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Jan Wigger (1973-2024): “No reason to ‘inform’ the reader in any way in my reviews.”
Photo: Jens Ressing
Jan Wigger took music personally.
He could react to bad music with long tirades of abuse.
Good music never ceased to enthuse him.
Such passion is a brilliant prerequisite for success as a music critic.
Jan Wigger also had an encyclopedic knowledge and a feeling for language, trained by the “art of exaggeration” of Thomas Bernhard.
Jan Wigger, born in Aachen in 1973, came to Hamburg in the 1990s, worked for the independent record label L'Age d'Or and began writing for the German "Rolling Stone".
He also thrilled indie fans as a DJ at his “Pretty Things” evening in the Hamburg club Grüner Jäger.
From 2001 onwards he wrote texts for SPIEGEL ONLINE, and after a few individual reviews he became a weekly chronicler of new CD releases in the autumn - initially alone, later together with Andreas Borcholte.
Wigger's reviews were influential; a band like Die Nerve or the singer Dagobert, for example, who Wigger praised very much, also became popular thanks to his popularity.
Jan Wigger was rarely impressed by PR prose and hype; he recommended that young bands: “Look for real enemies (Die Amigos, Nena, Bully Herbig)”.
Long before the Kaulitz brothers' TV renaissance, Wigger wrote a tribute to Tokio Hotel.
His columns were about more than just music
Whoever praised and criticized with so much passion was of course not without controversy among the audience.
Wigger knew this and also addressed it.
He wrote in "Rolling Stone": "The reader reactions of the last eleven years are not surprising - if they agree, they remain silent, if they reject it, they demand that the reviewer be fired, often in drastic terms." 'inform': A column should always be about more than just music."
In addition to the "Wiretapped" reviews, Wigger wrote the metal column "Amtlich" for SPIEGEL ONLINE together with Thorsten Dörting and today's "Rock Hard" editor-in-chief Boris Kaiser and presented obscurities from music history in the column "Wigger's Wonderful World."
His involvement ended in 2014 for health reasons.
On Tuesday it was announced that Jan Wigger died a few days ago.
As his father told SPIEGEL, the police assume that a serious internal illness was the cause of death.
Jan Wigger was 50 years old.
SPIEGEL editor Andreas Borcholte, who brought Jan Wigger to SPIEGEL ONLINE as a freelance author in 2001 and entrusted him with the “Wiretapped” column, says:
»I didn't know anyone who could discuss and write about music more passionately and knowledgeably than Jan. Every week between the end of 2001 and the end of 2014 we discussed which new records he would review for our pop column "Abhört".
They were extensive and amusing, often instructive for me and sometimes nerve-wracking conversations in which we went from colleagues to friends over the years.
My best moment among many others with him was when we went to the concert of Bruce Springsteen, Jan's greatest idol, in Hamburg.
It was his umpteenth Springsteen concert, but Jan was as excited and nervous as a teenager;
as if he was seeing the boss live for the very first time.
His heart also beat loudly and throbbing for Eintracht Frankfurt and the pop hits of Münchener Freiheit, for the political indie of Die Nerve as well as for US mainstream rock, for profound black metal and for obscure sixties psychedelia and Japanese horror films.
Jan always drew his incomparable, idiosyncratic texts from his personal, fragile world of experiences and emotions.
His highly emotional, always self-deprecating way of formulating clever thoughts and relentlessly tasteful judgments about music shaped the sound of pop criticism in the noughties and influenced many young colleagues who set the tone today - and not least myself my own writing about pop.
His untimely death is a great loss and hurts me very much.«
A kind of best-of from Jan Wigger:
Jan Wigger's fiery defense of Tokio Hotel against the haters and critics
“Wigger’s Wonderful World” about the pop obscurity “Montage”
Jan Wigger on Springsteen's best albums
Jan Wigger on “Fun” by Die Nerve – a pop criticism that is still quoted today, even by the band themselves.
Wigger's legendary rant about Varg Vikernes and his apology to Zola Jesus
Don't be afraid of Satanists - Jan Wigger about the Dutch occult rock band The Devil's Blood