Sakawa Boys – Berlin
What if I told you that there’s one European capital of great esteem where the prices are low, where people routinely walk around with half-empty beet bottles through the streets, and where rent is very cheap?
Hell, you could start an art commune here and wouldn’t even need to get a full-time job to support yourself. You can just eat shawarma off of every street corner. And, no, this European capital wouldn’t even force you to be in close proximity to the Soviet Union.
What if I tell you you’re a few years, decades, even too late? Yes, Berlin was the cheap, scuzzy, culturally diverse place that all artists, punks, and hipsters found out above and moved to. But the social experiment has ended. To misquote Dylan Moran, they’ve built Starbucks around it and hiked up rent prices.
Sakawa Boys’ “Berlin” is a grimy-sounding alt-rock dedication to the once hippest place on Earth. The vocals are aggressive, and the minimalist instrumentation is enough to get blood pumping, and the chorus is sung like a sticker emblazoned with a political slogan. But why are they singing this in the present tense? Do they possess information we haven’t? If rents have miraculously dropped, pack it up and take the locomotive to Kreuzberg.
Quitt – Kein Sperrmüll für die Toten
There’s such great power in negativity. It’s a shame that people don’t use it more often. It’s a shame that when they do get tangled with negativity, they are the ones who end up being used up and chewed out.
No, no, the greatest champions use negative thinking. Great athletes lie in bed and try to imagine a game or their racing course in minute details. But they rarely think of the event as something perfect. They prefer thinking about all the terrible things that can go wrong.
When it comes to negative thinking, nothing hits the brain quite as quick as information that’s delivered through old ear canal. Music’s a powerful tool. It can make people want to riot, or make them want to wake up early in the morning and change their lives for the better.
German punks Quitt believe in negative thinking and in the power of doing things in the wrong way. All of that is obvious on “Kein Sperrmüll für die Toten.” There’s something German about expecting the worst, and such tactics have kept Europe going for the last decades. As for Quitt, they may be nihilists, but they know a good song when they play one, and they’re using one here.
