Handsome, hard-looking men with brutally impassive faces stand in front of a great machine. The machine is a heavily armored, a grimy steel-plated furnace that looks like the Moloch-machine in Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Periodically, immense gusts of yellow and orange flame pour out of the machine or ascend in columns from the places where the men stand. The guardians of the great machine wear black knee-high jack boots and leather aprons. Their throats and foreheads are smeared with oil and lubricating greases leaked from the machine. In close-up, the men's eyelashes and lips are darkened with soot. A vast industrial roar, rhythmic like the throbbing of a great locomotive engine fills the air. Ten-thousand people are crowded into an ancient amphitheater and they raise their hands in the air to stab fingers upward in motions synchronized with the blast of engine noise. More fire ascends around the members of the band and the guitar players, wearing tubes such as you might see on the fuselage of a rocket, stand in molten puddles of fire -- it is impossible that they can be in the midst of this choreographed explosion without being burned by it. This is the German heavy metal band, Rammstein, performing in concert at Nimes, France in 2006.
Slavoj Zizek in his film A Pervert's Guide to Ideology compliments Rammstein for deploying Nazi-era spectacle for anti-Fascist purposes. Whether Zizek's tribute is wishful thinking is a question best left to the viewer. Most young people, not familiar with Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (or with Lang's Metropolis) probably won't recognize the imagery that Rammstein exploits in its impressive concerts. Probably, the jackboots and leather, the impassive, implacable stance that the Fuehrer takes while observing the mayhem around him, the windy tumuli of flames and the beams of spotlights lancing through the smoke and haze, all signify some recondite form of sado-masochism, some variety of Gothic romanticism that the young viewers are not equipped to relate back to the source of this Goetterdaemmerung, Hitler's Wagnerian vision of the Third Reich as a realm of robot soldiers, blood and fire, mobs convulsed with savage enthusiasm, gigantic machines looming over gritty engineers and industrial workers all blonde and beautiful and with steel-hard muscles. And, in fairness, to the problematic esthetics of Rammstein's concerts, Hitler's sense of grandiose spectacle referred, of course, to a third term, the element of the equation common to both Nuremberg and the Rammstein concert at Nimes -- that is, the "voelkisch" tribal enthusiasm for explosions, fire in opposition to darkness, the primordial balance of light and dark in the cold Northern parts of Europe, the romance of iron and molten metal comprising the glamor of the industrial revolution, the worship of technocrats with dead, icy eyes stage managing vast crowds with implacable expertise... But, in Rammstein's presentation, this entire gruesome panorama of son et lumiere is, of course, explicitly German, explicitly Teutonic -- unlike many European pop groups, Rammstein performs in grungy, growling German, bellowing out their lyrics, mostly written in Wagner and Hans Sachs' doggerel Knittelvers. And the crowd knows the lyrics and screams them back at the Germans even though this group of fans at Nimes, ten-thousand of them in the ancient amphitheater, are all, no doubt, patriotic French people. Rammstein's albums contain transcripts of the lyrics to their songs, but not translated into English -- the point is that this group performs in German, indeed, German of a particularly Expressionist or early Romantic diction: the lyrics read either like Trakl or Eichendorff (or, for that matter, Goethe or Heine): people suffer Sehnsucht ("yearning") in dark forests of pine trees and ancient oaks. Human beings ("Menschen") are seen burning in colossal fires -- indeed, the name of the band, Rammstein, refers to a famous German air disaster in which a crowd gathered to witness aerobatics by jets flying over found them itself in the midst of aircraft crashing to the earth, dowsing dozens of spectators with liquid fire. Furthermore, many of the songs cleave close to the bone of the German language -- the lyrics involve puns and plays on the words that are well-nigh untranslatable. One song, "Los" exploits the fact that "los" means both "without" (as in Wortlos --
"wordless") and to be set free, that is to be without external constraints. Another song has as its chorus Feuer frei, an expression that means, literally, "fire freely" but which is military parlance for "fire at will" -- of course, a phrase that is accompanied by great clouds of fire rising over the performers, most of whom seem to be decked-out in iron tubular flame-throwers. The song Teil refers to a notorious incident in which a German masochist answered a personals ad seeking someone who was willing to be butchered and eaten -- the sadist, who went by the name Metzgermeister ("Butcher-master"), accommodated the masochist's desires all too well, lopping off the man's penis and, then, roasting it for his evening meal. The song is performed with frisky antics by the keyboard player, Flocke. Flocke is a gawky storklike Ichabod Crane fellow and, with his keyboard, he hops into a huge cast iron bucket where he gestures at the audience pathetically while the lead singer, Doom Schneider, shoots thick jets of fire at the pot where poor Flocke mimes that he is being boiled into stew. All the while, the lead singer, who staggers around either like a poor imitation of Hitler, or like a zombie, cries out Mein Teil, words that mean, I think, either "my portion" or "my member" -- that is, the virile member served up as grilled sausage on a platter. Other songs by Rammstein are equally bizarre -- one catchy number is a pirate tune, called Seemann Reise, complete with choruses of "Ahoy." Obviously, the DVD of this live performance at Nimes, France is not everyone's cup of tea but it is certainly interesting and, as hard rock and metal bands go, Rammstein is exciting, as good as the best.
Correction: Legions of Rammstein fans have contacted me to advise that the lead singer in the band is Till Linderman. Doom Schneider is the group's drummer. Thus, the sanguine, sooty figure blandly supervising Rammstein's pyrotechnics is Till and not Doom.
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