Rammstein at the U.S. Bank Stadium

 On August 27, 2022, the German heavy metal group, Rammstein, performed at the U. S. Bank Stadium, the massive sinister-looking football colosseum that is home to the Minnesota Vikings.  The band's crew operates with Teutonic precision and the concert was efficiently staffed.  An armored car protected the gates in the cyclone fencing around the stadium but lines moved briskly and security wasn't too brutish.  (One speculates that, in  part, this was because Rammstein's head-banger base consists almost entirely of White fans -- they are probably afforded the benefit of the doubt.)  There were some janitors assigned to the toilets to keep them spic-and-span and, in terms of logistics the whole experience wasn't too frightful.  It's my estimate that about 45,000 people attended this show.  This seems an astonishing number for a band that performs, so far as I can tell, entirely in German. The crowd seemed orderly, although, of course, a few people got pretty drunk.  The audience was enthusiastic and the band, at one point, provided a sing along with the sort of karaoke high-lighting that is now used to guide parishioners when the congregation sings hymns.  The crowd sang enthusiastically in German and shook their fists in the air and, when prompted to display brightly illumined cell-phones, obliged as well, creating a sea of waving white lights.  

Rammstein's act has been refined over the past thirty years to to precisely accommodate the concert venues where the band performs.  The elaborate searchlight arrays flash beams through air made visible by fog machines and huge towers belch fire forty feet upward toward the stadium's lofty roof -- the effect is like the flares of fire in the opening shots of the original Blade Runner movie.  With only a few exceptions, the effects are all exactly tailored to the enormous dimensions of a stadium of this sort.  If the roof were a little lower, the band and its audience would be in trouble.  (As it was, the final display of fiery pyrotechnics, flames so intense that I felt them blazing on my face at a distance of about 200 yards, lit some kind of skein-like web on fire over the stage and the material, whatever it was blazed, like an aerial bonfire; this effect didn't seem calculated and made me a little uneasy.)  My ticket cost $122 dollars (about what it costs for a good seat at the Minnesota Opera) and Rammstein provided excellent value for the admission -- they played most of their most famous songs, acted some of them out with flame-throwers and grotesque costumes, and the concert was about two-hours and fifteen minutes long.  (There was opening act involving two pianists playing Rammstein tunes on amplified keyboards; this was relatively low-key and intentionally inconspicuous.)  

In  concert, Rammstein's music is acoustically flattened to three audible components.  First and foremost, there is an aggressive and bellicose drum cadence:  variants on dum dum diddley dum / dum dum dum.  A wall of  sound pulses and drones behind the drum rhythm.  The front man, Till Lindeman, yowls lyrics in German -- he's a versatile singer:  Till can growl and shriek in the best punk rock manner, but he's also capable of barking out patter with a sinister edge and cabaret-curl to his words; when the song requires, he can also sing in a robust beer-hall baritone. Rammstein's songs are replete with German phrases that can be explained but not exactly translated.  In fact, most of the lyrics, so far as I have studied them, are pretty clever and have a literary flair.  Of course, the noise is deafening.  In actuality, Rammstein is the world's largest and most well-compensated (and entartete, that is,"degenerate") drum-and-bugle corps.  The military cadences in almost every song are virtually identical to the drum-line beat that you might hear at a small-town 4th of July parade fifty years ago.  (What has happened to all the drum and bugle corps that were once the pride of every small Minnesota town?  I recall attending a drum-and-bugle corps competition with the Eden Prairie Marching Band in Duluth around 1970.  Little villages out in the country all fielded drum and bugle marching units and, as a kid, I was appalled and impressed by the members of those bands, all about 24 year old men with big droopy moustaches and goatees, their uniforms bulging with flasks of whisky and vodka -- you'd see these lad relaxing in the beer gardens still resplendent in their uniforms.  Most of the audience at the Rammstein concert looked somewhat like these guys, at least as I recall them, and I suppose that drum-and-bugle corps music, also played at a deafening pitch, is really just another form of head-banger music avant le lettre.)   On rock-and-roll TV shows, like Dave Clark's program, when kids would rate music, usually, they would say:  "It's got a good beat.  You can dance to it."  In Rammstein's case, the music is almost entirely marches, straight forward four/four military cadence compositions  that mostly sound alike.  With regard to Rammstein, you can say that the music has a great beat and you can march to it. One of the songs makes explicit, a tune called Links zwei drei ("Left! two three!" -- that is, marching cadence.  And, in fact, on stage, Flake (pronounced Flahk eh, the keyboard player) is set up with a treadmill so that he can march vigorously in place as he plays his electric piano and synthesizer.  Flake wears a disco-style gold lame jumpsuit.  The rest of the boys are clad in the nondescript uniform of industrial workers -- they look like the janitors laboring to keep the toilet floors in the stadium not too hideously filthy -- and there's a proletariat, Marxist aspect to their demeanor. (Rammstein's members are former East Germans who had publicly announced their distaste for America and their nostalgia for the old GDR.)  They also march up and down the stage like Wehrmacht volunteers, sometimes using a gait that approaches goose-stepping.  When Till, the front man, isn't singing, he squats down and wields an invisible hammer pounding at his thigh in a move that is, not surprisingly, called "The Till Hammer" -- like one of Wagner's dwarves he pounds vigorously with his imaginary hammer, keeping time with his imaginary hammer-blows.  No one dances.  Everyone just strides back and forth keeping a properly martial stance.  (In the audience, people stand in place and march while flinging their heads around.)  The lads are handsome and have the thuggish appearance of Nazi-era Aryan Uebermenschen.

The show flirts with Nazi-era esthetics -- there are Nuremburg-style cathedrals of light, beam-pillars  that stand like pale colonnades in the murky air, and Till and the boys sometimes salute the audience and each other with gestures that look a little like the Hitler-Gruess.  Till and company aren't particularly warm; there's no onstage patter -- it would have to be in German in any event -- and it was only at the very end of the show, after the encores, that Till even acknowledged that he was in Minneapolis.  The songs are played back to back with not much in the way of interludes and some of the show is pretty thrilling in a primitive way:  deafening military cadences, Till rolling his "r's" aggressively as he encourages the audience to sing along in German, and fire spouting out everywhere -- there are pinwheels of fire, guitars shoot out flames as in a Road Warrior movie and huge flares of flame burst upward from the sound towers.  Sometimes, a fluttering flock of black particles is blasted out over the audience -- it looks like a plague of locusts.  Other times, the particles that fill the air over the people standing on the floor are white and flutter around like moths.  Some of it is pretty funny:  in the macabre song Mein Teil, a tune about a homosexual cannibal who cut off his lover's penis and ate it, Till prances around like a nightmare monster from Struwwelpeter, wearing a huge chef's toque and theatrically sharpening a huge prop knife on  an equally huge razor strop.  Till then threatens Flake.  He boils a kettle of water for his penis-soup with his flamethrower.  Then, he and Flake have a duel in which they shoot thirty-foot tongues of fire at each other from their flame-throwers.  It 's like a little comic operetta and a good time is had by all.  At the end of the show, the band departs the stage in a blaze of bursting fire, appears at the side of the arena, and, then, floats over the crowd on what appear to be white pontoon boats.  It's hard to see because of the huge distances involved and the flashing lights and cascades of fire -- everything is either too bright for the eyes or drowned in shadow:  just  as your eye starts to adjust to the gloom, a bunch of lights explode like colossal flash-bulbs on an old camera and you can't see anything but vortices of fog.  When the towers belch fire, the enormous tongues of flame turn into circular clouds of black smoke that surge up to the ceiling.  At one point, early in the show, a giant baby perambulator is rolled out on state and its inside set on so that it that blazes with the savage brilliance of acetylene flames -- I have no idea what this effect is supposed to signify, but it's impressive and scary.

Of course, the gargantuan scale of the show makes the spectator seem weirdly disconnected from all the rampant sound and fury.  The figures on stage are an eighth of a mile away and they register as tiny forms surrounded by huge banks of flashing lights and gouts of flame.  Some video is shot and simul-cast on thirty-foot tall screens flanking the screen, but that footage is distorted by the lightning-like bursts of fire and searing light, and so the images don't really make sense -- furthermore, they alternate so quickly that you can't exactly see them.  Everything is choreographed to within an inch of its life and one gets the sneaking sense that maybe no one is really playing their instruments at all, that the band is just cavorting to a deafening soundtrack.  Some of the effects are under-sized for the grandiose setting.  When Till and Flake have their first flame-thrower duel, the bursts of fire that they exchange look like matches being lit in the darkness by comically miniature figures -- but, later, the tongues of flame are dramatically extended. It's all very spectacular and the thunderous music has a gloomy sort of appeal and, while the show was underway, a real thunderstorm swept over the stadium and pelted the roof with rain and lightning lit the dome from overhead while bursts of fire climbed up to scorch the rafters.  

I fear that I betrayed a Rammstein brother.  A drunk guy was climbing up the steps by where I was watching the show  from my place at the end of a row of seats by the aisle.  As he approached, he locked eyes with me and, then, extended his fist in my face.  I didn't know what to do and sort of ducked to get away from his hand.  In fact, I think he wanted to fist-bump me to show his jubilation at being drunk and at a Rammstein concert where the stage was half on-fire.  But I didn't figure this out quickly enough and so I left the proffered fist, a friendly gesture, I think, just hanging in mid-air.