A Brief History Of Hamburg School Part 1

 

For the rest of the week our worker's council sent me for a further training in labour law and communication and collaboration to Hamburg. So I had the idea to create some posts about the so called Hamburg school. It is a synonym for musical movement started at the end of the 80's until the mid 90's. Developed by new wave the bands combined elements of indie-rock, punk, grunge and pop and became an important part of German youth culture and made a new self-conception in using German language in popular music.

At the end of the 1980s, a German-language music scene was created in Hamburg, whose bands had no record contracts and did not release it anything. Only with the founding of the label L'age d'or in October 1988 this kind of music got a platform. One of the first acts that were signed was Huah! Formed by Frank Möller they made their very own thing between punk, hip-hop and soul. Sadly they never got the critical acclaim they should have.

Huah! - In einem 3000-Seelen-Dorf

Another band from Hamburg that never made great success was Kolossale Jugend. Named after Young Marble Giant's epic album Colossal Youth. This was guitar based indie rock, as it was so intense and reluctant at that time only American or British groups got it. 

Kolossale Jugend - Bessere Zeiten

Another label that released bands from this genre was Alfred Hilsberg's What's So Funny About. Blumfeld's first albums were released on this label. Blumfeld are probably the ones that got success in these days. Their sound, originally strongly influenced by guitar feedback, turned into a more pop-oriented sound after the band was reshaped in the mid-1990s. The most important feature is the interleaved German lyrics, partly performed in voice vocals by the singer Jochen Distelmeyer, which combine their own emotional worlds with social criticism in pictorial language.

Blumfeld - Ghettowelt

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.