“I want to be immortal,” Patrick whispers in an excited voice. His hair is dark, greasy, long and he wears it in a Prince Valiant cut. He’s wearing jeans, black and thick, like always, even though it’s summer and it’s really hot and they have a hole in the knee. Underneath, his shin flashes out, on which a few dark hairs are already sprouting. I see this, get a bit distracted, finally clear my throat and say, “Hmm. All right then. Fine with me.” It was supposed to be solemn, but I couldn’t. I suddenly feel strangely tired and stare at the Sith Lord in Patrick’s hand for a long time.
Another world
We sit on the floor in the shadow of the entrance – around us, the housing complex. It’s a day sometime in August. There is ivy, lizards dart around and the tinny ventilation of the underground car park, which protrudes from the bushes like an alien temple, watches over us sublimely. In the middle, in the shadow of the entrance, lies our world: Jedi knights, spaceships, pirates, fortresses, dangers lurking, treasures to be looted; a universe made of Lego that we rebuild every day. Sometimes adults come over and wave at us. You wave into another world.
Noah, Nils and Benni have been gone for hours. I’m alone with Patrick and today, for once, I’m responsible for managing the game, i.e. I decide what works and what doesn’t work. Patrick plays it excellently, his Sith Lord is almost invincible. For a few weeks he has been searching for the elixir of immortality. Now he’s got it and it’s game up, over, forever, but we don’t know that yet.
Later I’m lying on the carpet at home, completely radiated by boredom, Nirvana’s NEVERMIND is playing. In front of me is a box that is about as big as me. I’ve been saving up for this Lego spaceship for years, it’s the Millennium Falcon collector’s model. There it is now on the floor in front of me. However, I will never assemble it.
A breath of wind blows through the open window, it smells of withered fruit, asphalt and a few tired bees are buzzing. I put my sandals on, I’m wearing Nike shorts and a sports jacket, there’s nothing in the pockets. Now I leave the complex, cross the street and enter the Galleria shopping center.
Childhood is no time at all
A lot of people think that childhood is something of a good time. But there is no time at all. Anyway, there is no time as a child. Everything goes by so slowly, so tough and every week is like a year later. At some point, you can tell from the fact that you discover a desire to destroy, it ends, everything becomes more complicated and sadder and the music reinforces these new feelings. Heart starts beating to the beat of the music and you fall in cactus gardens and sit on hills over there and you smoke joints and puke.
Childhood ends, and fantasy with it. You puke and change.
Roughly speaking, there are two options after childhood: indie and hip-hop. The big difference is that hip-hop kids don’t puke from smoking joint, but indie kids always do. The hip hoppers have Eddings in their pockets and use them to draw on other people’s walls, they climb on construction sites, roofs and cranes, smoking weed and stealing. Of course, all of this is solely the fault of the music, in this case hip-hop. But the Indie is much more dangerous: As sharp as a Japanese knife, the Indie cuts into the insecure brains of young people. Like heroin or cigarettes, it creates an unprecedented (or at least barely) need for the tearful and the comforting. Lines that are incomprehensible to the outside world, such as “Her name is Yoshimi, she’s a black belt in karate” feed this artificially created place of sadness. As in hip-hop, young people become what they consume. Except that years later they are depressed and unable to work and the hip hoppers drive Audis and eat oysters at KDW.
Indie or hip hop
Yes, indie is not sweet and not lovely, but sustainably more self-destructive than any other subculture. After Indie, there are only two ways to live on: esotericism or spiritual science. We are living in bad times for both today – either social isolation or unemployment and probably even greater isolation.
As far as the role of the man is concerned, things are usually not easy with the former indie boy. Contrary to popular belief, he is known to be sensitive and is the less correct type compared to the hip hopper who generally thinks in terms of sportsmanship. Bumps from years of insecurity and social anxiety often lead to toxic character and an insatiable need for constant validation in the indie boy. Indie as a subculture is, so to speak, the last bastion of pain that is openly expressed to the outside world, even if this pain only arises through indie. It’s a beautiful pain, but it would certainly be better without it.
So I walk into the Galleria unsuspectingly, without a real goal, because I have nothing in my pockets. I look at footballs, roller skates and the colorful rolls at Trzesniewski’s, I stand by the fountain. The water shoots into the air from 26 jets, is increasingly caught up by gravity and falls back into the pool in a curve describing it. This creates a dome shape made of water jets. At one point, many children blocked the jets and a single jet shot up to the mall’s ceiling. Security came and the kids ran away. There is also an aquarium and the miller is directly opposite the aquarium. I often try out CDs here, I test them for hours with thick headphones and ask the staff if they have anything similar. The Müller is definitely my favorite shop, in bright orange the German multimedia drugstore stands out from the dim shops around it. There’s weird juices, cheeseballs and white candy bunnies, disposable cameras, computer games and remote control planes – and lots of newly released CDs.
After listening to some of them, like every month, I get the free magazine Mbeat, which is available at the cash desk. I roll it up and exit the miller, then slip out of the Galleria through the emergency exit. Few know this way out. You arrive at a strange place, an inner courtyard with all sorts of ventilation pipes, it smells like an underground car park. Grasses sprout from the cracks in the concrete, and a soft rustling fills the air. Here I sit down and unroll the magazine. I’m biting my fingernail, the last rays of sun are falling in the window above me. On the cover is a band: Tocotronic, with their current album SCHALL UND WAHN.
This text was published in an abridged version in the 800th MUSIKEXPRESS issue. Pauls Jet’s current album JAZZFEST was released in February 2022. ME author Jana-Maria Mayer awarded six out of six stars and found: “The masters of projection screen pop jet out of the shadowy existence of other Austrian greats on the meta rocket of their new double album.”
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