An Unexpected Door To ‘Neue Deutsche Welle’ and German history: Hansel and Gretel
There are times, when one discovers a great song, which turns out be a cover of something, someone released decades ago and boom! You’ve just found yourself a whole new artist to look into! Well, this is also possible with a whole genre, which in turn opens a door for a whole, previously unknown piece of (music) history.
Udo Lindenberg presenting Erich Honecker with an electric guitar in front of Engels-Haus in Wuppertal, 9. September 1987. Source
There is no knowing, how I stumbled upon the German comedian Otto Waalkes and an excerpt of his 1983 TV show 'Hilfe, Otto kommt!' ('Help, Otto is coming!'), but I did. In this excerpt he ends his show by singing a German children's song 'Hänsel und Gretel verliefen sich im Wald' ('Hansel and Gretel got lost in the forest')[1], as a sort of lullaby for the night. After performing it in a parody translation in made-up Swedish and English, come the big guns: the same story, adapted for the tunes of several 'Neue Deutsche Welle' hits of the time:
Hurra, Hurra, die Schule brennt (Extrabreit)
Carbonara (Spliff)
Sonderzug nach Pankow (Udo Lindenberg)
Ich will Spaß (Markus)
Da Da Da (TRIO)
Skandal im Sperrbezirk (Spider Murphy Gang)
Finding a genre, that is new to you is exciting, not only because it is a whole, previously unknown type of music. It is exciting, because by looking up the bands and their songs, you can come upon great stories and little bits of history.
One such bit is how West German musician Udo Lindenberg turned the 1941 swing hit Chattanooga Choo Choo into a sort of ironic request, directed at none other, than Erich Honecker, the long-time leader of the German Democratic Republic. The lyrics picture Lindenberg looking for the special train to Pankow, which is a district of Berlin. The district became known for its use as administrative center of Berlin's Soviet sector, and later of the East German government.[2] Moreover, Majakowskiring, a street in Pankow was the residence of many senior government members for a time,[3] among them Honecker himself, who the lyrics depict as a 'Rocker' on the inside, secretly wearing leather jackets at home, and listening to Western radio stations while locking himself in the toilet.[4]
Despite his cover (and even the original) was banned for some time in the GDR after its release in 1983,[5] Lindenberg was finally allowed to play in East Berlin that same year. Of course for some reason, he was not allowed to play 'Sonderzug nach Pankow'. Even though this was his only concert in East Germany, the most ridiculous parts of the song also came true in some way: Lindenberg sent a leather jacket to Honecker in 1987[2] and later that year gave him an electric guitar, when they met in Wuppertal, during Honecker's one and only official visit to West Germany before the German Wiedervereinigung (reunification).[6]
References:
1 Hänsel und Gretel verliefen sich im Wald - Wikipedia (DE)
Day 28 of working from home, day 15 of partial curfew and the last (4th) day of Easter weekend. It took about a month for an extraordinary situation to turn into everyday life. But should you also behave the way you do in everyday life?
Short answer: No. This is exactly why I am writing this, despite not having written a single line here - or anywhere else for that matter - for almost a whole year.
Yesterday, early in the afternoon I finally had the time to listen to a Polish jazz album[1][2] I purchased years ago, but never listened to earlier. To be fair, I only listened to the A side of that album, but still: I sat on the floor, next to our record player, and paid attention to nothing but the music for more than half an hour. When else are you going to do that? When else can you do that?
As horrible and frightening this situation is, one has to admit: it also presents opportunities and time enough to pursue them, like never before - and probably never again. So instead of lamenting over the situation and/or being utterly bored, how about learning a language, you always wanted to learn? Reading more? Writing more? Finally learn how to cook a half-decent tomato sauce? Or how about just being generally thankful, that you are one of the people who actually can work from home and subdue your years-long preconception, that you cannot be productive, when left to your own devices? Or all of the above?
Because of all, that’s been going down, there finally isn’t a nagging voice in your head, that you should do useful things outside of the flat. There can be only one logical conclusion: you should do them inside. But do them, because personally I do not think, that this opportunity will present itself again. Not ever, not once.
Secret rhythm, hidden syncopation, buried rhythm displacement and other mystical creatures
Most of you probably know Videotape by Radiohead. It is the final track on their 2007 album In Rainbows. What you probably don’t know is that it has a ‘secret rhythm’. Well, it doesn’t really, but it sounds cool, doesn’t it?
The album version is a piano-heavy song, with a strange atmospheric background noise and unusually placed beats. In short: a Radiohead song.
What makes this more interesting, is the evolution of this track, from live performance to the album version. Apparently, some Radiohead fans were baffled by the fact, that Thom Yorke had such a difficulty starting such a ‘simple’, straightforward song during one of their shows. This spurred some fans to go on a fact-finding mission. The whole ‘conundrum’ is probably best summarized by this video with a rather clickbaity title: The secret rhythm behind Radiohead's "Videotape"
While the video presents an interesting case, their solution is not really correct, as it is pointed out in the comments. If I counted and understood it correctly, you have to assume a double tempo for the song, and count 4 :
1 e & a 2 e & a 3 e & a 4 e & a
in which the beats in bold are the ones Yorke is playing piano on.
What is really great about this song, it that it has a sort of ‘hidden double time’ playing in the band members’ heads and it gives a whole different feel to the song if you try to count the measures the way they do, and not the way the piano suggests. I can agree, that it is great, that the band members wanted to challenge themselves with this ‘background rhythm’, so much so, that they eventually decided to remove it from the album version completely. This is the aforementioned ‘Bonnaroo version’ of the song from 2006:
Still, it is ‘only’ rhythm displacement, not some secret voodoo. You can also observe a more extreme case of this in the song Bells by the Norwegian experimental trio Cakewalk:
From animated series to music in 4 steps (a.k.a. you just have to love the internet)
Some of you have probably heard about an animated series called Rick and Morty. The series, currently in its third season, is a fascinating sci-fi about the adventures of Rick, a brilliant scientist with a severe alcohol problem and his not-at-all-brilliant, somewhat socially awkward grandson Morty, through space and alternate dimensions. The show can essentially be considered a comedy, but it has a dark sense of humor, disturbing themes and a higher-than-usual rate of pop culture references/minute.
The whole series has a certain improvisational tone and randomness to it, but there is one episode, that is more random than usual: ‘Rixty Minutes’, the eighth episode of the first season. I really don’t want to go on about the story, but the whole twenty minutes is a sketch show of TV shows from different parallel dimensions. This is how we ended up with ‘commercials’ like this one for ‘Ants in my eyes Johnson Electronics’:
You can really hear that most of this is probably improvised and that the voice actor (co-creator Justin Roiland) has a high-pitched, musical way of speaking. Well, you are not the only one:
This is Irish musician David Dockery, doing a great drum cover of this sketch. He is absolutely worth looking at and/or following on YouTube because he does more of this amazing stuff. But if you think, that this stops here, well... You could not have been more wrong:
Less, than a month after Dockery released his cover, Marc Anthony Figueras, a guitarist from North Carolina came out with the above video, based on Dockery’s cover. But only after this, with contribution from another YouTuber, did it became a full-fledged masterpiece:
Unfortunately, I could not figure out who the third wheel of the ad hoc trio was, but still: this is some seriously great jazz-funk there. A comment under the final video gives an idea about what could come next:
‘Now Justin Roiland or Dan Harmon just needs to see this and put it in Rick and Morty and then it'll all come full circle’
Whatever they do, they cannot take away from the awesomeness of this ‘collaboration’.
Yes, there is such a thing as ‘acoustic metal’ and of course it’s made by PIRATES.
Concerning Hobbits, Flash animations, and a strange website’s most famous legacy. Oh, and pirates. (A belated Cover Thursday post.)
So, there is this page, called Albino Blacksheep. If you have been there, you probably know it as a collection of a lot of weird things, most of them animations. If you haven’t had the chance to visit it, you still can. (Yes, it’s still up and running!)
Even if you’re not familiar with Albino Blacksheep, you must have heard about ‘They’re Taking The Hobbits To Isengard’. According to KnowYourMeme, this techno masterpiece was first uploaded to Albino Blacksheep by Erwin Beekveld in 2005. That’s 12 years ago:
If all of this still sounds like a bunch of nonsense, I’m not sure that you will be much impressed by what I’m about to show you. But you should still take a chance and bare with me. (There will be pirates.)
If you are familiar with Taking The Hobbits to Isengard, then you are probably also familiar with its 10-hour version, which can mean only one thing: you know the whole thing by heart. And if you do, well...
Yes, it is six guys dressed as pirates, armed with an accordion (among other things). They are The Dread Crew of Oddwood from San Diego, CA. They are a pirate-themed metal band, who mostly use a variety of acoustic instruments and describe their style as ‘heavy mahogany’.
Most of their songs have a bleak and frightening atmosphere and feature killing, ships, gunpowder, and drinking, or all of them combined. (What else? They are pirates after all.) In spite of this imagery, their music is ridiculously fun to listen to, mostly because of their strange choice of instruments, and how they still manage to create a notably ‘heavy’ sound despite the lack of electricity. If you are interested, this song is a great place to start:
I came across Moon Hooch about half a year ago in a video about their performance at NPR Music’s Tiny Desk concert series. It was not the result of a lengthy search, I just wanted to see what a band sounded like, which had a traffic cone modified saxophone in it, so I just clicked right away:
Their sound and energy was something completely new to me and I loved it immediately. I would not want to waste your time with likening them to some other band, because first of all, it’s not really possible, and second of all, they did come up with a pretty airtight ‘definition’ by themselves:
Cave Music / ˈkāv myo͞ozik / It’s like House, but its more wild, more jagged, more free, more natural to live in.
I really don’t have anything to add to that, so please just listen to them :)
I’m aware that I have just started and this is only the second instance of Cover Thursday, but I will break with the non-existing tradition already. I have to show you a video and a YouTube channel:
This is Adam Neely, a New York based musician, and his video about covers. Well... sort of. It certainly has some covers of the Ed Sheeran song, just not the way you imagined. If you are ready for a hilarious 14-minute journey through reharmonization, just click on the video above.
If you are not, well... here is the original:
This piece was shown to me, by a professional pianist and theatrical composer, who said, that he just hasn’t been able to play that for years. No wonder, really: Keith Jarrett starts of with a theme, which his left hand carries all the way through the improvisation, which starts off somewhere in the ballpark of the original theme, but then goes all over the place. You can talk about ‘great hand independence’, but this is clearly something else.
Listen to the whole thing, while never taking your ears off the original theme, and remember: this was only the encore to an otherwise great live concert. He just walked out to the stage one final time, and did this.
This a first of many Fridays, on which I will call your attention to an artist, concert or piece of music, that is on the experimental and/or improvisative side of the musical spectrum. First of all, I think it important, that I explain how I came to be fascinated by this musical approach. This I will do in a series of smaller, more manageable posts. So here it goes…
I never considered myself much of a jazz buff, although I always liked jazz-rock tunes and compositions that were more complex than the usual A B A B structure. I suppose if I had to name one song that opened a new door and taught me how to ease into virtually any type of music was Echoes by Pink Floyd.
For those of you who don’t know: this is a 23-minute long composition, with a middle part that most people would consider strange, confusing and annoying at the least. Somehow the more I listened to this song, the more I liked that weird little middle part and the more capable I was to accept and even enjoy this 5 minute break of underwater shrieks and noises.
This was the song that taught me that the best thing you can do while listening to music is to clear your head of expectations and just let the composition carry you away. This is what I would suggest you to do. Don’t look for purpose, don’t look for familiar structures, just listen to the whole track for the sake of the music.
If it’s Thursday, then it’s time for covers:
Rammstein’s Du Hast, an industrial metal tune originally in German, covered by the Russian band Dobranotch. Not just klezmer, but also translated to Yiddish!
Here’s the original for comparison:
Last evening I had the pleasure of taking part in my first ever Sofar Sounds concert. It was held in a spacious but cozy apartment in downtown Budapest and I have to say this performance format is a godsend.
This might sound pretentious and snobby, but as much as I love music, live music in particular, I usually hate concerts. Sofar Sounds is great, because it takes away everything, that can be annoying: talking, cheering, screaming, and random drunks behind you, loudly singing along songs they do not know the words to. What is left is the “naked” performance, and after a couple minutes you do realize, that this concentrated attention is all, that is necessary to enjoy a live performance.
A post shared by Sofar Sounds Budapest (@sofarbudapest) on Aug 22, 2017 at 12:20pm PDT
Our first performer was Muzsik & Volkova, a Russian-Hungarian duo, with a self-defined ‘greengrass’ sound. Their songs and performance style have a certain energy and suggestiveness that can remind someone of both Tamás Cseh and Vladimir Vyssotski. The resemblance is even more fitting because of their themes of both personal and public nature.
The second performer was Platon Karataev, or at least a half of the band. Their performance was varied in dynamics and almost all of their songs featured a two-part vocal harmony, which contributed nicely to the atmosphere they wished to create. Though they only refer to themselves as ‘indie’, their music bares strong elements of folk (in the American sense), which is still a rare and unfamiliar taste in Budapest.
All in all it was just as great a performance and "venue" as I imagined it to be. This is in part thanks to the concept of Sofar Sounds, but it would not have been possible without two powerful duos.
On the Saturday of Sziget Festival 2014 I steered in the direction of the World Village Stage. To tell you the truth I only hoped to sit and relax on the grassy slope opposite to the stage itself, in the company of a beer. This turned out to be one of the best concerts on the whole festival.
So there I was, beer in hand, with two possible means of spending my time. One was laying down (and let’s be honest: possibly sleeping) on the slope, the other was checking out the stage, where a band played. (Right then I could have sworn to the fact, that it comprised members of both System of a Down AND Gogol Bordello).
As it turned out, I was not entirely mistaken, because Gasmac Gilmore does actually define their style as a mixture of Gogol Bordello, Kaziers Orchestra and System of a Down. Their fanpage previously labelled this as ‘Balkan metal’. (As of yet, this has been changed simply to ‘alternative metal’.) This term, ‘Balkan metal’ is absolutely exciting. (Especially for me. I am sort of picky, when it comes to metal, however I can and I will listen to almost anything that comes from - or has anything to do with - the Balkans.)
Before I was even through the first shock I noticed that my limbs have started to move to the music, made by the five guys on stage, wearing what seemed to be clothing in the style of the 1900s Austrian countryside. I probably arrived sometime during the fourth song, but it immediately captured my attention. It was an unexpected moment, when the frontman announced “the happiest heavy metal song”, took a ukulele in his hand and started playing Somewhere Over the Rainbow. Even more unexpected was the thing, that looked like a mosh pit, which formed during Somewhere Over the Rainbow, despite none of that happening during the previous, definitely heavier songs.
Intstruments came and went throughout the concert, be it a three-piece brass band, a violinist, an accordionist, or any combination of these three. The crowd gathered more and more during the early afternoon gig, a sign, that Gasmac Gilmore did manage to create a great atmosphere. I liked this never-before-heard style so much, that I went ahead and impulse-bought their latest album, Dead Donkey, right after the show.
