RAMMSTEIN – MADE IN GERMANY
Rammstein’s new career retrospective Made In Germany 1995–2011 finds the band at the apex of its career. The members of the Berlin-based six piece – frontman Till Lindemann, guitarists Richard Z. Kruspe and Paul H. Landers, bassist Oliver Riedel, drummer/percussionist Christoph M. Schneider, and keyboardist Flake Lorenz – share common roots in East Germany’s renegade D.I.Y. punk scene, yet after joining forces in the mid-’90s would ultimately become one of the biggest, and most controversial, rock groups in the world. Since then, Rammstein have sold millions of records, with their six studio albums – Herzeleid (1995), Sehnsucht (1997), Mutter (2001), Reise, Reise (2004), Rosenrot (2005), and Liebe Ist Für Alle Da (2009) – topping charts in numerous countries; according to Billboard magazine charts, they have become the most successful German-language group in music history. Rammstein have also grown into one of the biggest international touring draws, headlining massive festivals and stadiums alike: a 2010 concert at New York’s Madison Square Garden – Rammstein’s first U.S. performance in a decade – sold out all of the famed arena’s 20,000 seats in fifteen minutes.
Rammstein’s initial penetration of American pop culture proved a little more, well, penetrating than most. A featured act on the 1998 “Family Values” tour, Rammstein stood clearly apart from the other artists on the bill like Limp Bizkit, Korn, Orgy, and Ice Cube: audiences were quickly seduced by Rammstein’s explosive pyrotechnic display and heavy beats and guitars – only to be perplexed when Lindemann dropped trou to reveal an enormous dildo, with which he appeared to sodomize Lorenz and then spray ejaculate (actually a liquor-based liquid) over the crowd as the band performed the track “Bück Dich” (“Bend down”). Derived as much from absurdist Berliner performance art as it was from shock rockers spanning Alice Cooper to Ozzy Osbourne, these displays violated local tastes not used to such, erm, European sensibilities: following a “Family Values” show in Worcester, Massachusetts, Lindemann and Lorenz were arrested on charges of indecency and forced to spend a night in jail. It’s no surprise, then, that Rammstein’s first commercial American exposure came via the audaciously twisted oeuvre of director David Lynch, who chose the band’s songs for the score of his infamous 1997 film Lost Highway on Trent Reznor’s suggestion.
Yes, umlauts be damned, Rammstein decisively demonstrated from the start that theirs was not your grandmother’s nü-metal – in fact, Rammstein so defied genre pigeonholes that a new one, Neue Deutsche Härte (“New German Hardness”), had to be coined to encompass the Frankenstein-monster sound the group defined. Such trailblazing followed a national tradition. On the one hand, Germany has served as a spawning ground for totally groundbreaking genres like Kraftwerk’s synth-pop, the krautrock of Neu!, and Einstürzende Neubauten’s industrial-salvage grooves; there’s also the country’s custom of perfecting innovations from elsewhere via Teutonic precision – much as BMW and Volkswagen did for the American automobile, so did Germany streamline the likes of Detroit techno and hard rock (Scorpions, anyone?) for mass production in its own idealized image.
Rammstein displayed elements of both approaches on its debut album Herzeleid, of which “Du Riechst So Gut” is a key track (and gets subsequently reprised on Made In Germany 1995–2011). “Du Riechst So Gut” decisively stamped out Rammstein’s sonic template in surgical steel: heavy-metal riffs contradicted by arpeggiated keyboard lines redolent of industrial titans KMFDM and Skinny Puppy over thumping dance beats direct from Berlin’s all-night clubland. This incongruously appealing formula continued on “Du Hast,” the propulsive hit single (further popularized by its inclusion on the soundtrack for The Matrix) from Rammstein’s international 1997 breakthrough, the U.S. platinum-certified Sehnsucht. “Du Hast” blurred the charging metal guitars of Pantera and Metallica with cinematic trance synths and house-music pianos, and never looked back. Made In Germany… makes clear Rammstein’s musical identity never stopped mutating, from the Gary Glitter glam beats driving “Haifisch” to post-punk references like the Joy Division-style bassline underpinning “Rosenrot” and quotations from Public Image’s “This Is Not a Love Song” on “Amerika.” On top of this stylistic maelstrom lays Lindemann’s distinctive baritone vocals, memorably described by German writer Peter Richter as evoking “a tombstone with inscriptions carved in Gothic lettering.” Like everything associated with Rammstein, Lindemann’s singing proves a freakish hybrid that perversely challenges the sonic clichés of heavy music: instead, it alternately evokes ’80s new wave angst à la Depeche Mode (whose “Stripped” Rammstein memorably covered), Wagnerian operatics, the sardonic growl of late-period Leonard Cohen, and the kitschy melodrama of German Schlager pop.
Indeed, what surprises most about Rammstein’s enduring worldwide fame is the band’s uncompromising commitment to its German heritage – all while constantly questioning and prodding it, never avoiding its painful benchmarks. The band’s name comes from both the German word for “battering ram” and a town famous as the location for an air-show demonstration accident that resulted in multiple deaths. The few songs Rammstein sing in English are not coincidental, containing pointed satires of German culture. “Pussy” at first appears a crudely humorous sing-along (“You have a pussy/I have a dick-uh/So what’s the problem?/Let’s do it quick”) before dropping in references to Mercedes-Benz, the autobahn, sauerkraut and “Fahrvergnügen” (driving pleasure). “Amerika,” meanwhile, rhymes “wunderbar” with war and Wonderbra alongside mentions of Mickey Mouse and Coca-Cola: it’s a critique of the prevalent Americanization of the world mixed with humor – “I don’t sing my mother tongue,” rasps Lindemann ironically. The jackboot stomp opening “Links 2 3 4” similarly alludes to Germany’s history of fascist militarism before skewering it resolutely. As well, just from its title alone, “Mein Land” – Rammstein’s new single, and the only previously unreleased song on Made In Germany… – clearly probes the tension of blind nationalism and national identity.
In this confrontational strategy, Rammstein follows the lead of other contemporary German artists from various mediums. The “New German Cinema” epitomized by Wim Wenders and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, for example, examined the broken psychology of a post-war Germany abruptly severed from its past, replaced with the culture of the conquering heroes. As well, painters like Anselm Kiefer and Gerhard Richter transformed moments of shame from Germany’s history – in Kiefer’s work, Nazism and the Holocaust, in Richter’s, the bloody terrorism of the Baader-Meinhof Gang – to guarantee they weren’t forgotten. Rammstein takes this approach to a radical, polarizing extreme – in their songs, no subject is taboo, no topic too transgressive; S&M, homosexuality, degradation, and all manner and method of violence get explored throughout their repertoire – often inspired by horrifying real-life tragedies. “The controversy is fun, like stealing forbidden fruit,” Flake Lorenz explained to U.K. newspaper The Times. “But it serves a purpose. We like audiences to grapple with our music…” As such, the song “Mein Teil” took inspiration from the story of Armin Meiwes, a German cannibal who sexually mutilated his victim before killing and eating him.
And grapple they do. With sixteen songs, Made In Germany… surveys all of the elements that have come to define Rammstein – from the band’s startling beginnings to the present day. It’s not a greatest hits album per se as much as a subjective, opinionated, potentially divisive overview of the band’s recorded legacy: it skips “Benzin,” for example, which was a #1 hit in numerous countries, and features five tracks from Mutter, Rammstein’s challenging third record whose volatile creation almost caused the band to break up. As a microcosm, however, Made In Germany… allows the listener to trace Rammstein’s evolution – from the introductory brutality of Herzeleid to the more assured, soaring production of Sehnsucht, through the slick meditations on evil and power on Mutter and the dark, heightened satire of Reise, Reise and Rosenrot, all the way to the most current Liebe Ist Für Alle Da, which found Rammstein taking all the ideas they’d explored to that point to their radical end, going farther than ever before.
In a way, Made In Germany… is only part of the Rammstein story. It’s hard to divorce a song like the haunting “Engel” from its place as the closer of Rammstein’s relentlessly theatrical spectacle of a live show, where the muscled, sinewy Lindemann straps on enormous steel angel wings that erupt in a blaze of fire (Lindemann is a licensed pyrotechnician – a fact that’s almost as important to his output as an artist as his singing); conversely, nothing quite tops the fusion of sound and image when Lindemann straddles a massive phallus-shaped cannon that sprays the crowd ecstatically with foam jizz during the concert version of “Pussy.” Then there’s the horrifying album art (Mutter features a dead embryo); elaborate, infamous videos (for the “Pussy” clip, the band members performed graphic sex scenes with porn stars culminating in money shots); and postmodern bad-taste stunt gags (a limited edition of Liebe Ist Für Alle Da came packaged with six dildos allegedly modeled on the Rammstein members’ own penises). Indeed, the totality of Rammstein attempts to violate all of the senses even beyond the ears – from feeling (the flesh-searing heat of the pyrotechnics is visceral at each concert) to smell (Rammstein’s debut single, “Du Riechst So Gut” – which translates to “You smell so good” – was sold in a perfumed digipak). Music is only one part of Rammstein’s legacy, but its permanent one, and that is what Made In Germany… succinctly documents: the continued, vital existence of a band polite society never wanted to exist in the first place…
Source: Universal Music
