Rammstein: New song "Radio" is the next history lesson
Just a few weeks ago, Rammstein walked through German history with her song "Germany" in seven league boots. Now the band continues their history lesson. On Friday, Rammstein released their second single release from the upcoming May 17 album "RAMMSTEIN".
Already on Thursday evening had about 1,000 people in Berlin-Mitte, Hamburg and Cologne the opportunity to watch the video for the first time in a kind of flash mob in public. The almost five-minute strip had been projected on the walls of the house. Anyone who wanted to hear the soundtrack, however, had to bring a radio or listen to the smartphone.
The new track is also called "Radio" and describes how it must have felt to have lived in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The first verses of the song are: "We were not allowed to belong / see, speak or hear nothing".
"That song was forbidden"
Western songs, especially English-speaking (rock) music, were mostly forbidden in the working-class and peasant state or were subject to strict censorship. Listening to so-called western broadcasters, radio and television stations of the Federal Republic was also prohibited. The information sovereignty lay with the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) and the Ministry of State Security (MfS) - and saw in West German radio and television programs a threat to their rule.
In "Radio" this is expressed in two verses of the second stanza: "Those songs were forbidden / So dangerous foreign notes," sings Till Lindemann (56) in contemptible-melancholic way.
But many people in the GDR ignored this ban. No secured border was able, between 1949 and 1989, to intercept the radio waves on which the radio stations of the Federal Republic broadcast their broadcasts. If you had a radio, you could listen.
In the second half of the first stanza it says: "But every night for one or two hours / I have disappeared from this world / Every night a little bit happy / My ear very close to the world receiver". Already at this point let Rammstein hint which suffering the GDR taught the people. But this becomes really clear in the chorus: "So I hear what I do not see" / Silence secretly far away woe ".
The significance of this nocturnal radio listening in the GDR Rammstein in the video in different ways dar. You see a woman in sex with the "world receiver". A nun worships the radio, rosary in hand. Another woman takes her transistor radio in a stroller, takes it to breastfeed to the chest - when she is snatched from her by a people's policeman, she drops pleadingly to her knees.
"My radio belongs"
In the end it is precisely this suppression that causes the system to collapse in "Radio". Angry people proverbially go to the barricades in the video. Helpless, the People's Police swing their clubs.
Particularly striking is a young woman. On her bared upper body, she has written the words "My radio is with" based on the Femen movement. At the same time she waves a flag - in the style of the icon of the French Revolution, the Delacroix painting "The freedom leads the people" from 1830. In Rammstein it is the radio that leads the people to freedom. It stands for the freedom that arises from information - and the fear of repressive systems before the free word.
"Radio" also carries biographical features: The band members of Rammstein grew up in the GDR. Their beginnings took the band in the DDR punk rock scene of the 80s. In their biography published in 2015, Rammstein go so far as to say that the band would not have existed without the GDR.
With "Radio" Rammstein give their listeners on the one hand audiovisually the opportunity to go into the emotional world of those Germans who had to suffer under the system of the GDR - working up in the style of the New German Hardship. "Radio" has become a highly political track, just like the "Germany" published a few weeks ago.
If this pattern continues, then with the new album is a record in the house, which springs from the increasingly political zeitgeist and pouring it into hard grades, which fans can brave quite excellent, moshing and singing - and even learn something.
