Nina Hagen

I first discovered Nina Hagen by buying a promising looking four-song EP on one of the regular Monday shopping excursions from the Interlochen Arts Academy. I had previously had good luck blind-buying an Oingo Boingo EP (the four-song 10” EP (“extended play” as opposed to the longer LP (long play) – long being longer than extended, I suppose) being an entirely new format to me), and felt lucky. As it turns out, my luck held until the next time I tried it, when I purchased a horrific (or is that “an horrific”?) EP by some cheeseheads named New Musik, which was so laughably bad that I swore off the format forever after that.

But Nina Hagen blew my ears off. Nina is a German punk diva, famous for her operatic range and her four-hour concerts, and for not shying away from anything or anybody. She has an extremely powerful voice, and seemed to be the epitome of punk with her black leather jacket, badly dyed rat’s nest of hair, and fuck-you-too demeanor. But her songs were inventive and exciting and far from the simple-minded three-chord thrash that was the popular currency among punks at the time. Behind her growling and screeching voice, her band played incredibly tight arrangements that would stop and start on a Deutch mark and would swerve violently from German hofbrau oompah to possessed reggae. I was enchanted. It didn’t even matter that I couldn’t understand a word she said. I once briefly considered getting help translating it from Herr Hammers, the German teacher and father of two of my best friends, but I was pretty sure that if I did so, I would be banned from their house forever. I may not have understood it, but I could tell it was bad

Nina Hagen had a fair following in Germany and the rest of Europe, and that EP, which collected tracks from two albums and also showcased her versions of established songs by The Tubes (White Punks on Dope) and Lene Lovich (Lucky Number), was put out to test the American waters. Finding them suitably warm, her next full album was released domestically. It came out during the summer after I graduated high school and was called, provocatively enough, Nunsexmonkrock.

There was a movement gaining ground at that time to ban controversial records – well actually the movement, spearheaded by “internet inventor” Al Gore’s wife Tipper, was to label controversial records as such, but the defenders of free speech recognized that that was a shortcut to censorship and fought it in court. Many musicians, such as Frank Zappa, also testified to the absurdity and ignominy of censoring music (or, indeed, any art), and I was right there behind them. But I suddenly understood that fear of freedom of expression for the first time when I turned the stereo on and put the needle to the first track of Nunsexmonkrock. The album starts off innocuously enough, with some tinkling bells followed by a slightly jungley tom tom riff. Nina begins speaking in a perfectly reasonable tone of voice.

Uh-oh.

Nina growls out “possessed” and “demon” with such ferocity that it’s hard to not think of her as the one possessed by the demon. The band kicks in and she continues her story about how Jesus cast the demon into a pig and the pig went running away, “screaming!” and the album is off and running straight to hell.

I had never been so scared of a record in my life. I sat, slack-jawed, listening to one depraved song after another, and could not believe such a thing was ever recorded, never mind released. I wanted to personally buy up every copy and burn it because something that powerful and that evil could wind up in the wrong hands with some drastic consequences and could severely damage somebody with a weak moral or musical constitution. The tracks were barely songs – more like musical skeletons for Nina to flesh out with her many layers of guttural utterances and banshee screams and terrifyingly nonsensical lyrics. This was clearly drug music, but it wasn’t hippy-go-lucky “everybody must get stoned” pothead music, this was brutal, dark, terrifying, razorblades and needles in your eyeball music. One of the songs, Smack Jack, was about the horrors of heroin and is so convincing that it must’ve been written by somebody who knows from the inside, somebody bent over by the weight of a very large monkey (the next year, my best friend Eric dismantled some Sugar Smacks and Apple Jacks cartons he pilfered from the cafeteria to spell out Smack Jack on his dorm room door – something that impressed me and worried the Resident Advisors no end).

Each song on Nunsexmonkrock is more terrifying than the last, and the album wanders all over the archaic map, from UFOs to tarot to Rastafarianism to god knows what else. The tracks are densely woven, with hundreds of voices swirling around in a hallucinogenic haze, and the hand drawn lyric sheets, which bear scant resemblance to the final songs, are fearsome in their disjointed imagery and maniacal doodling. Perhaps most disconcerting is Nina’s frequent and seemingly sincere references to religion. She growls the story of Jesus and the possessed pig and ends by saying “if only you’d believe, everything is possible for those who believe” while her head spins around and she vomits fire. In one song, named after and sung to her daughter (Cosma Shiva), she even asserts that “god is your father”. I can’t help but think this is just the sort of witness-bearing that the Catholic church does not appreciate.

Clearly, this woman was insane. And dangerous.

I soon dropped my desire to save the world from Nina, and, in fact, have grown to love the album, but I have yet to find a scarier, more boiled down essence of evil – and I hope I never do (well, Foetus and Fantômas both give her a good run for her money). It seems each generation has their artists who push the moral envelope, horrifying the parents while thrilling the kids (in no small part because the parents are so horrified). Whether it’s the Rolling Stones and their sympathy for the devil or Marilyn Manson’s provocative posing, there’s always something grotesque going on at the edges of pop culture and somebody always thinks they’ve gone too far and it’s their moral responsibility to do something about it. (One of my favorite shock bands is Florida’s Cannibal Corpse. I’ve never actually heard their music, but admire their breathtakingly gruesome song titles: Hammer Smashed Face, Entrails Ripped from a Virgin’s Cunt, Dismembered and Molested, and their big hit, Fucked with a Knife. Like I said, I’ve never actually heard any of these songs, but I’m sure they can’t live down to their titles.)

Although there are many worthwhile tracks on Nunsexmonkrock, (only Iki Maska, a blindingly boring riff on Peter Gunn, has no redeeming qualities for me whatsoever), I chose my perennial favorite, Dread Love. One of the perkiest and most accessible numbers on the album, it nevertheless showcases her bizarre and disturbing layered lyrics and incredibly powerful stratospheric vocal range. I especially like the ending of the song, with the band disintegrating while she repeats the name of the album.

As it turned out, Nina Hagen was unwilling or unable to maintain this particular unique form of heavy-metal minimalism tone poetry, and her next album found her dabbling in dance music (?) with Giorgio Moroder, the premier producer of European synthetic dance music, known for cracking the code to electronica 15 years early with his production of Donna Summer’s ur-techno hit, I Feel Love. To this day, Nunsexmonkrock remains an unparalleled achievement in densely woven hallucinatory satanic drug music. And, as a bizarre side note, all the synthesizers on the album were played by David Letterman’s cool cat musical sidekick, Paul Shaffer. I always wanted to get invited onto Late Night so I could ask Paul what he thought of those sessions.