Information
Date: July 30, 2001
Title: Heavy-Metal Rammstein Stakes Its Claim to Flame
Source: Washington Post
Press Article
NEW YORK -- In the three years that Rammstein has been playing the United States, only a single fire marshal has demanded that Germany's most pyromaniacal metal band perform a flame-free show. That delights the group's production manager, Nicolai Sabottka. It's his job to persuade local officials not to worry when, for instance, the group's lead singer writhes on the floor during the encore, burning like a tiki torch.
Sabottka usually points out that so far Rammstein's worst accident happened when a roadie fell asleep while smoking in his hotel room and burned up his bed. But soothing authorities, he explains, is also a matter of choosing the right words.
"I never call it a flame-thrower," he says of a device that shows up late in the show, strapped to the singer's head and launching 15-foot flames across the stage. "I call it a flame-spitter. It sounds less scary."
Sounding scary is ordinarily one of Rammstein's higher priorities. With jackboot rhythms and plenty of Teutonic rage, the sextet -- which plays Nation in Southeast Washington tomorrow -- marched out of Germany in 1993 and has been blitzkrieging charts around the globe. The music is as raw as uncooked bratwurst, with synthesizer to provide some industrial-strength melody. Fire is the main visual hook, but Rammstein also offers something that American audiences apparently crave: the chance to pump a fist and sing in German. U.S. audiences have been notoriously unwelcoming to bands who don't speak English; not since Nena's "99 Luftballons" in 1984 has an act from the Fatherland gained traction here. Rammstein, however, has sold more than 1.5 million copies of its three albums, proof that American kids will happily chant along to dark, militaristic fables of doom and sex, even if they don't understand a word they are saying. The band's latest, "Mutter," hit No. 77 on the Billboard charts with little radio play or MTV support.
Why? Because metal actually sounds better in Deutsch, just as punk sounds better with a snarky British accent and country music needs a drawl. A line like "And I didn't answer" is a banal toss-away. But get a few thousand teenagers to scream out"Und ich hab nichts gesagt!" in unison and the air is suddenly heavy mit the smell of a Panzer division. If it's loud enough, anything German seems menacing, a truth American bands have known for years -- explaining the umlauts that Motley Crue draped on its name, and the SS-inspired font that Kiss used for its logo.
Rammstein (pronounced RAHM-shteen) plants a flag in that same rich soil, then pounds it about eight feet deeper. The vibe of the band's shows falls somewhere between that of a leather bar and a Hitler Youth rally. This has led to denunciatory editorials in Germany, where sensitivities to anything even hinting of the Third Reich run high, and it has landed the band in trouble here, too. In the aftermath of the Columbine massacre, Rammstein found itself under the media heat lamp when it was discovered that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the high-school killers, were fans.
Rammstein, in other words, gives kids a way to annoy their parents by embracing something that seems even more disconcerting than gangsta rap.
"People think we're Nazis, but we're not," explains guitarist Richard Bernstein, eating breakfast with three band mates at a SoHo restaurant. "Our lyrics have nothing to do with politics. It's about fantasy and love and whatever. We don't deal with political things."
Psychological trauma is actually Rammstein's topic of choice. The title track of "Mutter" ("Mother") is about the most universal and timeless of problems: getting along with your mommy. It's a terror-filled album, but the terrors are all interior, anthemic yawps of emotionally scarred kids in need of a hug. Odd as it seems, behind the goose-stepping bluster and the spontaneously combusting amplifiers, Rammstein is just a bunch of guys with mohawks and fuchsia rinse jobs who want to be loved.
"My mother is sort of angry with me about the song," says drummer Christoph Schneider. "I don't know why. I didn't write the words."
Watching the band perform one recent night at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York, it'd be easy to miss Rammstein's tender side.
Lead singer Till Lindemann, the bulked-up and humorless center of attention, looks like the kind of guy who manages a dungeon. During one song, he crouches to a nearly seated position and then violently pounds his left forearm against his thighs, alternating left and right to the beat. He marches in place a lot. At other times, he just kneels on the floor facing the audience, his hands behind his back, like a man awaiting a beheading. For the opening notes of "Mutter," he stands still and sucks his thumb.
Lindemann handles most of the group's pyrotechnics, somersaulting around the stage with spark-spewing shoes for one song and working the "flame-spitter" for another. Bernstein tosses his guitar into an amp, which immediately bursts into flame. Later, microphone stands seem to spontaneously combust. For a while, the band plays while standing on Lucite boxes filled with what look like human body parts floating in formaldehyde.
The audience, mostly young men, joins in the choruses, with little idea of what they're saying. For "Zwitter" ("Hermaphrodite"), a song from the new album, that means getting more than a thousand metalheads to sing about a guy who has sex with himself: "I can make myself happy every day / I can send myself roses." In German, the words sound as frightening as mach schnell.
The fire effects seem like an unnecessary sideshow, in part because the songs are powerful enough to stand without gimmicky visuals. And the night devolves into something approaching camp when Lindemann struts out for the encore, his jacket ablaze, then bursts into a living bonfire when a stagehand "accidentally" adds fuel to the flames. As Lindemann collapses in fabricated agony, the show stops and the lights briefly come up, as though an actual life-threatening tragedy were unfolding.
"It's all part of the show," whispers a fan, who isn't fooled.
After a few unsuspenseful moments on the ground, Lindemann rises to his feet triumphantly and finishes the concert, smoldering a little.
Only half the members of Rammstein speak English, so translator Eric Hess has come along to Scharmann's in SoHo, a small downtown eatery, for breakfast. It's 11 a.m., the morning of the Hammerstein show, and the band is looking suitably groggy, a few members decked out in the black T-shirts they'll wear onstage later in the evening. Lindemann has skipped the interview.
Talk immediately turns to groupies.
"We don't have groupies," says Flake Lorenz, the group's keyboardist. "Women are afraid of us."
"Oh, that's not true," says Bernstein, a chain smoker and the band's most animated spokesman. "If they come to the show, they're not afraid of us. They're really surprised that we're friendly."
You could easily get a different impression from songs like "Du hast" ("You Hate") and "Rein Raus" ("In Out"), a cut from the new album, which likens a quickie sexual encounter to bestiality ("I am the rider / You are the horse"). And as convincingly as Rammstein forswears any skinhead sympathies, the band obviously was aiming for outrage when it used clips from Leni Riefenstahl's "Olympiad" -- a 1936 film paid for by the Nazi Party -- for the video to a song called "Stripped." In Germany, the choice prompted a round of loud Gott im Himmels among the band's critics.
Bernstein, who recently took the surname of his Jewish wife, initially claims he was surprised by the response. Surprised? Really? "It was kind of provocative," Lorenz admits. "But by doing this, we prompted a conversation about art and Leni Riefenstahl."
Everything about Rammstein is designed to generate gawkers and talk -- even the name, which the band took from the German city Ramstein, where a U.S. air show disaster killed dozens of spectators in 1988. (It's to commemorate the fiasco, the group says.) The band members grew up in East Berlin, where rock was strictly regulated until the Berlin Wall fell. Some bands, including Kiss, were outright banned from radio, and other songs were played just once a week. East German authorities kept a grip on the sale of records, too, so laying hands on decent pop usually meant asking retirees -- the only people allowed to cross the border -- to smuggle LPs back from Hungary.
Even that was tricky. Lorenz remembers asking an elderly friend to retrieve a Canned Heat album. "He didn't understand what I said. I ended up with stupid stuff, which I just threw out," he says.
When Rammstein first assembled in 1993, the group sang in English, like everyone else in town. After switching to its mother tongue, the band came up with an even better branding concept at its fifth show. Guitarist Paul Landers poured curlicues of gasoline on the floor of a local nightclub as fans filed in that night. Midway through the set, he dropped a match on the floor and suddenly, it seemed, everyone was dancing.
"These were different times," laughs Bernstein. "We played small towns, drunken crowds. They didn't care about anything."
"It was cold. It was wintertime," explains Schneider, the drummer.
Igniting the floor beneath a crowd is, of course, verboten now. To meet U.S. safety regulations, the group had to agree that it wouldn't blow fire over the heads of fans -- a favorite tactic in less litigious Europe -- and it's required to keep 15 feet between the audience and assorted firemaking implements. Fuel for all the effects comes from pollen, which yields something that production manager Sobbatka disarmingly calls a "cold flame."
"You wouldn't want to stand in it," he says. "But it's not like the flame you get from gasoline."
Talking about pyrotechnics sort of bugs Rammstein these days. The members prefer to focus on the music. They fondly remember their flameless shows. It reminds them that they don't really need a circus act to win over a crowd.
"In order to break through the noise you have to do something," Schneider says over breakfast. "We did it with fire. Now, in a way, we're the victims of it."
And it's only going to get worse. Production manager Sabbotka says that the other night, Lindemann mistakenly hit Bernstein with the spitter. It was late in the show and Bernstein was wet from sweat and water, so the fire didn't leave much more damage than a sunburn. The response from the crowd was huge.
"I think," says Sobbatka, "that we're going to make it a permanent part of the show."