Three observations:
1. to be beat up
Soon everyone will be looking back at the year and its trends. In music it’s probably the ability to dance, or rather the change from increased irritability to danceability. Because the pulse of the year is high: Gabber beats are fired on Björk’s FOSSORA. Beyoncé has made a house album whose hit single “Break My Soul” begins with gunshots. The fragility of Rosalía’s “Hentai” is punctuated by a machine gun sample, and Kendrick Lamar’s “United In Grief” features a scream before the beat shoots out at listeners, while Yanns in France with his 2021 hit “Clic Clic Pan Pan” Shooting sings onomatopoeically from the radio in 2022.
It’s as if the artists wanted to act out their over-firing nervous system—their stress—in gun samples and shot beats. All too often it is mentioned in connection with new albums that the artist wants to counter the domesticating element of the pandemic with danceability. Drake made house in 2022. Muff Potter came back singing: “Hammer Blows, Back of Heads”.
2. my native language cares for work
One of the words that came up more often in 2022 was “mother”. Björk sings a requiem for her late mother on FOSSORA, and has her daughter write lines about Björk as a mother. In the cinema, Anke Engelke plays the leading role in a film called “Mother”. Daniela Dröscher’s bestseller “Lügen über meine Mutter” dealt with her mother’s body image, and Judith Holofernes published a collection of blog articles at KiWi in which she reveals how “uncool” she felt her mother’s body was in the pop business of the early 2000s. had to feel years.
Gün Tank wrote in The Optimists. Novel of our mothers” (Suhrkamp) about so-called guest workers, and the author of these lines published a novel in staccato with “MTTR” at Wallstein Verlag, which tells of becoming a mother that begins and ends in an office. Exemplary characters act as voice output of their upbringing. What values were instilled in them, and for what purpose? “When everyone thinks of themselves, everyone is thought of / Social is what creates jobs,” sing Muff Potter in Hammer Blows, Back Heads.
In “Work, Service and Leadership”, Nikolas Lelle explains how and why the National Socialists shaped Germany’s self-image as a hard-working nation. At the same time you can read texts like: “Hamburg boss no longer takes young people: ‘Have to go to yoga after 6 hours'” (06/18/22, 24hamburg.de). Texts in which older people wonder why Gen Z doesn’t see work as their purpose in life. Is education for discipline and diligence growing slowly? Does the Z in Gen Z stand for tenderness?
3. everything is so cynical
In Iran, Gen Z teenage girls are being killed for protesting their right to live independently, while in the EU, two more countries are ruled by far-right parties, and the AfD is seeing a surge in polls. Rammstein dedicated the song “Armee der Tristen” to the “Party of the Hopeless” in 2022. Nora Burgard-Arp published “Wir but not” (Katapult Verlag), a dystopian novel about what would happen if the AfD program became a reality one day, while in the USA women again had to take to the streets for their right to an abortion, and in Europe people are being murdered in a territorial war. The nerves act out their prosperity-spoiled amazement in a song called “Europe”. “Everything is so cyclical,” Tocotronic sang back in 2015. Next year will probably end with annual reviews again.
This column first appeared in the Musikexpress issue 12/2022.