Bimbo – Gutter Girl
Nobody hates real poets more than the people who have chosen to report on their work. Is it envy? Is it greed? It’s just the same as hating the person who drives a motorcycle through a flaming hoop for a living.
Sure, everybody would like to be up there when people hold their breaths and get ready to cheer. But nobody feels inclined to have to pay for all the damages. Fixing a broken bone ain’t cheap nowadays, and it’s never been pleasant.
But the poets aren’t really people who can rhyme, choose the right words, and know what kind of shirt Rimbaud wore. They’re the people who don’t know any better about sending themselves flying through a burning hoop.
Bimbo’s “Gutter Girl” is great poetry of the self-immolation kind. Nah, it’s not trying to creep you out or have you be taking photos of some bizarre occurrence. It’s so honest and direct that this kind of planning would simply not fit the bill. “Gutter Girl” is punk-rock poetry. No music producer could clean this up and send it to the radio. There’s simply nothing to clean up. There’s nothing here that’s out of place, or that needs to be removed. It’s danger-art as pure as it gets.
Aylin Leclaire – Quallen Gegen Rechts!
We’ve seen it all before, yet, many of us, are convinced it’s going to be different. The worst thing about history is that it doesn’t only show you how things ended up happening the way that they did. It also shows you how things are going to end up happening.
In 2025, the brightest minds, as well as everyone else with an internet connection, is trying to figure out the rise of well-dressed extremism. Why are politicians who openly flirt with incendiary ideas getting the votes and being voted into office by the people?
To call it the “extreme right” might be to compress a great evil to something that isn’t as easy to define as we would like. But just as so many are getting too tired to complain about it, artists are using their talents to protest against it.
Aylin Leclaire may sound angry enough to want to pick a fight in the middle of Berlin. But the artist is right to be outraged. It’s all happening in Germany, after all, and you don’t need to be a history professor to know what this could mean. “Quallen Gegen Rechts!” is a well-intended punk song. It’s not a political song, so much as a song of remembrance. We know what happened and promised to never let it happen again. Aylin Leclaire is using creativity to fight against a common evil.
