[Dixielandjazz] Sturm, Fir and Drang

[Stephen G Barbone]

Perhaps we Dixielanders should present a little Sturm, Fire and Drang?  
<grin>

I can see it now, John Petters playing a flaming set of drums, in  
front of a shower of fireworks and flame throwers ignited by Pat Ladd  
and Louis Lince. That could add new meaning to "Hot Jazz".  How about  
the song Du Hast? (see paragraph 4)  Anyone got a lead sheet and  
lyrics for it?

Cheers,
Steve Barbone
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband


Offering Sturm Galore, Fire and Drang as Well
By Jon Pareles NY Times - December 12,2010

Go for the fireballs, stay for the self-mythologizing and angst: That  
could be the pitch for Rammstein, the German rock band that played its  
first American show since 2001 on Saturday night at a sold-out Madison  
Square Garden. During the concert flames shot up from the stage, down  
from the rafters and sideways from flamethrowers mounted in  
microphones and on a set of angel wings; fireworks added explosions  
and showers of sparks. At one point a man ran around the stage in a  
flaming suit, with an E.M.T. on hand to snuff him out.

It was the kind of spectacle that has made Rammstein an arena and  
festival headliner across Europe. Its members are not modest. “Lend  
your ears to a legend,” announced “Rammlied,” their first song,  
followed by a guttural shout that the crowd shared: “Rammstein!”

The music shows Rammstein’s origins in the mid-1990s, when bands like  
KMFDM, from Germany, and Ministry and Nine Inch Nails from the United  
States had already bonded hard-rock guitars and dance-music  
synthesizers. The songs run about 60 percent rock, 40 percent  
electronic, slamming away and pausing occasionally for half-speed  
interludes of brooding pomp. Rammstein’s lead singer, Till Lindemann,  
is a bass-baritone who makes his every utterance — sung, barked,  
spoken — portentous enough to match his stage presence; stocky and all  
muscle, he could be one of Wagner’s Nibelungen.

In Rammstein’s early years its songs worked the easy shock effects  
that were common in industrial rock, singing about impulses of sex,  
violence and destruction. Rammstein’s international breakthrough song  
from 1997 — and a major singalong at Madison Square Garden — was “Du  
Hast” (“You Have,” also a play on “Du Hasst,” “You Hate”), a bitter  
rejection of marriage vows.

Rammstein stays grimly foreboding in songs from its most recent album,  
“Liebe Ist für Alle Da” (“Love Is There for All”) (Universal). There  
were dolls hanging overhead as the band performed “Wiener  
Blut” (“Viennese Blood”), which brings a woman into a castle basement  
for an ominous tryst: “Welcome to the darkness,” Mr. Lindemann  
intoned, as the band started a churning, thrashing guitar attack.

But Rammstein doesn’t present itself as a band of simple, cartoonish  
bad guys. There’s a troubled self-consciousness in songs like  
“Waidmanns Heil” (“Happy Hunting”), which opens with hunting-horn  
calls and confesses to a creepy bloodlust, and in  
“Benzin” (“Gasoline”), a stomper about fossil-fuel addiction. Amid the  
visual and musical blasts, Rammstein doesn’t exult in human depravity;  
it worries. During “Engel” (“Angel”), between streaks of flame from  
his wings, Mr. Lindemann was singing, “We are afraid and alone.”