The nearly ten-minute video for Rammstein’s “Deutschland,” the first single from the band’s untitled seventh album, has been viewed more than forty million times on YouTube since its release, in late March. Rammstein formed in 1994, and its six-man lineup hasn’t changed since then. Its members came of age in East Germany, before the Berlin Wall fell, and the “Deutschland” video attempts to deliver an accelerated and gory summation of German history. In 16 A.D., Roman soldiers clashed with Germanic tribes east of the Rhine; the video begins with a band of Romans creeping through the Teutoburg Forest, toward a pulsating beam of red light. The cinematography recalls both “Game of Thrones” and “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.” What follows is a gnarly account of the past century in German politics, including the First World War, the Weimar Republic, Marx, Lenin, and the Holocaust. The video also contains brief nods to cosmonauts, the Hindenburg, and sausage (pulled, as it were, from a human abdomen).
By condensing Germany’s history into a parade of horrors, Rammstein is lampooning the country’s delicate and complex relationship with its own past. This is what Rammstein does. It transforms hideous or troubling imagery into cathartic camp. The clobbering drums and guitars of “Deutschland” suggest a kind of forced reckoning: Let’s not look away from any of this.
In the mid-nineties, the German press devised a new genre of music just for Rammstein: Neue Deutsche Härte, or “new German hardness.” The band combined elements of Krautrock, industrial music, heavy metal, and an almost Jacques Brel-like insistence on drawing out and enunciating each lyric. Till Lindemann, Rammstein’s hulking front man, has a deep and foreboding voice. He sings in German, usually about carnal pleasures or the sweet release of death. If you don’t speak the language, the unfamiliarity and the gruffness give the music an added bit of menace. I often don’t know precisely what Lindemann is saying, but I can usually sense that it’s not nice.
In 1997, the director David Lynch used two Rammstein songs (“Rammstein” and “Heirate Mich”) in his film “Lost Highway,” which, for a while, lent the band an arty and cerebral air. That year, the single “Du Hast,” from the group’s second record, “Sehnsucht,” made it to No. 20 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock chart. Rammstein was eventually swept up in the nu-metal craze of the late nineties, and in 1998 was invited to join the first Family Values Tour, a metal and hip-hop revue created and curated by the band Korn. (That year’s lineup also included Orgy, Limp Bizkit, Ice Cube, and, later, Incubus.) Rammstein’s participation in the tour made sense in some ways, but a majority of the Family Values acts indulged a hypermasculine form of aggression, in which fear or anxiety could simply be shouted down. Rammstein is still more likely to scoff at or ridicule macho posturing. (It is very hard to imagine the members of Limp Bizkit simulating anal sex onstage.)
Musically, Rammstein has never been particularly preoccupied with reinvention, but now the band is metabolizing its earliest influences in ways that veer even farther from the battering rage of nu metal. The new songs feel especially indebted to the German electronic duo Kraftwerk, who, beginning in the nineteen-seventies, wrote stylized, repetitive, experimental pop songs that relied heavily on synthesizers. (In 1997, Rammstein released a cover of Kraftwerk’s “Das Model”; Rammstein’s version retains the jaunty keyboard melody, but is harsher and more sinister.) “Radio,” the second single from the new record, is not a Kraftwerk cover, though at times it feels as if it could be. Rammstein’s sound is still heavy—occasionally, as on “Tattoo,” it makes you feel as though you were being flattened by an asphalt paver—but “Radio” is Rammstein at its most harmonically adventurous. Though Lindemann’s lyrics are still mostly about sex, much of the new album will be sonically palatable to listeners who might normally dismiss heavy metal as grotesque noise. These songs are as energizing as they are titillating.
In 2010, Rammstein performed at Madison Square Garden, the band’s first U.S. date in ten years. Tickets sold out within thirty minutes. The concert became fodder for a feature-length documentary, “Rammstein in Amerika.” The film includes interviews with some of the group’s famous fans—including Steven Tyler, of Aerosmith; Scott Ian, of Anthrax; Chad Smith, of the Red Hot Chili Peppers; Moby; and the actor Kiefer Sutherland—and shows how American authorities were not always so open-minded about Rammstein’s sense of decency. In 1999, in Worcester, Massachusetts, Lindemann and the keyboardist Flake Lorenz were arrested for pretending to engage in sodomy onstage, while playing “Buck Dich.” (The title translates as “bend over.”) Afterward, Lindemann shot streams of an opaque liquid out of a plastic penis.
Toward the beginning of “Rammstein in Amerika,” Marilyn Manson describes the first time he met Lindemann backstage: “We couldn’t even shake hands, because he was on fire.” Rammstein uses an extraordinary amount of pyrotechnics in its stage shows, and it is not unusual for Lindemann to perform while most of his outfit is ablaze, his long arms swinging like comets. Sometimes he and the guitarists Richard Kruspe and Paul Landers wear flamethrowing masks and launch fireballs at one another; Lorenz might climb off a keyboard treadmill and take a flaming shower in a metal bathtub. If Lindemann puts on a giant pair of angel wings, trust that they, too, will soon burst into flames. The show is chaotic, but it’s orchestrated with a staggering German precision. “You have to understand that ninety-nine per cent of the people don’t understand the lyrics, so you have to come up with something to keep the drama in the show,” Kruspe has said.
It is easy to place Rammstein in a lineage of theatrical rock bands that have incorporated elements of indecency, horror, sadomasochism, or self-mutilation into their live performances: Kiss, Alice Cooper, Ozzy Osbourne, Gwar, Marilyn Manson, Slipknot, Insane Clown Posse. In 1969, Jim Morrison was arrested for exposing himself during a concert in Miami. In 1974, while onstage in Los Angeles, Iggy Pop slashed his chest with a knife. GG Allin has both produced and consumed excrement while playing.
For Rammstein, the concert experience can feel more revelatory (and, occasionally, more artful) than its records, in part because watching the band perform compels audiences to both account for and laugh at the entire notion of mortality. In an interview with John McCarty, for his book “Splatter Movies,” the director David Cronenberg talks about the existential appeal of this sort of imagery, and how it can become a powerful sort of truthtelling: “They are films of confrontation. They aren’t films of escape. And what it is that the audience is forced to confront are some very hard truths about the human condition, which have to do, in my films particularly, with the human body and the fact of aging and death and disease and the loss of people close to you.” By turning existence into a spectacle—exaggerating it, rendering it in preposterous proportions—the band manages, however counterintuitively, to comfort us.
Rammstein is touring Europe and the U.K. this summer, and it has been booked into the sorts of venues typically filled by artists like U2, Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, and Metallica. In Berlin, Rammstein will play the Olympiastadion, which can accommodate nearly seventy-five thousand people. In Munich, the band will play a comparably sized stadium on consecutive nights; both shows are sold out.
It’s worth noting that Rammstein has established a huge and wildly dedicated global fan base while eschewing (or, perhaps more accurately, being eschewed by) traditional media outlets and most commercial radio stations. In an era in which the compression of fame feels acute, and only the acts at the very top receive much attention, Rammstein has nonetheless thrived. As the music industry continues to struggle with effectively and fairly monetizing recordings, Rammstein—much like, say, Phish—has built an entire economy around its live shows.
Watching “Rammstein in Amerika,” I was surprised by how youthful the crowd at Madison Square Garden was. In camera pans of the audience, I could see their sweet, teen-age faces curled into snarls, locked in a kind of angry rapture. Rammstein travels with a two-million-watt sound system and four hundred speakers—“I used the earplugs, and it was still too loud, my body was shaking,” Iggy Pop admits in the film—and this kind of scale makes the show transformational on a physical level, too. Something gets rearranged inside you. I have found that, if I listen to enough Rammstein at the right volume, I, too, turn into a kind of overexcited, gnashing maniac, reminiscent of Beavis in the “Cornholio” episodes of MTV’s “Beavis and Butt-head,” in which he consumes too much sugar, pulls his T-shirt over his head, and demands toilet paper from strangers. It is possible to disappear into the squall, gleefully and completely. If we define fun as the unknowing acceleration of time, then Rammstein’s particular brand of self-obliteration, in which time collapses entirely, is a guaranteed good time. ♦
