Rammstein Summary

A kid posted the other day on RammsteinNicCage.Com, asking for people to outline their thoughts with regard to Rammstein, for a school assignment he's doing. I posted with a summary of my history with the music and also my thoughts about it, and figure I might as well post the same here, since this site is all about Rammstein:

I got into Rammstein when a gaming buddy DCCed me Sehnsucht via IRC when we were chatting in a Quake channel about what we listen to when we frag. I listened to nothing else for about a week of fragging (two hours a day at least) and fell in love with the sound. I went out and bought the album, and fragged to it for ages. It anchored my general music listening for over a year. That was just before Mutter came out, but the idiot who sold me Sehnsucht didn't have the forethought to let me know a new album as coming, so I didn't know, and after thrashing Sehnsucht I lost touch with the band.

Earlier this year I saw a Rammstein track called Los on another person's iPod, and it struck me that I'd stopped attending to a band I'd loved before, and I tracked down all their subsequent albums and Herzeleid. I just fell in love all over again and went out and bought all their albums and DVDs, including a replacement copy of Sehnsucht, which I had lost at some point.

I never knew what the lyrics meant until this year. I just loved the flow of the words, and found the whole package intensely provocative. This year I found Herzeleid.Com and Jeremy Williams's translations, and developed a whole new level of enjoyment from the music as a result. I started my own lyrical project (adapting Jeremy's translations into English lyrics), and have become a bit of an addict.

Rammstein's lyrics are stunning.

I listen to Rammstein all the time, doing a range of things (sleeping, working, day-dreaming, writing, etc.), and even after hundreds of times through (I keep all five albums on continuous shuffle along with Worlds Collide by Apocalyptica on my iPod) I get that same frisson from the lyrics that I did in February.

I've even been inspired to write my own lyrics by Rammstein's work.

Rammstein's consistency in composing and performing in German is an indication of how intensely talented they are. The English-speaking world is traditionally seriously closed-minded about non-English performers who don't perform in English, so I think Rammstein's success is much more telling than that of other bands, such as ABBA, who have transitioned into English lyrics. The fact that they have a crap-load of fans who do not understand their lyrics and still get the excitement and drive of it, and are as loyal as the German-speaking fans is great, but I recently discovered that the Mexican fan-base take it to another level, and actually know all the German lyrics, verbatim! To memorise such a large body of text in another language like that, so you can sing along for entire songs, en mass, is incredible! I'd say it's probably unprecedented, and may never be seen again.

Another aspect of Rammstein that makes them interesting is their eclectic style. They stand astride many musical genres, and meld them together very successfully. Opera, metal, industrial, dance, blues, grunge, classical, love ballads, power ballads; it's all there. They are unclassifiable, because of this success in fusing sounds. I've called their genre Rammstein, but you could also call them a fusion band, because that is precisely what they do, song after song, album after album, and every single piece they release is chock full of drama, passion, humour, and an unholy joy for rhythm, pace, and story-telling.

Love them or hate them, Rammstein are unique and special.

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