Rock am Ring: beyond the limits of attitude

opinion Rock at the ring and in the park

The Limits of Attitude

Stand: 31.01.2023 | Reading time: 2 minutes

Five Finger Death Punch’s Ivan Moody at a festival

Quelle: LightRocket via Getty Images

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The largest German rock festival has a fundamental problem: the band Pantera was uninvited because of their alleged fascist attitude. Now another big band is up for discussion. Who is still allowed to play on the former Zeppelinfeld and at the Nürburgring?

“The fiction reveals the truth,” reads the opening credits of a video by Las Vegas band Five Finger Death Punch. The quote comes from Ralph Waldo Emerson, who dreamed as early as the 19th century that America would find its way back to itself and its old greatness.

In Five Finger Death Punch, America is groaning under the dictatorship of communism and the pandemic: those who reject the system end up in labor camps, those who wear masks are given orders of conformists, zombies hoard toilet paper. At the end of “Living the Dream”, the video for the song of the same name, the last patriots go into civil war. The news reports that America is waking up again. It’s all in the 2020 clip, from QAnon world conspiracy fantasies to so-called lateral thinking.

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As connoisseurs say, 5FDP is now causing a stir in Germany. The rock band is booked for Rock am Ring and Rock im Park, the big twin festivals on the first weekend in June on the Nürburgring and on the former Zeppelinfeld. Concerned cardholders, local politicians and uninvolved music lovers are calling for 5FDP to be canceled – just like Pantera. Rock am Ring and Rock im Park uninvited the band from Texasbecause there is video evidence of a Hitler salute on stage from 2016.

The Toten Hosen have made an official statement about this, and they are also on the festival posters: They couldn’t say anything about the attitude of Pantera; “We find the whole situation complicated and unfortunate.”

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The Toten Hosen themselves have one or two older, complicated, unfortunate songs in their poison cupboard, such as “Ülüsü” about a Turkish lover, for whom the singer is ashamed. The history of rock is also the history of its embarrassing provocations, its adolescent poses and its mental accidents.

The whole of the present has become unhappy and complicated, and the old boundaries between ideologies are fluid. Everyone knows the punk next door who refuses to be vaccinated and masked because he has never trusted the state and the system.

Cancel culture is a big word. At Rock am Ring and Rock im Park, however, the question simply arises as to what a festival can withstand in 2023 or who it is better to uninvite again. The organizers are responsible for the answers, nobody else.