“Hagen recorded Nunsexmonkrock in New York with a band that included Paul Shaffer and Chris Spedding. To describe it as wild hardly suffices – the drugs-sex-religion-politics-mystical imagery that spills out is nearly incomprehensible in its bag-lady solipsism, but the music and singing combine into an aural bed of nails that carries stunning impact. It almost doesn’t matter that Hagen sticks to English; what counts is the phenomenal vocal drama. Her range seems limitless, and the countless characters she plays makes this fascinating.”
/ The Trouser Press Record Guide (1991) review of Nunsexmonkrock /
“Nina Hagen’s 1982 album Nunsexmonkrock is one of the single most ground-breaking and far-out things ever recorded and it deserves to be considered a great—perhaps the very greatest—unsung masterpiece of the post-punk era … Nunsexmonkrock could have been recorded 40 years ago, yesterday, or a thousand years from now and it just wouldn’t matter.”
/ From Dangerous Minds website /
Unleashed on this day (12 June 1982): berserk German punk diva Nina Hagen’s debut solo album and definitive artistic achievement, futuristic post-punk masterpiece Nunsexmonkrock – hailed by a Rolling Stone reviewer as the "most unlistenable" record ever made. Au contraire! Hagen’s confrontational Exorcist-style vocals and crackpot flights of fancy are (mostly) grounded in experimental but tough and danceable New Wave rock. Opener “AntiWorld” invents an operatic / Biblical / gypsy punk hybrid. Spooky anti-heroin diatribe “Smack Jack” nails a sense of junkie panic. "Iki Maska" is anchored to the same Henry Mancini / Peter Gunn guitar riff as “Planet Claire” by the B-52’s. The irresistible “Born in Xixax” bristles with paranoid conspiracy theories predicting World War III but vows, “One day we will be free!” Best of all, the extraterrestrial “Cosma Shiva” marries blaxploitation funk bass with samples of the gurgles and squeals of Hagen’s baby daughter, and concludes with Hagen declaring, “And my little baby, I tell you—God is your father.” Nunsexmonkrock still sounds like bleeding-edge science fiction!
