Festival Pop Culture in Berlin: It was the women who are beating

If you do not hear senior radio, rock music is a relic. It was also nice, the mixture of fast instinctual drainage in three minutes, beer-like nonsense and brave rebellion on TV. Rock is a traditional craft that tells a lot about a century: the last one.

Rock is the German city theater in Populär, applicants for the World Heritage - important, clear, but unfortunately much too important in self-perception. With a sympathetic, but also a little disinterested attitude towards Rock you have come through the music production of the last years. Interesting was always different.

And now this: over the three nights of the pop culture festival in Berlin, the lowered guitars smoked, the glowing tube amplifiers began to smell, and the musicians' bodies poured plenty of testosterone into the crowd - the hormone of men, as is commonly said. But the finding has a turn: it was mainly the women who are beating.

Votos - Roland Owsnitzki

Anna von Hausswolff

The highlight of the festival followed on Thursday: Anna von Hausswolff from Sweden transformed the Kesselhaus of the Kulturbrauerei into a cathedral full of dark thoughts and heavy spirits. It's crazy, as the dainty blonde did not let the metal hammer crash down with an energetic rocker gesture, but in an authoritative slow motion. Gentle, sovereign, powerful, also because musically controlled at all times.

Whether she played the organ or the guitar, the men in the band burned every bank, if need be, while the boss let her supersafe soprano slide down into an eerie old. At the end, she walked through the audience like a seer and sang her unreleased ballad "The Mirror": I'm not leaving as long as you can not. Berlin had pee in the eyes.

Gitarrenonanie has really disappeared

Even Chelsea Wolfe from California roared with guitars on the first festival evening by the boiler house, but without the noise in the horizontal under high tension can. And the Afro-British Ghostpoet from London, whose deep, melodious speech talk collided with inner-city dance styles a few years ago, appeared with a washed and sometimes also well-fed rock band. Had Wumms, with Schmackes, not free from Muckertum, if that means musicians who perhaps enjoy themselves the most.

When a festival is curated competently, it pushes not only the pop music the Fiebermesser in the butt, but also their time. The return of the skirt is only half the diagnosis. Because the Schweinepriesterhaftigkeit the Gitarrenonanie is really gone, where Rock wants to be meaningful again.

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The neo-rock has in common a slow pace, an unpleasant mood, a lot of reverb on the guitars and a gloomy picture of history. This music blows to us from the rubble of the future. She solves fears of the present and overcomes them in a dark celebration. It is the return of rock as a ritual, not free of kitsch.

The Berlin post-rock band Hope is also part of this, which has been distributed in a theater room and let the audience walk in between. Rock as an exercise in mindfulness, who would have thought that. While the well-known Stuttgart band Die Nerven or even the newcomers from Essen, International Music, still delivered something like functional rock music. In a festival that shows so many designs, they seemed to have aged prematurely despite their youth, albeit in a very fit state.

Even though the state funds overflowed with music in the ever-ready festival rhetoric on diversity, gender equality and dialogue, the festival also has a pound that knows how to use it. It is the insight that you can make a great program, in which women play more than half of all positions, that there is an audience for it and that you have nothing to fear artistically. On the contrary.

Cherry's carvers do not bother much

The rock diagnosis seems plausible, if you have the slightly larger bands in view. For the first time, the impression was created that there is such a thing as a main program and then a whole lot more, which is probably more important to the festival makers Katja Lucker, Christian Morin and Martin Hossbach.

A headliner and a discovery from Berlin open the skirt diagnosis at the end again. Like any extraordinary art, they elude the rigors of time and market. We are talking about Neneh Cherry and Andrra.

Votos - Roland Owsnitzki

Neneh Cherry

Neneh Cherry introduced her new album "Broken Politics", which uses soft, acoustic sounds and personal experiences of helplessness in reduced tempos. The band was not yet fully recorded, Cherry himself committed blunders. But that did not bother us, because pop music is composed of gestures and grooves that are neither language nor perfection.

And on the last evening, the native Bavarian Fatime Kosumi with Kosovar background and her band Andrra reminded how much has already been won with a wayward design. At the beginning, a voice from the band told in English how a forced marriage is regulated. And then follow haunting, pathos-laden songs from the southern Balkans, which met hard electronics and complex, but groovebetonte rhythm (Mäcki Hamann on the synthesizer, Jörg Wähner on drums - a trio as a stroke of luck!).

Even in these wide sound and reverberation rooms you could feel the yearning for salvation. As long as the music fulfills it playfully, we do not need to look for it in politics.