The spring of 2022 is one of the darkest times I have come across so far. Like many other cultural workers, I also ask myself the question: What the Putin hell should one take for a role at the moment?
The distillate of my lyrics is generally vulgar-hedonistic things like “Hey, great song, great band, I have 1 selfie stick, listen, make out, drink etc.” It’s hard for me to spread such garishly packaged hedo content these months. Not even because I think it’s improper to dance on razor blades, volcanoes or graves, no, I can’t really put myself into my exhilarated text persona right now.
The only thing that seems to help is defiance. Because should the whole colorful pop and live culture really continue to dry up in the third year of Covid? That could suit all the bad people. No longer in the mood for this paralyzing passivity.
In the last two issues of this column, I decided to counter the messed-up here and now with great songs that have just been released. Because just because the performance culture enslaved by Omikron is only slowly starting up again, just because fewer shared music recommendations cushion your daily doom scrolling and because a lot of music is just being overlooked, they’re not gone: interesting acts that accompany, paraphrase, interpret all that shit .
In this column it should now be shown that pop is really more than just elevator music that drones on the way down. But definitely wants and can influence society.
Here are a few highlights in which pop culture seeks a confrontation with ugly reality.
EUROVISION SONG CONTEST 2022
The annual Eurovision Song Contest will take place again from May 10th, with the dazzling entourage drawn to Turin. What last year’s winner Maneskin is to be owed. If you want to be well informed in advance about the outcome of the event, you should definitely listen to this song:
With “Stefania”, the Kalush Orchestra has a typical ESC hit in its glove compartment: it’s this catchy mix of feel-good pop and ethnic elements. The fact that he is already being treated as such a favorite is due to the band’s origins: Kalush Orchestra will be playing for the Ukraine. It should be a visually powerful staging of solidarity when this piece runs in the hall and on the countless channels. The English translation of one line in particular shows in advance how charged this event will be:
“I’ll always find my way home / even if all roads are destroyed”
phew! By the way, the Ukrainians will not compete directly with a Russian act. Russia was excluded from this year’s ESC.
EUROVISION SONG CONTEST (Reprise)
Speaking of pop, ESC and Russia. In the next print edition of the Musikexpress you will find ten pages about the ESC of the new millennium. I spoke to Lukas Heinser about this. Heinser, commentator Peter Urban’s right-hand man, has written a book about the ESC entitled “Eurovision Song Contest – Popular Errors and Other Truths”. Here is a little teaser from my conversation with him, because it goes well with the topic of the column:
“Russia has long been a problem when it comes to queer rights. When the ESC took place in Moscow in 2009, before all these bad laws came into existence, a parallel Pride parade was violently beaten down. That seems to be the difference to similar nations, who at least wait until the whole press is gone – whereas Russia also hits it in front of the world public present.”
(From the interview with Lukas Heinser, recorded before the start of the war. The entire conversation appears in Musikexpress #5/22)
SONGS FOR BETTER TIMES
Even away from the big European stage of the ESC, pop shows solidarity. You can find countless solo samplers, many of which take place on the Bandcamp platform. This underground-heavy compilation should be singled out as an example here, which, in addition to attitude, also features various interesting young bands: Das kleine Totschlag, Zirkel, Peter Muffin can be heard among others. Pop, beats and desperation packed into handy shapes. All proceeds from “20 Better Songs For Times” go to Mission Lifeline’s Ukraine Aid.
CLOSE UP WITH STUSS
Extreme times call for extreme measures. My greatest success as a music journo was on stage with a program called “The Beatles are idiots, so is Radiohead”. In it I not only said a lot of ugly things about the bands I mentioned, but always also about the local whining hit parade bard scene.
A few days ago now found Sound Of Peace his performance. Peter Maffay, Joris, Silbermond and Clueso played for the alliance in favor of Ukraine in Berlin. It was also my very favorite boss merger ever on stage: Revolverheld with Marta Jandová. Earlier (and soon again) I would have opened: Their joint piece “Hold on to me” from 2010 represents the primordial soup of lazy home saver pop, in order to then really take the measure. In the fucking spring of 2022, even that doesn’t seem appropriate to me. Should they continue to sweat their dashing tunes onto the stage, the white flag from me: Go ahead, dear shooting gallery figures. Even your voice seems helpful to me. Although – I want to be honest – I only really followed Oliver Kalkofe’s speech on this show.
TOUR D’AMOUR
Collect donations, create awareness … both very important. But the artists in the union Tour D’amour go even further: In pandemic times, when everything came to a standstill and you didn’t know when a band bus would roll down the streets again, when a club would ever open again, the Tour D’amour came together in these times. She used the infrastructure of event shops that were idle at the time, and collected donations in kind on site, which were then transported to the Moria refugee camp by band buses that were also unused. These newly created solidarity structures were used again in March for the Ukraine aid.
About a year ago I talked to one of the initiators, the Hamburg rapper Finna, about this topic at Popwoche.
AND THEN CAME PUNK
Of course, solidarity does not just show itself in the form of a willingness to donate, solidarity also means taking an interest in the other person and giving them a voice. The podcast “And then came punk” has put together eight episodes of a “Ukraine Special” since the beginning of the war. In it, the two creators speak primarily to activists from the attacked country and sometimes offer more context and insights than the headline machine can give you in a month.
FREEBOARD RIDERS
Respect for so much different and concrete solidarity of the local music scene. And of course it’s not just all awesome, I don’t want to withhold that from you either. As a music journalist, for example, I receive promo mails every day that tell of current releases, concerts and clips. Why not? Apparently the best thing about the sinking of the Titanic was the orchestra playing on deck. What really annoyed me, however, was a promo dude who repeatedly promoted the new song by one of his artists in his newsletter with what a significant voice was playing on the subject of war.
>> “German-speaking urban pop with authentic, thoughtful lyrics”. And the numbers speak for themselves, because with just two songs he has already reached 30k views on YouTube and 18k streams on Spotify. <<
I don’t want to give the music, which belongs to the marginal rubbish, any clicks here, so I won’t name names… but when you hear the song, it quickly becomes clear that the songwriting obviously had nothing to do with the current situation in Eastern Europe. In this form of communication, it was all about interweaving your own concerns with the zeitgeist.
Using the shock of seeing pictures like the one from Butscha as a promotional hanger is really miserable.
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THE KINGS OF DUBROCK
Okay, but with such a downer it should not go out of this column. It’s much more likely to be closed with THE song highlight of the week. The Kings Of Dubrock with “All Men”. There is no connection to the war in it. Except perhaps that the band around Jacques Palminger is dealing with the phenomenon Men grapples. The song is too multifaceted to be morally sour, but despite the high testosterone content of the world run, something comes across. Besides… if anyone is familiar with toxic masculinity, it’s probably Palminger, because he shares the Fraktus and Studio Braun projects with the man Heinz Strunk. My favorite author for a long time, today I only get in a bad mood when I read something from his eternally misogynistic echo chamber. On the other hand, I don’t let anything come to Palminger, in the lyrics he uses words like stuffed cabbage or handkerchief, rhymes belt buckle with beating trap – and in the end it all makes total sense. Plus this fetish video with stock photo dudes. Perfect!
What happened until now? Here is an overview of all pop column texts.
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