourself in public if you want to shower someone with a few foul words and death threats. And there is hardly any “before” anymore anyway, everything is there at the same time. On YouTube, times and worlds melt into one another: you listen to the first Incredible String Band from 1966, read the sentimental boomer comments and find out in the commercial break that there is now a “robotic dog” with AI technology (but only 47 copies!), totally lifelike, only better: “It’s like having a real puppy, but made of completely safe materials!”
Ha-Ha. Funny, right. I don’t know – is there still time? Is there still any residual humorous appeal in being amused by strange AI formulations? Like before about “children’s mouths” and mistakes made by simultaneous translators (“I want to accept the irritating”)? What was relaxing was that the children and simultaneous translators were not high-tech, culture- and civilization-changing weapons in the hands of an evil oligarch clique in a pact with a fascist US regime. Analog was really less stressful. Phew.
But one more. Pursuing the thesis that Die Ärzte could have once been the first German band to perform German rap live and on record (it was of course Haindling with the “Hoizscheidl Rap”, 1984), I searched for the song title and entered the familiar line “I can rap and you can rap” into the Google machine and received the following explanation from the AI, which intervened without being asked: “’I can rap and you can rap’ is a sentence that means: ‘I can rap and you can rap.’ It is a simple statement about the ability to rap that applies to both the speaker and the addressee.” In the past you would have said: “Oh, keep the edge.” But earlier is overrated.
This column first appeared in Musikexpress issue 2/2026.