Mathias Rust is back. In “Geradaus”, in the video for the Deichkind song of the same name, he flies in a Cessna from Hamburg-Fuhlsbüttel to Moscow via Helsinki, as he did in 1987. He lands in front of the Kremlin and dances across Red Square. Rust is played by Philipp Grütering. “We don’t look back, don’t look to the left or right,” raps Grütering aka Kryptik Joe in “Straight Out”.
It’s a perfectly normal Deichkind move. The images do not match the text: in the video, they are reminiscent of an odd and bold German peace missionary 36 years ago. And the text doesn’t suit them: they constantly look left and right to gather material for their pieces and their work.
There is no doubt that 21st-century German pop would be poorer without Deichkind. The old discourses are renegotiated, more Dadaist and Dionysian, with slogans such as “level why why” and “unfortunately cool”, about electropunk and fair techno, about concerts with confetti cannons and conceptual art.
“News from the permanent state” is the name of their eighth album. In 1994, a book by the sociologist Wolfgang Pohrt was called: “Hard times – news from the permanent state”. Deichkind are also convinced that there are always some crises. Albeit always something different. A new song, “Merkste selbst”, lists what is no longer possible in 2023, as they say today: flying to Stuttgart, football in Qatar and German hip-hop, among other things.
“Who says that?”
It’s not easy for Deichkind, four years after her masterpiece “Who says that?” when actor Lars Eidinger represented her in all videos, and after the pandemic, which has also changed some things in pop business and thematically, maybe even aesthetically . With the title track of the 2019 album, the three Hamburgers were so close to the spirit of the time and the events of the near future that it was more than a comment: “Who says that? – Alexa and Siri, the cloud and your boss/ The silent mail and the voices in your head/ The guru, the trainers, the TÜV and the mob/ He got it from Tinder and they got it from God.” Welcome to the world of countless truths. The seventh album was a prognosis.
The concerts, to celebrate the wisdom and jokes with costumes, stage design and beer shower, were canceled due to Corona. Kryptik Joe, Porky (Sebastian Dürre) and La Perla (Henning Besser) turned to themselves, wrote new tracks and recorded their eighth album.
“News from the permanent state” is an inventory of the sensitivities. “Delle am Helm” is about burnout due to the permanent overstrain in digital existence, “Fete missed” about the so-called Fomo syndrome, the fear that others could lead a more exciting life, “play it safe” about missing backups and to careless passwords, “I don’t feel like it” from a general lack of drive, “How then” from a lack of self-confidence and “More of it” from exaggerated greed.
The big picture becomes smaller behind such social phenomena, it disintegrates. Everything political becomes a private matter. But maybe that’s not so much due to Deichkind as to the circumstances that make her dance again. “Even in the Bentley we cry” is a song about innate and inherited wealth, really nothing more.
“In der Natur” tells of the absurd longing of the tamed city dweller for the wilderness that has remained untouched by him: “No one will help if you call / You haven’t showered for a long time / And this is not booked here.” The forest is not a documentary, expectations hang higher than the branches there, passive-aggressive animals everywhere, the oat milk is gone, no one is heating. In the video, Kryptik Joe follows a robotic dog through the undergrowth.
Extended art collective: Deichkind in 2023
Those: BENJAKON
Of course it’s funny. Like the black man who floats across the sea on a paddle board in the same video, wears leather trousers and a chamois beard hat and yodels. He is Bavarian, his name is David Mayonga and his rapper is Roger Rekless; he belongs to the collective around Deichkind. He can also be seen in the video for “Geradeaus”, in front of the container ship that got stuck in the Suez Canal two years ago and blocked world trade: “Always straight ahead / Everything straight ahead.” It’s clear: It can’t go on like this forever. But not back either.
Deichkind have been our men in the everyday dilemma for 25 years, formerly with “Think big” and “Work sucks”, today with “Wutboy” (“Do you want the peace goods / Do you need more war billions”) and “Kids my age” (“Who is Mathias Rust?”). Rust flew alone to Russia for world peace. Deichkind play for everyone to endure the insoluble contradictions. Can one be a humanist and a hedonist at the same time? If it sounds and looks like this: yes. When machines make music for people and when Vladimir Putin’s conference table hits the Elbe, as in your video.
What should Deichkind even be? “An experimental arrangement,” the band, which doesn’t want to be one, once explained. That still applies.