I’m going to Germany this summer! I’d like to brush up on my German - I studied it in college, but I’ve forgotten nearly everything. I’d like to brush up, and amongst my brushing-up activities will be limiting my musical menu to only German music. This presents no hardship, as I’ve already been on extended musical binges of the Germanic variety…but I seriously need some new material.
I’ll tell you some of what I like, and hopefully you can recommend some more.
Genre-wise, I tend towards hard rock and metal, but I like all sorts of different kinds of music. Please give me some song names to try - Band names only will be less helpful. Oh, and the lyrics have to be in German - the Scorpions don’t count.
Stuff I like:
The Holy Trinity of Awesomeness:
Die Arzte
Rammstein
Kraftwerk
Bands I like:
Dschinghis Khan (because they’re impossible not to like)
Oomph! (perpetually disappointing, but still pretty good)
Band I don’t like so much:
Eisbrecher (If you took Rammstein and subtracted the awesome, you’d end up with Eisbrecher)
I’ve also heard and like lots of miscellaneous songs, of course, but I’ll leave it at the above for now.
Einsturzende Neubauten have many many songs with very well enunciated German (and stylistically they fit somewhere between Rammstein and Kraftwerk). Tracks from a couple of my favourite reocrds include:
Feurio, Ein Stuhl In Der Hölle, Die Interimsliebenden, Stella Maris, Halber Mensch.
Manowar did a Beatles-like remake of their song ‘Heart of Steel’ as ‘Herz aus Stahl’.
I have more at home that I’ll try to look up and post later.
I was introduced to the a cappella group Die Prinzen in German class and find their stuff pretty catchy—and also vocabulary-building.
Even catchier—I remembered it for 15 years from a single hearing—is Geier Sturzflug’s song Bruttosozialprodukt. Asking for that in a Frankfurt record shop led me to a double CD set of Neuen Deutschen Welle.
Grin! I like klezmer music pretty well, although I really hate the washboard. Keep all the other instruments!
I’ll throw out just one more “classical” recommendation – it’s all I got; I know nothing about current popular music – and that’s the Songs of a Wayfarer by Gustav Mahler. It’s for one singer, accompanied by orchestra. Sort of “opera-ish” but not too awfully strongly so.
My mother hated opera. Just hated it. But she liked these songs.
Wolfsheim were a good German synthpop act, but only some of their stuff is in German. Great stuff, though: Kein Zurück. Peter Heppner from Wolfsheim has also collaborated with the Neue Deutsche Todeskunst band Goethes Erben, which is great stuff with spoken-word bits which should help with the learning: Glasgarten.
mmm, not sure I’m in agreement. I agree with everything else you said, but Neubauten fit between Rammstein and Kraftwerk the way -1 fits between 0 and 1 - whatever continuum there is between those two bands, Neubauten is way past the Rammstein end of it. I love Rammstein, BTW, but Neubauten is the best.
Kurt Weill does tend to be, but it’s still great music. You might consider looking up some of Ute Lemper’s performances; she does German and English equally beautifully.
Die Toten Hosen, I had one of their albums back in high school and then forgot about them. Just a couple of weeks ago I bought a newer album of theirs, I like it and I can understand a word here and there. I think they are a tad bit more punkish, but the album I bought, Ballast der Republik, is more hard rock/metal.
Subway to Sally, more hard rock, I have a few of their albums and can again pick out a word here and there. I have the albums Nord Nord Ost, Kreuzfeuer, and Bastard.
These are the only two that I can think of that I listen to. I only took German in high school 25 years ago and didn’t do that well, but with these groups I can at least figure out where the words begin and end. I’ve gotten all of those albums off of Amazon digital music.
There’s also the all-too-often overlooked Element of Crime, if you’re in the mood for something more melancholy chanson-y (but often, also surprisingly funny). Their very early work is in English, but ever since the beginning of the nineties, they’ve been (almost?) exclusively producing stuff in German, often lyrically excellent. I can’t look for links right now, but you could do a lot worse than checking out Weißes Papier, Straßenbahn des Todes, or Immer da wo du bist bin ich nie, for a random selection.
All right then, I really can’t abstain from posting in this thread though I usually don’t like those bands that sound so damned, well, German (I hate, hate Rammstein with a passion, just like the Scorpions, both are like bad comedy acts to me, but Kraftwerk of course are great, because although they are stereotypical teutonic engineers making music, they can groove like a mofo). That’s why I’ll throw in some of my favorite German Indie bands:
And to honor the godfather of German rock who, surprisingly for everybody, made it to age 70 two days ago and is having a massive comeback in the last years, here’s some classic Udo Lindenberg:
