Herbert Grönemeyer in the video for his song “Everything stays different”
Photo: Greenland/EMI. All rights reserved.
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With his tenth album, “Bleibt alles anders” from 1998, Herbert Grönemeyer continued the modernization of his music that had been heralded a few years earlier. After what he said was his weakest album, “Luxus” (1990), Grönemeyer and his band did not get beyond themselves on “Chaos” (1993) – and changed the sign: “Bleibt alles anders” was mostly created in London with the help of Alex Silva, a programming-savvy producer.
Its electronic accompaniment gives the album something serious, elevated artistic that surprised at the time. The title song is an enigmatic short epic, a rock-electro hybrid, in which filter keyboards waft, crickets chirp and the band, who plays with Britpop coolness, takes turns with the sampler. The lyrics of the ambitious song are richer in metaphors than Grönemeyer had been used to: “There is a lot to lose, you can only win / enough is not enough – or it will be the way it was / standing still is death, go ahead, everything stays different.”
The new introspection was not least a swan song to the attempts to improve the world to which Grönemeyer subscribed in the eighties and early nineties. In retrospect, “Everything stays different” doesn’t quite have the radiance of the more universal, iconic “Mensch” that appeared in 2002 and on which the huge Grönemeyer songs are found, which seem like addresses to the nation or to all of humanity.
Read more: The best German songs of all time
Herbert Grönemeyer had grown so big that he could perform like that. But “Bleibt alles anders” is an important moment in Pupation that paved the way for the music released thereafter.
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