Rammstein are one of the most successful contemporary German bands, that is undisputed. Not only are they successful in their home country, they are also selling massive amounts of albums in the US and have a loyal fan base in America. A large part of that has to do with the fact that they appeared on the soundtrack of a film that, while not a box office hit, reached almost 100 percent of the very people who are receptive to the music of Rammstein.
“Rammstein, ein Mensch brennt” booms over a pulsating bass and a pounding guitar riff when the ambivalent hero in “Lost Highway” stands in a hotel corridor with a nosebleed and a spinning head. It is, so to speak, the acoustic guide for the anger-driven protagonist to strike. David Lynch had given Rammstein a place on the soundtrack of his enormously effective film with this entry – but also with the use of “Heirate mich” – that they hadn’t actually gotten at all at first.
As the director of “Blue Velvet” and “Twin Peaks” said in a “Spiegel” interview from 1997, the band’s management kept sending him songs long before filming began. The musicians were not only fans of the intricate, surrealistic and, above all, drastic films by the American, who wrote cinema history directly with his debut, the midnight film “Eraserhead”, but they also found his suggestive screen visions to be the ideal breeding ground for their muscular sounds and those of Singer Lindemann burned characters in their lyrics.
Lynch in the “Spiegel” interview: “The band has been sending me their CDs for years. I never listened to them. But then I happened to put her last album on – and it was just what I needed for ‘Lost Highway’.” What’s more, the entire film crew suddenly went crazy about the music when it played to Lynch on set and used it. Hundreds of CDs had to be reordered from Germany so that everyone could hear them. Actually, Rammstein wanted Lynch to just shoot a music video with them, but that didn’t happen. The impact of the songs in the labyrinthine drama of a man losing his mind and literally jumping out of his skin could not have been more intense. Rammstein were suddenly internationally known.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2BOZU1I3Ds
Not bad for a formation whose musical roots lay in the underground of the GDR, which played ironically with romantic catchphrases and Germanic symbols, while also cleverly handling fascist tricks and punk rhetoric, which should basically be mutually exclusive, but yes – as it sometimes goes in popular culture, as if it were almost some kind of chemical compound – amalgamating in a devilish way.
Rammstein knew they were a good match for Lynch
With their songs, which celebrate horror and sentimentality at the same time, Rammstein follow a similar aesthetic path as David Lynch. The perverse and uncanny, trained on psychoanalytic motifs, forms the core of his films, which are often incomprehensible but penetrate deep into the soul of the viewer with images and sounds, which range between obviously postmodern ideology (“Wild At Heart”) and highly reflective transformation and decomposition of Hollywood Myths (“Mulholland Drive”) and soap opera and crime thriller patterns (“Twin Peaks”) created something completely unique.
This artistic code, with which both Rammstein and Lynch have attracted legions of wildly arguing interpreters, but also critics who only suspect lazy magic behind all the grotesque bombast, does not seem to be so easy to decipher. After “Lost Highway”, the director recommended himself again and again as one of the biggest supporters of the group from Germany. However, his film scenes also helped the Rammstein cosmos to become something artificial, cinematic, overwhelming that was perhaps not initially intended.
In 1997 the band hadn’t fully settled down and were still looking for a style. But after it was used in “Lost Highway” it was set for all time. The American view of this German music became the DNA of Rammstein’s songs, so to speak. The morbid shudder that triggers the quoting of rotten symbols of the forbidden remained – the ironic play with horror was priced in as with Lynch and freed from all political intentions. You could call it the price of success for these musicians, who actually made their first artistic steps in a left-wing milieu and were now doomed to serve the insatiable fascination of a primarily American audience to have Nazi and fetish aesthetics staged.
The role of (dark) sexuality
Pictures can sometimes be more real than any reality. And so only naïve people may be surprised if Rammstein can also be heard accompanying a porn that is shown on a projector in “Lost Highway”. It is true that Lynch never let himself be persuaded to enter this shadowy world of body images (there is always something mysterious and transcendent about sex in his films; in several of them, his stories become entangled and change after love affairs, all of which seem emotionally shaken; violent , sad, funny), but he often stages sexuality in a macabre way and as a performance. Rammstein and especially their singer have joined this fascination for the perverse sexual in the Freudian sense and when all the things that can now be heard about the band and especially their frontman come full circle, then limitless art and slippery ones seem to come together here Face reality in a dreadful way.
Lynch’s films need the cinema or television to have an effect. In addition to their songs and their music clips, Rammstein also have the big stage for this. It’s not just the pictures and sounds that count here, if things continue elsewhere afterwards. Lawyers may clarify if the suspicion is confirmed that abuse has taken place at after-show parties – that a musician may have lived what he actually only wanted to portray as a stage character.
But it is also a fact that such bottomless moments also mean a hard break with the self-constructed fiction. Lynch would probably say: Whoever betrays the secret (i.e. tells about it and thwarts it) is the gravedigger of his own art.