“Stop! In the name of Love «, that could also have been a motto by Kid P. He found the songs of the Supremes “unbeatable/unreachable”.
Foto: imago/Everett Collection
Your heart beats, but you don’t feel anything. You hear and see, but you don’t feel anything. Foilletonists are the clerk of culture. Undead that sort the pictures and plates, label and pack them in drawers. It doesn’t matter whether an artistic work is new realism or post-punk. Whether it looks “how …” or “sounds like …”.
Only one thing is crucial: that it pops. That it shakes us. That it tears out of the hell that is called everyday life. And one who got this – more than any other – was Kid P. (the “P” stood for punk). A workers’ child from the zone edge area that came to Hamburg in 1979 and flourished there, collagen-like super 8 films together, published a fanzine called “price increase” and wrote letters to the music magazine “Sounds”. They were so, well, so different that the editor Diedrich Diederichsen hired him as an author – the world should learn what was going on in this head and, above all, in this heart.
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And that was overdue. Anyone who reads today, as was written in the end-70s about the renewing pop culture, packs the horror. In rows, professional editors failed to put the experienced in living words. The new, exciting person was pressed into a dusted old -fashioned or a pseudo -youthful language and suffocated under phrases and phrases. It was all so Laaaaa.
Even what was sold as new. For example, the Düsseldorf NDW band nothing-»They are as boring as you/life. Buy your music, a home and a mid -range car. «These are words from Andreas Banaski, as Kid P. was called with a bourgeois name. A stimulus figure, hated and idolatically loved. A “sounds” reader described him as the “only representative of humanity, warmth, love and starting”. With his articles »you could be happy like a small child. Kid P., about whom you could laugh without ever laughing at him. “
No wonder, after all he told like a child. Unwiltert he trumpeted his views beyond pop and the world, regardless of any sensitivities and sensitivities. In one of his notorious city reports, he just took away the entire music scene of West Berlin band by band. But he did not do this from the waiting of a cynic who announces his toxic contempt for the artistic cretins from above. Rather, an honest outrage spoke of him. He knew how well English pop music could be, and desperately despaired that the Germans did not even begin.
“His heart was loving and full of romantic, sized survival ideals and feelings” (Hans Nieswandt). And because Kid P. consistently measured the reality of its ideals and feelings, he had to be disappointed again and again. He packed this disappointment in sentences that could not have been clearer. There were no sacred cows, especially not critical favorites and column saints of the Indies scene. He slaughtered the Banshees singer (“If SiouxSie is unique as a singer, she is unbearable as a person. I can’t stand her.”) And New Order (“You are still in mental puberty, somewhere between advanced architecture studies (hook) and high school (the rest).”). Even the icon of Sean Connery was not sure before his pasture (“one of the most infutable old people in film history”).
In return, he celebrated the pop that celebrated great feelings. “Somehow the age of love has to rule the world (and by that I don’t mean the herpes disease, because of which Kid Creole set his married life).” His enthusiasm was not only the Champions League (ABC, Human League, Dexys Midnight Runners), but also representatives of the second league like the Nolans, a sister group from Ireland, numerous fans, numerous fans had. And teenagers to be precise: teenagers were always right.
One of his most moving articles – it was about the Blow Monkeys – raised with the words: »It was a bad day for sex. But let me start all over again. It all started that a girl told me that she always hears a piece on the radio now, and it would be like back then (then – keyword in girls’ relationships): Orange Juice, Aztec Camera, Sweet & Interpretation. And see, I take my job damn seriously and put my ears. “
This is not a reddened music journalism, that’s poetry. Literature that has been pressed between two book lids. That also thought two of his friends: the music journalist Christoph Dallach and the musician Andreas Dorau. On the trips to the sanatorium – Banaski was seriously ill in 2013 – the idea of publishing a book with selected texts came from him. Now it has been published: “The truth about Kid P.”, edited by Erika Thomalla, professor of book science in Munich.
This book focuses on his wild time with “Sounds” from 1981 to 1983 when he inspired and infected not only the readers, but also upcoming writers with his style. A second focus is on the “Spex” years in the late 80s when his sentences were 30 lines and longer. It took minutes to find the predicate of the main sentence. The lyrics are still fun, because like Banaski (he had put the pseudonym Kid P.) in his subordinate clauses, inserts and clips, always open up new barrels, making links between football European championships, old Hollywood films and politics – this is a festival for friends of associative thinking.
At the same time, he studied library. The next professional step was obvious. At the beginning of the 90s, Banaski documentary became “Tempo” – a kind of living Google for the employees, only much more creative and more subtle. There he built up a gigantic pop culture archive that survived the death of the magazine in 1996. He rarely wrote now.
When his colleague from “Spex” times, Sebastian Zabel, editor-in-chief of the “Rolling Stone” in 2012, Banaski experienced a comeback much too short. Once again, he managed to create miniatures like this: »The Beatle was the natural level of development of the teenager; Leather jacket, mane, till glasses and slope to snoot, rebellion, but pinch the tail when it gets dangerous. In the Biederen Beach Boys’ bank employee, you only had to slowly grow with a backward hairline and increasing abundance of physics. ”It is a pleasure to finally be able to read such sentences in a bundled manner (instead of having to come out of torn magazines).
His texts are framed by Essay’s private and professional companions such as Clara Drechsler, Detlef Diederichsen and Hans Nieswandt. They all studied and internalized their kid P.. The subjective way of writing has long been in the mainstream. And yet even an author like Moritz von Uslar cannot reach the German Godfather of the (now not quite as new) New Journalism in a crucial point: Kid P. was undone. He also did not spare himself, he revealed wonderfully trivial things (“I don’t know anyone who crumbles like me when cutting a bun”). His appeal »be left, be a fool, but with style! And with heart! «Hardly any of his students have taken to heart.
In his foreword, Diedrich Diederichsen indicates his “proletarian dandyum”, which he held up to the often rich children in the “ultra -classisistic Hamburg”, the social origin of which he always mentioned in his texts. The other foreword comes from the editor Erika Thomalla. Like the cultural sociologist Elena Beregow represented in the book, she is already moving from a profession on spiritual roads that are limited by guardrails and bollards. They try to explain to readers why a free spirit like Kid P. could afford to do insolence at the time, which they would cost their academic career this year. The fact that he speaks of “student pack” instead of “students” is still one of the casual offenses. By trying to historize him – as a closed chapter of a long past era – they only steer the headlight on the present all the more clearly. One like him is missing in the spiritual world of 2025. Even the charm of the old white man was already the right words in 1984. Let us leave Kid P. the closing word:
»The tasks of the› old man ‹? Stay at home and create a restorative ambience. Fell out in petty bourgeois security. Take a good book on hand and a loving female, as it is emancipated and overwhelming life clever, can still be found in Dickens-Epen. Harmless amusements that can be added without special hazards and excitement. Make the legs long and sometimes reach for the phone and then and then to be reimbursed in an excessive exaggeration by the last twitches of the nightlife dumpling in Agony. From whom? Now from you, which you do not learn and are driven out again and again by carefree, thoughtlessness and sexual emergency. “
Erika Thomalla (ed.): The truth about Kid P. as a Hamburg punk invented German pop journalism. Selected texts by Andreas Banaski. With a foreword by Diedrich Diederichsen, Junius-Verlag, 272 pages, Br., € 22.