Although on the outside I’m slowly getting older like everyone else, on the inside I’m feeling more of a “Benjamin Button effect”. At least in spirit, I’m getting younger every year. And only youth wisely recognizes that the soul must radically distance itself from the stupidity of the world in order to free itself…
Unfortunately, “demarcation” from the outside often looks like stupidity, not to say that this is where the greatest rubbish usually comes from.
An example.
When I was young, sometime between 1998 and 2005, my friends and I officially He belongs to bands like System Of A Down, Tool, Metallica, Nirvana and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. There was this club in Dortmund, the “Spirit”, which supposedly belonged to the Bandidos and I noticed that I would have to go by again soon to see if it was still there.
On Saturdays, an aging man with black, greasy hair always played the bands in question, and there was a kind of mosh pit experience, lit with lots of liquor and even more cigarettes.
So I dutifully went to “Spirit” with my friend Jule, it was also funny, it was also fun, but my secret, really hot passion was outside of this consensus of alternative rock.
Displaced male images and a few tankards of mead
The thing is, I loved folklore. And yes, in folklore there are intersections here and there with medieval music. And unfortunately I loved that too. Keep your Fender Rhodes, give me a bagpipe. Keep your disco-funk boy band from Australia, give me a few slippery men pictures including a few tankards of mead.
What I like most is a group that comes from Poland called the Warsaw Village Band. I discovered this music in my first shared apartment in Dortmund’s Nordstadt, a long time ago. I was just 20 and my roommate Adam used to drink schnapps and listen to Polish music around midnight at everyone’s expense. If I didn’t want to lose my nerve, I better sit down (a picture for life, kids) and I asked him what those scratching noises meant and he said that they weren’t scratching noises, that they were the best Polish newcomer band of the year 2005, Kapela ze wsi Warszawa, in English Warsaw Village Band, and in his stern eyes I immediately read that it was his absolute favorite band. We sat there half the night as if hypnotized and he played me this weird music.
No lie, I’ve been listening to this band since that night. I’ve never heard a band as often as this one in my life. I love it. But I have to do it in secret for the rest of my life, otherwise my life will take a bad turn…
Milking machine and three goats
Groucho Marx must have been a bit of a creep, but with his evergreen “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member” he hit the nail on the head for me in terms of my medieval music fetish.
As much as I like to distance myself from everything that my immediate environment thinks is good, I can’t be one of the fans of the Warsaw Village Band. That simply does not work. I would need a lot of felt clothing to get things started. I also needed a steady boyfriend with a goatee who liked to carve lances, put his calloused hand in mine when we went for a walk and perform hungry flower sex with me in the morning.
I would need the inner mindset to let myself go at medieval festivals after a cocoa ceremony, to forget everything around me and to throw my hands up in celebration while dancing, only for my silver bracelets to get caught in my neighbor’s and we then both also believe that this encounter is fate.
I would have to want to sew shoes out of fur for myself and my five children, whom the goatee would give me over the course of just six years. We would soon be giving up our rental apartment and living in a drafty yurt, somewhere on the border with Holland, without health insurance and use an electricity generator to turn on the milking machine for the three goats every morning.
No, I’d rather keep my musical taste aberration to myself and continue to pretend that I like good music and go to boring concerts of definitely very good bands (I won’t name any names) with my very smart friends and stay that way The alternative fate outlined above is as far away as possible with my “disposition”.
Separating yourself from the boundaries means living on the next level.