Three observations:
1. a hard rain is gonna fall
“Europe”, the single by Dienerve, sounds like Jochen Distelmeyer’s single “I sing for you”. Writers like Juli Zeh and actors like Lars Eidinger signed an open letter from Emma in which they spoke out against the delivery of heavy weapons to Ukraine for fear of a nuclear war. The Hamburg indie label owner Wolfgang Müller has one much shared counter-argument written.
Born in 1975, she begins with memories of his childhood during the Cold War: There were “the hands I pressed to my ears when two low-flying fighter jets thundered over our village. (…) ABC-Alarm was rehearsed regularly. (…) I was always terrified that this time it might not be an exercise, but that an atomic bomb would really explode on us. (…) This threat had disappeared for the last thirty years, anyone who was only born in the mid/late 80s does not know that.”
“A childhood is a youth, a tower of ivory / Everyone keeps saying it will never be like this again,” sings Max Rieger, born in 1993, about nerves in “Europe”. And Jochen Distelmeyer sings that he sings for you, “when only war and crisis rages around you / And hard rain falls on your world too”.
2. spoiled, repressed, frightened
At the time” writes the author Anna Mayr about the paradox of living in prosperity and security: “It is impossible to lead a happy life if one is at the same time fully aware of the circumstances of this life.” The western well-to-do person had sorted his normality well for a long time: crises, wars, catastrophes happen elsewhere. Only individual crises can happen to us: unemployment, separation, illness. But with diligence, good nutrition, sport and one or the other open letter, they can be dealt with.
This practical division has now collapsed. After enduring a pandemic, you’re not rewarded with “any closer,” as Charli XCX — born in 1992 — suggested as recently as “Anthems,” her 2020 lockdown song. Our life pre-corona and the threat of war was not normal, but only a well-off perspective of suppression that seemed normal to us. It was blinders that one – although they were sensible psychological hygiene – as a white, Western person “born from the mid/late eighties” now blames oneself for.
You hate yourself for your racism and your sense of entitlement. While at the same time, of course, one hopes that everything – please – will quickly go back to the way it was. WEIRD, meaning “western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic”, is what the equally weird Canadian anthropologist Joseph Henrich calls us in his non-fiction book that has just been published in German: “The Strangest People In The World”.
3. weird
With Henrich, one learns that western people like to draw conclusions about others from themselves – also in psychology. However, this would not be entirely possible. Because culture significantly changes the brain. Reading ability, for example, remodels the brain in such a way that reading people find face recognition more difficult than people who are not literate. Westerners also share the conviction that humans are clearly definable individuals and not “just” a node in a network.
If we saw ourselves as such knots, it would probably be easier for us to deal with racisms – such as sorting out crises, wars and catastrophes to “other places”. Personal self-loathing is not appropriate. It is the programming of our network that is sometimes hateful. Meanwhile, the Russian-based nodes are being told on state television how a single nuclear missile could wipe out Britain. “So lock all the windows and shut all the doors and get into the house and lie down on the cold, hard floor” screams Dana Margolin on the new Porridge Radio album.
This column first appeared in the Musikexpress issue 07/2022.