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Rock band Kettcar
Photo:
Andreas Hornoff
“My heart is a dead baby seal” is perhaps the most haunting line from a song that beats your conscience with every verse.
It's a deliberately awkward sentence, placed at the end of the chorus, that forces the listener to feel immediate sympathy: baby seals with big accusing eyes being bloodily slaughtered on cold ice floes - that's an image that everyone knows, that gets under everyone's skin .
In "Munich", Kettcar's first new single in seven years, the line is said by a German with a migration background because he feels like the seal in the face of the ever-increasing right-wing violence and coldness in the country: helpless, alone, defenseless, delivered.
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Released on Friday, the song, full of angry guitars that wail like alarm sirens, is a rare political statement in German pop.
A rock song whose content and story has been valid for years.
But now, in the days of long-overdue protests against the now exposed, cynical deportation plan of the right, it is becoming a beacon.
It is a radical song that stirs and agitates.
In the video clip, the Hamburg rock band uses disturbing footage to remember the victims of the NSU: the shops, kiosks and places where right-wing terrorists murdered nine people with a migration background between 2000 and 2006.
Their names will be listed in the credits of the clip.
Watch the video for “Munich” here as an exclusive premiere:
But first, “Munich” is about an individual fate: a young man is asked where he actually came from.
It's the usual, thoughtless, passive-aggressive question that Germans with a migration history have to endure all the time.
“You ask where I was born?” the text says with pent-up anger, “I say I was born in Munich-Harlaching/Munich, old lady.”
The scene is told from the perspective of someone who is not affected and wants to show solidarity with his migrant friend Yachi.
“We are so similar, we are so alike,” he says to him in the song after they are turned away in a xenophobic bar.
"And you said to me: 'Yes, we are - but we are not here'".
Changing perspectives, forcing the audience to empathize, letting them look beyond their own self-assurances and comforts - Kettcar can do this like no other band.
Back in 2017, the Hamburg emo rockers created a stirring hymn to the zeitgeist with “Deutschland '89”;
With “Munich” they succeed again.
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“Munich” is basically a fictional story, says Reimer Bustorff, 52, who co-founded Kettcar in 2001 and writes many of the band’s lyrics together with singer Marcus Wiebusch, 55, “but there are definitely individual passages that I also personally experienced.
I played a lot of football in my youth, often with boys whose parents had a migration background, so these everyday racist experiences were inevitable, in which you often stood by in disbelief.
Yachi and I were fat at that time too.”
Wiebusch and Bustorff are aware that the song fits perfectly into the discussion about AfD successes and frighteningly popular right-wing narratives, but they felt the text was timeless from the start: “In my opinion, it can be placed in any decade from the beginning of the eighties be transposed to the present day.
Unfortunately, it would have been relevant even without the current developments," says Bustorff.
The two musicians think it's important that so many people are currently taking to the streets to demonstrate against the right.
»It is never too late to stand up against right-wing radicals.
“We in Germany should slowly understand that,” says Wiebusch.
On Friday the band wants to perform at the “Hamburg gets up!” demonstration on Jungfernstieg at 4:35 p.m.
The new Kettcar album “Good mood unfairly distributed” will be released on April 5th.