Singing Sentence Rubble: Colossal Youth 1989 with Kristof Schreuf (1st from right)
Photo: Denise Grabbe
If you didn’t feel like listening to German lyrics at the end of the 80s, for example because of post-fascism in general or the New German Wave, but didn’t want to sing in English for various reasons, the only option was to take a radical detour across the meta level at best. Deconstruction, in one form or another.
It was very popular back then, even at the local universities, with a little delay compared to the USA and France. Hamburg was the center when it came to intellectualized trash rock and language stuff like that. Blumfeld presented tons of complicated texts, the stars worked with very special metaphors, but always with a recognizable song theme (often the singer’s self), Cpt. Kirk &. associated as freely as they were focused.
At the beginning of all this were the two albums by Kolossalen Jugend, “Heile Heile Boches”, 1989, and “Leopard II”, 1990. The singer Kristof Schreuf chopped up sentences in such a way that something new, initially incomprehensible, emerged. He sang sentence rubble: “Called this and that / Get halves, leftovers, wrong / Link it off, can handle it / Complete nonsense for it / Called this and that / Get halves, leftovers, wrong”. Nobody else did anything like that, then or now. Where is Cpt. Kirk &. and the incomparably more accessible stars quickly established a new connection and meaning, the language in the music of the Kolossale Jugend flew out the window in broken fragments. The listeners were then allowed to collect the stuff.
But here too, deconstruction is only for now and until further notice. Or destructiveness, perhaps better? Because destructiveness that doesn’t suck allows something new to emerge, here too, even if it doesn’t have the same connection and meaning. In the chorus of the piece “Dog,” the first verse of which is quoted above, Schreuf really gets going: “The curtain is torn open / The country is singing / The dog is buried.” The voice makes a difference here. It sounds strenuous, demanding, like complaint and righteous anger: a sound that lingers in the ear. And the mixture of maximum urgency (tonality) and mystery (semantics) that has never been heard again is still convincing and enchanting, even 35 years later.
Perhaps at least one line from the Colossal Youth, in addition to everything else it can mean, is programmatic, from “Alle Enemy”, one of their most beautiful pieces: “mix aggressiveness and perplexity”.
The associations are there, they arise in the head and body of the listener and this is where it is decided whether the Colossal Youth can have an effect or not. When it works, its effect is lasting, you can’t get these songs out of your ear, and when it comes to their pop historical significance, you can’t ignore the narrow complete work of Kristof Schreuf, who died in 2022 (an equally great record followed with the band Brüllen und Don’t overestimate the solo album “Bourgeois With Guitar”, which was in a completely different mood.
If you are no stranger to anti-German thinking and feeling, you will hear “ripp”, “land” and “bury” as well as a German idiom in the song “Hund” and can connect with the words. For example, if you are Heinz-Rudolf “I am also a displaced person” Kunze, you cannot attach yourself to the words. Or misunderstands everything again. So that even the most stupid people could understand it, the Kolossale Jugend had a T-shirt printed in simple language as a gift for reunification in the early 1990s: “Shut up Germany.”
Unfortunately, the music always disappears behind these lyrics. The Blumfeld problem. The music of the Kolossalen Jugend is very good, the drums and guitar are subliminally annoying but persistent, the bass booms. This is above all a stage for the equally deliberately annoying singer. But it’s a perfectly fitted one that you enjoy looking at, even if no one is standing on it and scratching.
The complete work of the Kolossale Jugend, which dissolved in 1991 after three years – the two albums as well as pieces that had previously only been released on singles, and a live recording from the Forum Enger from September 22nd, 1989 – have now been re-released in a box. Vinyl boxes are often a tombstone, a sign that something is really over and dead and can, at best, be sold off again as an expensive antique. In this case it is different. If you ignore the typical sound of the recordings, the Kolossale Jugend still seems just as powerful today as it once did.
Colossal Youth: »Heile Heile Boches / Leopard II / Found Pieces« (3-LP box set)
(Tapete Records)
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