If you are reading this, I would take it as a good sign for the survival of our world. Yes, that sounds ambitious, but we’ve got that far now, and no, I wouldn’t have thought it possible either. This has been going on for a really long time: This column started in the ME September 2000 issue, in a land before time. Mathematically and in terms of the calendar, it was still the last century, felt and lived the full 90s – you know, that cult Gaga decade in which everyone was so happy that the Cold War was over (at least that’s how cultural scientists* later have some of the worse fashion trends , hairstyles and music styles of that time) and in the barrage of good mood you could get the funnel, one of the last big first world problems is called Limp Bizkit.
Of course we were wrong; soon came 9/11, globalization and social media with the resp. upheavals and devastations brought to light – terror, asymmetric wars, climate change, famines, global shift to the right, pandemic … No, we have never partied as lightheartedly as we did in 1999, and at times over the years it has seemed difficult to me in the light of current news events until unseemly to throw out an easy pop column. But nothing prepared me for writing this column in the face of the real possibility that it would no longer be printed or published. is read because in the meantime the 3rd World War has started.
God hates us all
It’s March 16th here, a few days ago Sting re-released his song “Russians” from 1985, which was scared of nuclear wars and had been archived for decades as a contemporary document of a vanquished era. “I hope the Russians love their children too” – even then it was a rather thin straw. Problem today: It’s not about “the Russians”, not even about a party or a central committee, but about Putin. He has no children (Editor’s note: He supposedly has three daughters, as well as grandchildren), and presumably he loves nobody. Diplomacy is failing, as is psychology, the people in Ukraine suffer, it’s heartbreaking if you haven’t become dull with anxiety.
You might think: Now it really is God’s turn. Popular question: Why can’t he give the guy a heart attack? He could have done it with Trump and Bolsonaro. He does not have. There would also have been the discreet option Corona, it would have looked like a case of illness. But God didn’t. well One could almost think that it doesn’t exist at all. Or that the assumption of the old heretics from Slayer is correct: God hates us all. Or the thesis formulated in Randy Newman’s “God’s Song”: We humans don’t give a shit. I don’t know what’s worse, but I wish all faiths the best. And we’ll read each other again in the June issue, yes? Yes. Yes! To the peace!
This column first appeared in the Musikexpress issue 05/2022.