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Lindemann: Till's solo project

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  • If you want I can help with translating so that it gets finished more quickly We could split up the text or something.

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    • ^Are you Danish? Any way, I'm halfway done. But thanks :-)

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      • ^No, but I speak Norwegian. The official written standard called "BokmÃ¥l" is very similar to danish. So in school, we actually learned how to read danish. All we did was learn a couple of words, and then we could pretty much understand most of it while reading. The same goes for swedish.

        Try to understand this text, it will not be hard for you

        Bokmål originates actually from danish. After Norway was independent from Denmark, many felt that the connection made with Denmark was part of the Norwegian culture. Therefore they wanted a Norwegian language that paid respect to the danish roots.

        The other written standard called "Nynorsk" was created from all kinds of different dialects that were prominent at that time in Norway, to create a more original and unique Norwegian language. Reading those text might be harder for you.

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        • ^ It's actually very different, as it developed in different directions over the years. But I take your drift. I can read Norwegian and Swedish, but many Scandinavians really have difficulty understanding each other and often switch into English when they meet!

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          • ^wow ... Team work

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            • Okay, it's finished, but I cannot post it. It seems to be five times a long as allowed here. :'(

              It says I have 529890 characters but my word document only says 10699?
              Last edited by The Rose; 07-19-2015, 06:31 PM.

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              • Part 1:

                http://politiken.dk/kultur/musik/ECE...-besat-af-sex/

                Musik 18. jul. 2015 KL. 20.24
                Rammstein-frontman: I’m not obsessed by sex
                Till Lindemann pours sexual perversions and provocations into his music with Rammstein. Now he makes his debut as a solo-artist.

                COLLABROATORS: Till Lindemann and Swedish Peter Tägtgren have been friends for years and have enjoyed working together at a mature age. “It’s never too late to try something new” says Till Lindemann. PR-photo.
                Erik Jensen Correspondent, Berlin
                For the first time in several minutes, Till Lindemann looks directly at me across the table.

                He tightens the black suit-jacket over his torso and stares, as if he wishes I had been one of the abortions he sings about on ‘praise Abort’. Or something he could piss away in a ‘Golden Shower’, to mention one of the many sexual perversions he confesses to on his first album outside the confines of the group Rammstein

                “You don’t get it! I’m not obsessed by sex. It’s a provocation, it’s humour, it’s the little piquant spice in the pot to make people listen. It’s meant to capture attention. Nothing else.” he then snaps.

                At the café-table in Oranienburger Strasse in the middle of Berlin, the interview I’ve been fighting to get for weeks, is about to sail away in the sweaty heatwave that has stuck to the German capital for days. At the table I have strategically placed the CD ‘Lindemann’ which on the cover has the world flames watched by two grotesquely looking men, Till Lindemann and his Swedish partner, Peter Tägtgren. Next to it, the recently published book of the singer’s two German volumes of poetry in a simple, black typography.

                It’s a, from my side, attempted symbolic underlining of Till Lindemann’s work as one of the most original and definitely most successful German cultural personalities for decades. But the bait isn’t working.

                The heatwave has apparently made Till Lindemann, whose hair is bleached blond, ice cold. He looks up and down the street, addresses Peter Tägtgren and attempts strenuously to ignore my presence. If I ask to the difference between Germans from the old East, like himself, and those from the West, he acknowledges by acidly asking his partner: “Aren’t you different in Sweden too?”

                Even though Peter Tägtgren is an exciting musician, it’s not him I’m here for. As a matter of fact, I had no idea he had flown in from Sweden to participate in the interview. But as all attempt to engage the closed Till Lindemann with talk of sex, German poets, East/West and Rammstein falls flat, there is nothing to it, but change tactics and invite Tâgtgren in.

                “He”, as the Swede consequent calls his German partner, who also mentions his pal in only this way, begins to listen. And to look at us.

                And suddenly he throws himself into the conversation with more than denials and one-syllable-words.

                “When I was a boy, I was a good swimmer. So I was placed at one of the elite-schools, where the DDR wanted to educate athletes. That was fine. I learned discipline like another soldier, which I needed. I quickly loose concentration and focus. I cannot work in a studio for hours, it’s so boring”, says Till Lindemann.
                Fly-fishing and fly-fucking [translation note: Fly-fucking is what Danes call it when you obsess over small details]
                When he had finished singing about his infatuation with fat ladies or the positive impact of pills at Peter Tägtgren’s studio in the village of Pärlby Northwest of Stockholm, he went to sit at the window and fly-fish in the lake directly outside, while the Swede “fly-fucked the songs on his computer for hours on end” as the singer says.

                “It was liberating to be there and fish, because he worked with head-phones on, so I couldn’t hear anything. I know it sounds strange, being the singer for Rammstein, but I hate loud noise. I’d rather be at the country-side here in Germany, at my country-house in a little village up North” Till Lindemann says. He has arrived from his apartment in Prenzlauer Berg to the café on a bike.

                And now with a completely different friendliness he writes autographs and poses for selfies with a couple of workmen, who have recognized him. Towards the working people in the eastern part of the once divided Berlin, there are no whims.

                “I’m still an Ossie, deep in my soul. It will never change. If I have an errand in West Berlin, I still say that I’m going “over to the West”. My kids actually feel the same and that is perhaps a bit weird. But it’ll probably die out with the next generation, we have after all been living in a united Germany for 25 years now”, says Till Lindemann.

                He participated in the celebrations of the 25th anniversary for the fall of the Wall last year, and just like the rest of the country he looks forward to the same jubilee for the German unification in October this year.

                “Yes, with a mixture of joy and trepidation. Those celebrations are a little like having Christmas and Easter and everything at once. We celebrate, but no one seems to know exactly why. I don’t really have a nostalgic relationship to the old DDR, but there were values in that country, that shouldn’t have just been swept away. People felt secure and without the fear for the future there is in Germany today”, he says.

                At the album “Skills in Pills” Till Lindemann sings In English in contrast to Rammstein, where it is in German. That was a big hurdle for the singer.

                “In the DDR-schools we learned Russian and not English. It wasn’t until I went on tour in the USA with Rammstein that I started to learn English. I went to sit with the bus-drivers, when we had to drive for 30 hours from Chicago to Seattle. Those guys were insane and managed the trips on two cups of coffee and a single toilet-break. But they spoke English all the time and I sat there and soaked it up. Since then, I’ve been sitting with the dictionary and learned more. So my confidence was incredible low towards singing a full album, but I’m very proud that I succeeded”, he admits

                And then we’re back to the lyrics, which in reviews in the home-land have been butchered for sounding more like a sophomoric schoolboy’s hot sex fantasies than the poetic reflections of a mature man.

                I wish I was a little bird
                “They only see the surface. There are love songs as well, and a description of an almost religious nature-experience on a river, where I canoed and fly-fished in *Yukon’. That I express myself in images is yet another result of my DDR upbringing. Back then you couldn’t sing that you wanted to leave the shitty country, so the songs went something like “I wish I was a little bird and could fly South” We kept that tradition in Rammstein and possibly a few other work-arounds to avoid being too personal. But much of it was from personal experiences. The things about the pills, is about the “medicine-parties” we held in my youth. Everyone brought pills from their parents without knowing what is was. And we took them all anyway”, Till Lindemann reminisces.

                When Rammstein tried to break through in the years after the Wall, no one wanted to listen to a punky rock band sinning in English. Just before the group caved in, they decided to give it one last chance.

                We thought, if they can’t be bothered to listen to us in English, fuck it we’ll sing in our German mother tongue. AND make the music as extreme, angry, and brutal as possible. Really heavy, stomping, East German, with lots of hate. Of course also with lots of coal-black humour over all the German, misunderstood by many. It all changed suddenly. I’m still extremely grateful for the fate, I’ve got. I have no idea why it happened to me” a suddenly quiet Till Lindemann says.

                But both intellectual film directors as David Lynch and Lars von Trier and millions of people the World over fell in love with the deeply original German touch, that has become the country’s biggest international cultural success since WWII. And on top of that, a rare East German success.

                “Now you mention it, it’s really something I’m very happy about. My old countrymen in the “closed country” deserve vindication. But I’m really just a simple country boy, who never wanted success or to be interpreted that way by each and every one”, says Till Lindemann, who more than once has stated, that his flamboyant performances on stage with Rammstein, in Wagnerian thunder and lightning and big gestures, stems from stage freight and a wish not to be seen. Really seen.

                “That is why I write poetry, I think”, he says and picks up the little black book.

                “It’s easier for me to write poetry, it just floats from the brain and the heart, while the songs are hard work. It’s hard work to get to a good chorus every time, because the chorus is the heart of the song. But in poetry you don’t need a chorus. That is a great relief”, he says about his often romantic poems.

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                • Part 2:


                  Brecht and Goethe
                  Using metaphors from nature and a near worship of the gloomy, he writes himself into the German traditions inspired by some of the country’s great, like Lindemann’s heroes Goethe and Brecht.

                  “At school we had to read lots of Bertolt Brecht of course, he was a hero in the old East. But we only got the political texts. I later found that he had a dark side and wrote plenty about sex. So it’s not just me”, Lindemann declares and talks long and enthusiastic also about the great names of the German romanticism.

                  An obvious inspiration for his poetry, but where something else is also evident. Even in a poem with the innocent title “Eligie für Marie Antoinette” the bitter humour rears up with a demand for oral sex with the decapitated queens head.

                  “When you write things like that and use provocations to reach people, it can go wrong. Like it did at the massacre at Columbine High School, which we got the blame for, because the perpetrators liked Rammstein, and had completely misunderstood our songs. We were really vilified, and those accusations for being Nazis that we always have had to live with, became massive. It was a difficult time, but we didn’t change our artistic expression, and I still prefer to leave my songs and poems up to peoples own interpretation, even if humour and satire can be difficult”, he says.

                  Do you feel any responsibility for what happened then?

                  “Absolutely not. The easiest thing in the World is to put the blame on artists for all sorts of problems. But that is bullshit! I want to be able to express myself any way I want. Including about sex. It could be a way to say that sex takes up too much space in our time. At least on the internet together with all the other shit”.

                  Now with ‘Skills in Pills’ Till Lindemann have made sure that the virtual world has had another huge dose of sex.

                  Translation for Affenknecht forum by The Rose.

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                  • Thank you very much The Rose for translation! Yeah, Till was not very happy.

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                    • Originally posted by Zenika View Post
                      Thank you very much The Rose for translation! Yeah, Till was not very happy.
                      Thank you. he thawed an became quite talkative after all :-)

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                      • Thank you very much, can I share it on FB?

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                        • Thx @The Rose, it was a fun read after all . Helped me practise my Danish as well (I always struggle with that language, don't know why). Btw, in Dutch we say "ant-fucking" .

                          @Snake: thx for sharing the making of, though we didn't learn much from that I'm afraid . It's always Till bringing new aspects to every interview, and since he didn't say anything really, it was a bit same old, same old.
                          Dort wo der Horizont
                          Sich mit dem Meer verbindet
                          Dort wollt' ich auf dich warten
                          Auf das du mich dort findest

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                          • Originally posted by Maya View Post
                            Thank you very much, can I share it on FB?
                            Of course, be my guest :-)

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                            • Originally posted by Waidmann View Post
                              Thx @The Rose, it was a fun read after all . Helped me practise my Danish as well (I always struggle with that language, don't know why). Btw, in Dutch we say "ant-fucking" .
                              .
                              Thanks, I'll be by tomorrow and brush up on my Dutch. So if you see an old Danish woman in a R+ t-shirt, carrying way too much camera-gear and speaking broken Dutch: It's me

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                              • Thank you The Rose.

                                It would be amazing if you meet

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