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Punk veteran Iggy Pop (2019): Just nothing too emotional or deep
Photo: Naomi Rahim / WireImage / Getty Images
Iggy Pop: "Dirty Little Virus"
Cynicism is the best way to cope with the sadness of the Corona, thought Iggy Pop, 73, proto-punk from Detroit: "I didn't want to write anything too emotional or deep," he explains about his antivirus single released on Monday.
Of course not.
As expected, »Dirty Little Virus« is shoddy, mangy and terribly hungover: "She's only 19, but she can kill you", it says in the text about the boo-owl Covid.
In addition, a guitar riff rolls, reminiscent of "Dancing With Mr. D" by the Rolling Stones - a little dance with death.
And then this crazy trumpet cacophony!
"Oh what a grind, I'm losing my mind," howls Iggy and grinds her teeth.
A crazy song for a crazy year.
There is also a matching mouth mask with an old wrinkle face.
Andreas Borcholte
Tocotronic: "Hope"
In music, melancholy should at best be administered carefully.
Too much can function like a trap door that
lets
us
tumble
out of the coal cellar of tribulation and into the
really
dreadful floors below, where the depression lurks in total darkness.
In the right dose, however, only melancholy has that soothing effect that overly exposed happiness only asserts.
In this sense, Tocotronic have always been the most skilled pharmacists.
"Hope" is not homeopathy, but rather heavy emotional protection.
Spinning guitars, plus lulling strings and slightly stilted openness, as you know it from singer Dirk von Lowtzow: "Every note speaks a hope / for a new beginning".
A song like a warm runaway.
Arno Frank
The stars: "You don't have to do anything"
"Pants optional" (pants not a must) was one of the jokes that came up with the first invitations for a Zoom wine in the spring.
After all, who needs abdominal clothing when social life takes place in a digital window for the time being, which cuts off everything below the chest?
This year, a pandemic also meant clearing out the thousands of small conventions that make our everyday lives so difficult.
The musical instructions were given - purely by chance - the Hamburg band Die Sterne: Go out just because the sun is shining?
Stay home just because it's raining?
We don't have to do anything.
Right now it's worth listening to the song again and maybe canceling the trip to my parents after all.
After all, you don't have to do anything.
Hannah Pilarczyk
Vengaboys: »Zoom Zoom Zoom«
My black-pedagogical religious pastor from elementary school indelibly planted in my head the assertion that those words that you heard at the moment of your death would ring in your ears forever.
The Vengaboys create this effect with their Rumsdi-Bumsdi-Hits even without death, and their Corona miniature »Zoom Zoom Zoom« is no exception.
The rewording of one of their greatest hits, which is extremely reduced for Venga standards, laments claustrophobic quarantine conditions ("I'm stuck here in my room"), but nevertheless promises stealthy intimacy through video chats for small groups ("Let's spend the night together / In our breakout room «).
The consoling thing about this one-minute Covid slow pounder: It always resonates with the hedonistic original - as a promising reference to the future when the Vengabus comes back and collects us all.
Anja Rützel
Eminem: »GNAT«
It may well be that US rapper Eminem is "through" like a ghost train whose horrors have long since been seen through.
Here he borrows a greater horror and circles the terms of the pandemic like pylons with screeching tires.
He rhymes "normalcy" with "hydrochloroquine", although that is not possible, and threatens: "I'm sick and I'm not gonna cover my mouth next time that I cough" before he actually hits the lens of the The camera breathes - a gesture that was pointless a year ago but is now extremely aggressive.
No one has so far described the psycho- and sociopathological side effects of the disease more accurately.
And the beat change after just under two minutes sounds like another escalation.
It doesn't get any better.
Arno Frank
Danger Dan: "Pasta and toilet paper"
Danger Dan from the Antilopen Gang, actually known for political rap ("Beate Zschäpe listens to U2"), took the Corona buying frenzy of "Cannelloni, Macaroni, Spaghetti, Spirelli and Co." as the occasion for the most melancholy lockdown love song of the year: He would give all the noodles and every piece of toilet paper in this world, he sings, "for an end to the quarantine, for a spring walk with you through the Berlin Zoo."
The rapper delivers a moving sound and time document from the first weeks of the pandemic, which were shaped by the largest hamsters in Germany since the EU ban on the sale of non-energy-saving lightbulbs.
And asks a question of timeless interest: Whole grain lasagna platters, what for?
Jurek Skrobala
The doctors: "A song for now"
I turned to Bela B at an early age when life didn't want to work out as I intended: "Flowers" made me laugh, "Claudia" made my mother burst.
When the Covid madness began in the spring, it seemed only logical to me that it was Bela B who sang to me from his apartment that the bit of quarantine wasn't that bad after all - and thus shook my life again in order .
In April he had a musical video conference with his doctor colleagues because they couldn't work on the new album together in the studio.
That came later.
But this video was "A song for now".
So they were talking about cake.
Probably because it rhymes with "try".
But at that comforting moment, I would also have liked to have spoken to Bela on the phone.
And chatted about cake.
Sabrina Knoll
The Rolling Stones: "Living In A Ghost Town"
You have to be very, very old, about as old as Keith Richards, to find the Rolling Stones somehow "fresh".
It is possible that “Paint It Black” or “Gimme Shelter” really hit the mark at the time.
Today, the painting of the stones is considered to have been completed long ago.
And then came, with Corona, “Living In A Ghost Town” in April at the right time.
And with such force that even those who despised the blues rock of the old-fashioned school rubbed their eyes in amazement.
A lament about the lockdown of the sweet life, empty cities in fast motion, timeless riffs, harmonica and "Oh-oh, oh-oh!" - choirs over a drunkenly swaying reggae - the Rolling Stones haven't sounded so contemporary for more than half a century more.
Arno Frank
Scooter: »FCK 2020«
To evaporate the zeitgeist on crisp one-liners, HP Baxxter, the Walther von der Vogelweide of the generation of ass antlers, does not fool you.
His group of techno poets, Scooter, asked the tourist question "How Much Is The Fish?", Which was grumbling in the stadium, at the football World Cup in France in 1998, and commented on the turn of the millennium with "Fuck The Millenium".
In keeping with this tradition, Hans Peter Geerdes, 56, once again said everything there was to say this year, without saying much: »FCK 2020« - a middle finger turned song.
"The worst year ever," it says.
But when Baxxter fires his poetry steam cleaner on target with lines like "First we save the rave, then we save the world", then that is also part of normality.
Jurek Skrobala
Oliver Polak (with Erobique): "Forever Corona"
The first wave was over, the summer was reasonably fearless, but the second wave was already building up on the horizon when suddenly the song of the hour, the minute, the second appeared: "Forever Corona".
The melody and text came up to the author and comedian Oliver Polak while going for a walk, and Carsten Meyer alias Erobique completed it.
The result sounds as if Quincy Jones had taken up the bass line of "Another One Bites The Dust" again to let Holger Czukay put the whole absurdity of the situation into words.
"Forever corona, corona forever", whispers a female choir, and the finger-snapping fatalism of this cheerful music works like a vaccine against the threat.
The original is only surpassed by a »Sad Piano Version« with a passionately crooning Polak, which was released shortly before Christmas.
Arno Frank
Hammerhead: "I'm drinking alone" (bonus track)
No matter how assiduously you can decant your wine at home alone and take out the really big snifter - nothing protects you from realizing that during the corona crisis, drinking culture went to the dogs.
People are drinking more than ever, but also more lonely.
The Bonner hardcore punks Hammerhead, certainly no wine pans, had this modern German classic of the isolation frenzy half a century ago, but it is listed in our collection with pandemic songs as a bonus track because it takes two minutes to reveal the joys and dangers the quarantine pressurized refueling sums up: everyone crashes on their own.
Christian Buss
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