Hot and cold at the same time: DAF was about “sex, violence and discipline”.
Photo: image/Sven Lambert
The characteristics that were internationally attributed to the “German” in pop were not exactly flattering for a long time, shaped by countless more or less clownish post-war film Nazis with hard accents in various films. Soulless, cold and/or obscure. And in fact, you will hardly find anything as musically shattered as the German Schlager in other countries.
Wherever German pop tried to find a connection to Anglo-American pop, it succeeded at best in creating a sympathetic, long-term tension that was appropriate to German history. Exceptions were rare, with clay, stone shards and Krautrock a window opened, post-fascist mustiness dissipated and air came in.
The first really successful pop export within and outside the country’s borders only succeeded in the affirmative combination of emotionless, mechanical habitus with cold, mechanical sounds that were perceived as soulless, which broke with left-wing songwriters and everything hippie-esque. Florian Völker reconstructs this German pop aesthetic in his thorough, almost 600-page study “Cold Pop,” which illuminates the phenomenon down to the last corners. The text draws a line from the forerunners in the Industrial, Postpunk and New Wave of the 1970s, through the style-forming Kraftwerk and the West Berlin romanticism of alienation, to the most commercially successful latecomers after the end of the first waves, such as Rammstein and the so-called New German Hardness of the 1990s . Everything relevant that has to do with the phenomenon appears and is carefully and pointedly contextualized and interpreted.
The pop-historical lines that Völker draws make it clear in an exemplary manner how the development of pop can take place. In response to previous signs, gestures and sounds, in movements of action and reaction. The ostentatious warmth of the hippies of the early 1970s was followed by the partly ironic and broken affirmation of coldness and emotionlessness in the voice and objectivity of Kraftwerk, but also in sound-aesthetically extremist varieties of the 1980s, such as Einstreiche Neuhäusern, to whom peoples had a “cold heat”. attested by combining the aesthetics of cold with doomsday theater. One of the most revealing things about many of the case studies in this book is how, despite all the negation of the affective in favor of concept, mechanics, expressionlessness and meta-level, something like a dark romantic tradition always appears. The feeling is invoked in the negation of the feeling.
In general, according to Völker, the cold aesthetic is hardly available in its pure form. In addition to Kraftwerk, the Neue Deutsche Welle and the West Berlin apocalyptic of the 1980s, DAF played a central role. Music and lyrics by Robert Görl and Gabi Delgado-López revolved around “sex, violence and discipline”. For Völker, DAF pursued “a principle of extremes that enabled the combination of ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ motives.” The group acted offensively against the “warmth” models of community and empathic sensitivity that predominate in the left-wing alternative counterculture,” which were perceived as anti-pleasure and restrictive. Using the example of DAF, something fundamental can be shown with Völker: It “clearly illustrates that motives and strategies of ‘coldness’ can never be viewed separately from the ideal and practice of a social and aesthetic ‘warmth’, on the ‘cold’ actors “Reacted with distance gestures and attacks”.
By reconstructing this dynamic, Florian Völker also shows how pop history can be written as contemporary history. This point becomes clearest when it becomes clear to what extent the sound changes because the context changes. The cold pop of Kraftwerk, the Neuhäusern, DAF and the subversion strategies of the early Voluntary Self-Control (“We say yes to the modern world”) reacted to dominant tendencies in the German left and were therefore in every sense of the word cooler than the suddenly somewhat brash ones seemingly crazy people who wanted good things with the guitar in their hand.
Later, in the 1990s, the aesthetics of cold appeared in EBM, industrial rock, Norwegian black metal and, already in the 1980s, in the totalitarian performance of the Slovenian band Laibach. All phenomena that Völker also deals with, in the case of Laibach and Black Metal in detail. Each different context, each different semantics. The aesthetic of the so-called New German Hardness, which is present today primarily in the music of the most commercially successful German-speaking band Rammstein, can be described with this study as a fading form of cold pop: “The ‘cold’ served the NDH musicians (…) not for distinction within a German counterculture, but for differentiation from the pop music of West Germany, which was criticized as ‘Americanized’ and which was contrasted with supposedly ‘German’ music and culture.” If you look for a structural reason for this Rammstein’s music sounds so persistently stupid, that’s probably what he is.
In the end, Florian Völker once again summarizes the impulses and results of the aesthetics of cold, which are actually contradictory to one another: With the coding of commercialization, self-optimization and stimulating instead of hallucinogenic drugs, the artists of cold pop affirmed capitalist principles, whether they wanted to or not. At the same time, this aesthetic was experienced as subversive and progressive, also in the sense that it playfully anticipated what was to come: “The ‘cold’ apologists ran counter to the values and demands of their countercultural contemporaries, but advanced the development of society as a whole, because the “Kälte” not only anticipated postmodernism, but also helped shape it in German society, on a cultural and individual level.”
As far as I can see, “Cold Pop” summarizes all lines of development, precursors and latecomers associated with the phenomenon, including cultural studies diagnostics, on just 600 pages. In its attention to detail and breadth, “Kälte-Pop” is, despite what feels like two thousand footnotes, easy to read, incredibly knowledgeable and, last but not least, very entertaining chunk of pop history.
Florian Völker: Cold pop. The story of the most successful German pop export. De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 672 pages, hardcover, €34.95.