Recommendations of the Editorial team
Don’t have any plans or appointments for New Year’s Eve yet? Very good! Then don’t make a mistake now. You don’t have to listlessly poke around in your neighbors’ fondue pot, drink their half-dry champagne or – funny, funny! – bite into a mustard donut. You also don’t need DJ Ötzi telling you for the twelfth thousandth time on ARD about a star who has the same name. And you certainly don’t have to let Johannes B. Kerner and Andrea Kiewel count down the countdown for you. Sorry, Kiwi!
It’s better to arrange a date with 3sat on New Year’s Eve. Yes, really! The station that is otherwise associated with Alpine drone footage, tango documentaries and the faint hope that after the third act of Swan Lake no one will break the contemplative mood with applause, as if the holiday plane had just landed in Sharm El-Sheikh.
Pop as practice
Everything that makes 3sat look nerdy all year round makes the station the ideal safe space during New Year’s Eve madness. And the code word is: Pop Around the Clock! Since 2002, concert recordings have been broadcast for 24 hours every year at the turn of the year under this title, many of them as first broadcasts. Across genres and eras, without advertising, without nonsense. A wonderfully archaic-looking remnant from the heyday of linear television, which gets top ratings every year for good reason.
Because when time briefly falls out of sync, when the boundary between old and new year melts away like a piece of raclette cheese, then pop shows itself not as a product, but as a practice: it catalyzes memories, lets us indulge in plans for the future, provides fortune cookie sayings and sometimes simply the soundtrack for much-needed mental distraction. The program planning avoids any unnecessary clarity in the form of mottos, rankings or cramped references to current events. The format demands nothing more than attention – and trusts the audience to make connections themselves.
Historical and bizarre
If you like, you can once again take a closer look at some (musical) historical details this year. Around midday, for example, the middle-aged David Gilmour meets the older solo artist (Rome, 2024) with Pink Floyd (London, 1994). Bruce Springsteen can be experienced at a point in time (Dublin, 2006) when he was with ““We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions” Made folk, gospel and historical protest songs socially acceptable again.
And a black thread runs through the entire day of various Black Atlantic artists, whose concerts can also be read as a rudiment of a chronology from the end of apartheid to today: Sade (San Diego, 1993), Whitney Houston at the Concert for a New South Africa (Durban, 1994), Mariah Carey on her rise to global stardom (Tokyo, 1996), Rihanna (London, 2011) and Usher at midnight (Paris, 2024). In the joint performance by Cypress Hill and the London Symphony Orchestra in the venerable Royal Albert Hall (London, 2024), a visionary point from the Simpsons’ early work is realized – once again.
With air guitar and peppermint
The fact that a public cultural broadcaster opens its archive in this informal way and lets the audience browse seems like a quiet, almost old-fashioned act of cultural self-assertion. And it enables the younger ones among us to immerse themselves in authentically preserved moments of music history that we can no longer experience in this way. And in which no one held up their fucking smartphone!
So however you spend New Year’s Eve, I wish you a good start into the New Year. For my part, from 2:45 p.m. in front of the television I will be playing the air guitar to Westernhagen’s “With peppermint I am your prince” (Hamburg, 1989) and not miss anything, absolutely nothing, because:
“Darling, let’s dance,
We pour lead on New Year’s Eve.
Darling, let’s sing louder,
Then we too will soon be outlaws.”