The Foreign Correspondent Returns - Stories About German Rock Music # 43

Today I like to feature a band that exists since 30 years. I don't know many German bands that exists this long time and being true to their ideas. One is Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle Dirk from Sexy Loser mentioned them weeks ago - the other one are Die Goldenen Zitronen (The Golden Lemons). They started as a punk rock band in Hamburg that are know for their entertaining and politically relevant style. When they formed in 1984 they were just another part of the Fun-Punk movement combined hard rock'n'roll with the 70th annual punk rock and humorous, partly bad, hit-like lyrics. Over the years the band added more experimental musical forms, with which different styles were combined. Their lyrics are political and take a critical view of society from a loft to left-radical perspective.

In 1994 they presented themselves with the album Das bißchen Totschlag (This to a little manslaughter) in a new musical style, to her usual power rock came elements from Garage-Trash, Electro beats, hip-hop and Noise rock pop. In the title song the band refers to the arson attacks in Mölln and Hoyerswerda, the politically motivated murders of blacks in Germany and the following increase of the asylum law as well as the murder of the squatter and anti-fascist Silvio Meier.In the course of the years they changed once more her music style and the instrumentation became more electronic. A certain slope to the avant-garde continued in theirs next works which was completed with Lenin one. There has come out once more, in the end, a collage of modern punk music off pop-cultural commonness. I love this band for being straight and going their very own way and not getting corrupted by the music industry like other nowadays still called punk bands like Die Ärzte or Die Toten Hosen.

Die Goldenen Zitronen - Für immer Punk
Die Goldenen Zitronen - Das bißchen Totschlag
Die Goldenen Zitronen - Lenin
Die Goldenen Zitronen - Der Bürgermeister

The Foreign Correspondent - Stories About German Rock Music # 18

Let me take you back 20 years ago to German rock music. The Hamburg school is a loose music movement which originated in the end of the 1980s and reached her commercial high point middle him of 1990s. She went back to traditions of the new German wave and connected them with elements of Indie rock, punk, Grunge and pop. It was and is with it an important part of the German youth culture and brought a new self-image for the use of the German in the pop music with itself. In the beginning purely from Hamburg based bands like Cpt. Kirk &., Kolossale Jugend, Blumfeld , Die Goldenen Zitronen or Huah! carried, the Hamburg school is not simply a „storage tank of similarly sounding music“. It's distinguishes herself above all by German-speaking lyrics to which often a high intellectual claim is portioned out and which are connected extensively with society criticism, left political setting and postal-modern theories. In the middle of the 1990s became in particular of three bands very successful: Blumfeld, Die Sterne and Tocotronic. By the success of the Hamburg school also attained a lot of German-speaking guitar bands a higher fame whose attempts were not necessarily to be compared in music and text to the Hamburg school. However, with the establishment of a national, German-speaking indie-pop scene and the concept „Hamburg school“ became less important bit by bit. But this will be a story to be told another time.

So let me introduce some band from the 'Hamburg School' that made German ears listen to some new sounds:

Huah - In einem 3000 Seelen Dorf (In a 3000 souls village)
Cpt. Kirk &. - Selber Schuld (It's your own fault)
Kolossale Jugend (Colossal Youth) - Bessere Zeiten (Better times)
Die Goldenen Zitronen (The Golden Lemons) - Für immer Punk (Punk forever)
Die Goldenen Zitronen (The Golden Lemons) - Das bisschen Totschlag (This a little manslaughter)
Blumfeld - Ghettowelt
Blumfeld - Ich-Maschine

And if I talk about the so called 'Hamburg School' this story would not be complete without any word about Bernd Begemann from Bad Salzuflen who was still a member of the scene. He did a lot of good things all over the years and I was glad to see him live last year in a very very small bar in Stuttgart.