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I wish there was a worksafe way to follow the tag ‘japanese’. I’m getting tired of blocking all these blogs featuring pics of women sticking their tits, asses and/or vaginas into the camera…
Gimme Gimme Gimme (A Man After Midnight) (1979, Single)
Like most One Week One Bands, the list of things I wanted to write about far exceeds the list of things I have actually written about (there are a few entries to go tomorrow, including The Best ABBA Cover Version, What Would Have Happened If ABBA Had Not Split Up, WTF Is The Day Before You Came’s Problem, and King Kong Song: Threat Or Menace).
So I had intended to “tackle” the “question” of CHEESE and why things get dismissed as cheesy - which obviously happens to ABBA quite a lot. But I realise I don’t entirely know. I don’t have a very good cheese radar. I thought it just meant “corny” but there’s a load of stuff I dislike and find corny - slow Radiohead songs, Wayne Coyne’s voice, etc. - which I don’t think anyone (me included) would label cheesy. I was once an observer at a real actual focus group with a subset of The Kids taking about genres of music teenagers listened to, and they said that on the list ought to be “Cheese”. “What is cheese?” I asked and they shuffled their verbal feet and ended up basically sayingGrandad, if you have to ask you’ll never know.
Anyway this song is cheesy. And brilliant. If “Voulez Vous” was ABBA’s perfect absorbtion of the lessons of disco to create a gleaming Robo-ABBA, “Gimme Gimme Gimme” is that cyborg rejecting its machine parts and letting its humanity burst through. You hardly need me (or even Madonna) to tell you how great that riff is, or the chords backing up the chorus, or the ratcheting up of tension before the chorus, or… it’s everything grand and funny about ABBA, is the point.
It’s also about casual sex. There are a VAST number of disco, hi-NRG, etc. songs about that - most of them try and sound a bit seedy, adventurous maybe, like the sex everyone’s having is happening in some underworld fleshpot you’ve heard whisper of but aren’t actually in. “Gimme Gimme Gimme” isn’t like that, it’s uncool, but not in a “having casual sex is uncool” way, more in a “everyone has lots of casual sex these days, even the uncool people”. Which in 1979 may even have been true.
I wouldn’t exactly call myself an ABBA fan, but fan or not, i think there’s barely anyone (well, over a certain age…) who doesn’t know most of their songs and that’s quite an achievement. So i’ve had ABBA songs playing in my head all week long…which isn’t the worst thing to happen really. “Gimme Gimme Gimme” has always been one of my faves, btw.
Condensed milk = ‘refreshment’ or ‘fruit juice soft drink’ in Spain? You live and learn…
R.I.P MCA.
A couple of impressions from this year’s Luminale in Frankfurt.
Probably my favourite album by them. And Let there be rock = best music video ever!
As for 17, i’d always considered the visitor to be Santa! Come on, it’s Christmas Eve and his voice is ‘naturally deep’, who else could it be?!XD
TOMORROW WILL BE LIKE TODAY
From 1995 to 1997 Tocotronic had put out four full-length records, toured each, and carved out a fine niche for themselves with a distinctely identifiable blend of adolescent grunge-pop and dissociative rebellion. Naturally, sometimes a comfortable niche becomes just too small a place to maneuver.
1998 was destined to be the first year without new material from the band. Tocotronic embarked on their first US tour with American indie rockers Fuck to general indifference of the record buying public. However, their final gig in New York did attract rock royalty such as Sonic Youth and the kindred-spirits of Pavement.
Back home, the band decided to consciously go for a break with their former selves. They hired The Notwist’s Micha Acher to arrange horns and strings for their new recordings and holed up a record-breaking 70 days in a studio in France. (Remember: Their debut was recorded in a mere three days.)
The result, 1999’s glorious K.O.O.K. turned out to be a triumphant parting with their old ways. No more songs about hate and rebellion, no longer “teenage identification service providers.” The music grew longer, more spacious and elaborate, and less immediate, a farewell to the loud/quiet/loud ways of old; the lyrics more abstract and metaphorical.
I guess this is growing up.
***
Incidentally, amidst the album’s plentiful slow-burning post-pop/rock highlights (Das Geschenk, Jenseits des Kanals, Um die Ecke gedacht, Dies sind keine Rästel, Die neue Seltsamkeit), the band also delivered two of the most joyous and straightforward pop songs of their career:
Lead single Let there be Rock—announced on the band’s US tour as “a communist anthem”— gives a knowing wink to The Final Countdown of all songs in its chorus, the band having “pulled over in the most boring place an earth” and found “that we quite like it here.”
I hear you whisper “The kids did all of this by themselves”
And then there’s Jackpot, an uncharacteristically unambiguous love song
You are the jackpot of my life / Granted, that comparison’s more spot off than on
The song’s seering melody and playful exuberance would go on to serve as template for too many a german band in the years to come. (With ever-diminishing returns, from the halfway-decent to the mind-numbingly-awful: Wir sind Helden, Sportfreunde Stiller, Juli, Silbermond…)
Nothing quite prepared the listener for Tocotronic suddenly making the lightness of being so very bearable on K.O.O.K.’s transcendent closer 17, however. At 11:11 the longest track they’ve ever recorded, the band take on the etherial wonderfulness of teenage sentiment with magical realism. It’s a song like a Brad Nelson story; magical, and mystical, and sad & hopeful all the same. A song about a friend (or is it a ghost?) visiting you in your bedroom on Christmas eve, a cool breeze ascending from the trees and bushes that’s caressing your ear.
They knew it, and we knew it, and now we heard them sing it too:
Today I am as happy as I’ve never been before
Tocotronic were the first band with German lyrics i actually liked. Having a bit of a crush on Dirk von Lowtzow definitely helped.
Aah, those were the days…XD
THIS IS NOT SEATTLE, DIRK
Watch this, I’ll wait.
Three minutes and eight seconds of asymetric haircuts, the band’s trademark second-hand clothing (baggy corduroys, washed-out tracksuits & vintage promo shirts), and playfully hilarious jam sessions, with retro signifiers & the endless rain making beautiful Hamburg look like a 1970 soviet bloc outpost.
Three minutes and eight seconds of the band’s early single “Wir sind hier nicht in Seattle, Dirk” that are as good an aesthetic and aural introduction as you could possibly get.
So: Who are Tocotronic?
They’ve been called voices of a generation, too clever for their own good, amateurish hacks spending more time honing manifestos than practicing their instruments, prototypical pin-ups for pretentious prep-schoolers (holy mother of alliteration!), the most influential German band of their time, the Feuilleton’s (the German newspapers’ ‘Arts & Culture’ section) favorites, and quite possibly any other feverish proclamation you can imagine supporters & detractors alike to persuasively utter.
***
Dirk von Lowtzow (Vocals, Guitar), Jan Müller (Bass) and Arne Zank (Drums) met while studying Law in Hamburg and quickly hit the port city’s pub circuit in late 1993 with little more than a few hastily-recorded two-track seven-inches and an astute sense of aesthetics in tow; the band’s moniker alluding to the German alias of Nintendo’s GameBoy-predecessor Game & Watch.
Tocotronic’s playful blend of lo-fi grunge pop and sharp diary-like adolescent observations gained them immediate traction with fans and similar-minded bands of the Hamburger Schule alike, subsequently resulting in a record deal with indie label L’Age D’Or.
Their first four albums—landmark debut “Digital ist besser” included—all feature a uniqe blend of trashy grunge-pop anthems and ironic sloganeering with mundane adolescent trivia, and quickly cemented their status as accidental spokesmen of over-educated, self-absorbed Abiturienten (graduates of the highest of German schools’ three tiers; roughly: prep schoolers) and Erstsemestern (university freshmen) nationwide. Of course us lot would just eat up the poetic apathy of nonchalant ninety-second thrashers referencing Proust, Focault & Wittgenstein alike, wouldn’t we?
Tocotronic’s early style, handily dubbed ‘The Hamburg Years’, remains the most feverishly adored and contested, their non-sequiturial witticisms still gracing university bathroom stalls all over the country. With the hazard of venturing into self-parody always lurking just around the corner, the band wisely decided to move on to more abstract and evocative territories and expanded style, songwriting and production on the refined post-modern post-pop/rock of “K.O.O.K.” and the light-on-guitars space-pop of their self-titled effort.
Meanwhile, frontman Dirk von Lowtzow consumated his transformation from slacker to dandy and, entirely depending on your tolerance for people referring to themselves in third-person in interviews, turned into the most interesting elusive man in German pop, gradually approximating an amalgam of Stephen Malkmus, Morrissey and David Foster Wallace. No bandana, though.
In 2004, the band added US-born touring guitarist Rick McPhail as an offical member and went on to record the more direct and incisive guitar rock of the Berlin trilogy’s albums in the titular German capital. As of this date, the band have returned to the studio once again, currently demoing songs scheduled for their tenth album due later this or early next year. They’ve long passed the point of having anything to prove for their status as one of the finest and most acclaimed German bands working, but with late-period masterpiece “Kapitulation” in particular they also fended off any fears of a creative decline.
***
Putting on my critic-glasses for just a brief moment, here’s a summary of the band’s oeuvre until the present day, with a personal (hence utterly unassailable!) rating of each album attached:
The Hamburg Years
1. Digital ist besser (1995) - 10.0
2. Nach der verlorenen Zeit (1995) - 8.0
3. Wir kommen um uns zu beschweren (1996) - 7.5
4. Es ist egal, aber (1997) - 8.5Transitions
5. K.O.O.K. (1999) - 9.0
6. Tocotronic (2002) - 8.0The Berlin Trilogy
7. Pure Vernunft darf niemals siegen (2005) - 6.5
8. Kapitulation (2007) - 9.0
9. Schall & Wahn (2010) - 7.0The Future
10. tba (2012/2013)
***
I’ll spend today discussing their landmark debut, followed by the rest of “The Hamburg Years” on Tuesday. Wednesday will see a detailed look at the underrated personal (joint-) favourite “K.O.O.K”, while I’ll cover the strange new sounds of “Tocotronic” and “Pure Vernunft…” on Thursday, and the remaining two albums of “The Berlin Trilogy” on Friday.
At any point during the week, if you want to send love letters & hate mail, alert me to blatant errors or are an acquintance acusing me of grave exaggerations of my romantic prowess & intellectual achievements, I’m all yours on Tumblr, Twitter, and the messaging feature of this blog.
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