This article was automatically translated by AI.
MC Motherfucker: The style was basically there from the first single, and we have always pursued it that way. I have always thought that we stand out stylistically. Especially how we arranged the two guitars and the type of lyrics. We still do that today. We might produce a little differently.
Zip Schlitzer: Although I sometimes find it disappointing regarding the vocals: We sing in German, and then people only write about the lyrics in their album reviews and never about the music. Even though we put effort into that.
Johnny Bottrop: A little bit.
Zip Schlitzer: A little bit. And that's why we have always tried to make it so that the vocals are not too prominent. We don't make Schlager, this is punk. And there should still be guitars in it.
MC Motherfucker: That was always a point where things got heated during production. We always tried to find a compromise with the German language. So that the music sounds very rich and loud, but the vocals are just understandable. Because unfortunately, when people hear German vocals, they immediately listen to the lyrics. As soon as they don't understand them, you lose their attention.
Frank: As a songwriter, don't you want the lyrics to be understood live?
Johnny Bottrop: But that's why we have the comics in the booklet.
MC Motherfucker: We now have a very good opportunity by trying to give the vocals a bit more space with the two guitars, because we don't always just blast off together playing the same thing. Instead, we alternate left and right. In the past, we would pound together in certain parts. Then you could hardly hear anything else because of all the guitars.
Johnny Bottrop: Which was also great.
MC Motherfucker: I know, but that fades pretty quickly. That's just a typical style of the punk stuff from the 90s. Punk bands sounded very different in 1977.
King Kraut: Does that imply a bit more pop in punk?
MC Motherfucker: Punk has always been pop music. I don't know what people have when they say it's too poppy. As a kid, I felt really sorry for THE CLASH when they released "Rock the Casbah" and some idiots went to the Markthalle in Hamburg and organized a demo because the band released a disco song.
Anyone reading this today who was there should be ashamed to the core; you were idiots.
King Kraut: When you take the band and its music together, what role do the performances play in bringing the music to life?
MC Motherfucker: In punk music or rock 'n' roll, of course, the biggest role. Playing live always has to do with people who go to a concert wanting to receive a certain energy, wanting to celebrate, and wanting to celebrate these songs with the band. They want to have a party and meet up. Especially in a subculture scene and everything related to guitar music, concerts are important.
Johnny Bottrop: A punk concert is not a poetry reading.
MC Motherfucker: When I watched those YouTube videos of our warm-up concerts, I wondered: Why was I still singing? They sing everything anyway. I could have saved my voice and just let the audience sing everything. They were so loud!
Frank: That must be an amazing feeling.
MC Motherfucker: Yes, super! But you almost notice how secondary the band is at such a concert. You are actually just the reason for people to stand up again and sing along to those old songs that were very important to them at a certain time.
King Kraut: What do you choose when you go to a karaoke bar?
MC Motherfucker: I'm a really bad karaoke singer. Two years after I left the band, I stood next to the stage at SO36 with my friends Pennywise. And the singer, that stupid dog, pulled me up on stage and I was supposed to play "Blitzkrieg Bop." I only realized on stage, oh shit, I don't even know the lyrics!
Zip Schlitzer: I would still choose "I walked with a Zombie." I can still recite that by heart. It only has one line.
King Kraut: How do you find the balance between political lyrics and silliness?
Zip Schlitzer: Politics is silliness. It fits.
MC Motherfucker: We don't write political lyrics. Actually, many lyrics are based on social criticism. But that usually happens on a meta level. You have to think about what kind of lyrics you are writing and how to subtly hide your criticism. Best example: "Bulimie-Bettina." Take the lyrics: There is no criticism on the first level. It's a text that could have been in "Struwwelpeter."
Johnny Bottrop: We don't sing "Heidi Klum, you stupid cow."
MC Motherfucker: When you write political songs, it's always the case that you take a stance and defend it. Many bands have failed at that because you then get taken over by a political side and suddenly have to deal with their quarrels. SLIME had that problem in their early years. They had a hard time with those people who basically wanted to take them over. They became the band for all leftist people. That's why there was eventually that song "Linke Spießer."
Zip Schlitzer: Once you've been co-opted and deviate even a little from that, you immediately become a target of hate for them.
MC Motherfucker: Financially, it is very bad for a band to engage on a political level. You won't get any money anymore; you can play one benefit show after another. You can't finance your band with those idiots at all.
Johnny Bottrop: TON, STEINE, SCHERBEN ended up with about half a million in debt. That's why Rio Reiser made Schlager music with "König von Deutschland" to pay off the band's debts.
King Kraut: Is there even a sensible way to package politics in music?
Johnny Bottrop: Yes, there is. If you don't insist too much on fixed positions but rather ask more questions. Music is entertainment. Rock 'n' roll is not a political manifesto. But music can ask questions. With the right questions, by clashing contrasts and statements, you can make people think for themselves.
Frank: Aren't questions much easier than answers?
Johnny Bottrop: Music doesn't have to answer. Music is music.
MC Motherfucker: You make a mistake when you give answers. Then you are basically a politician saying: I will solve the problem now.
Johnny Bottrop: But you're just a dumb musician with four chords. That's why questions are much more important. What's the wise saying? "Where certainty ends, thinking begins."
MC Motherfucker: I sometimes hear songs from politically very engaged bands that tackle some problem, and I read a detailed article about it two weeks earlier in "Junge Welt." Then a band comes and tries to formulate all that in a song text – and it just doesn't work. It sounds clumsy; you don't have the opportunity to pinpoint it in two verses and three choruses. To explain it, to illuminate all the facets, that doesn't work. And then you've lost.
Sure, if it's an anti-Nazi text, that always works. But that's now scene populism. If you run out of material or you play at a festival and see that people aren't really participating, then you just let them chant "Nazis raus!" and everything is fine again. That's silly. I don't need to bring opinions to people who already share the same opinion as I do.
Zip Schlitzer: You can do that at the NPD party conference.
Johnny Bottrop: Yes, that's something else.
(General agreement for the band's new political engagement)
Announcement: "Here comes the band DAS WOLFSRUDEL with their song: 'Hitler!'"
(sings) "Hitler was a gay pig..." Well, a bit primitive, but 1000 comrades chase you...
King Kraut: How did you originally get into music and what was the spark moment when you realized: I want to be in a band?
Johnny Bottrop: I was twelve years old, a jeans boy, and at that age where you slowly start to be interested in girls. That was before punk rock; back then I listened to SWEET and ROLLING STONES. I was walking along a coastal dike at the North Sea during vacation. And there sits this ugly guy with a guitar, surrounded by eight super pretty hippie girls, singing songs. I thought to myself: OK, when I get back, I'm going to buy an acoustic guitar.
Zip Schlitzer: I thought the ROLLING STONES and THE WHO were great when I was twelve. I started sitting on the schoolyard with people from my school playing acoustic guitar and covering Bob Dylan. Although we weren't very good at it because the lyrics were too complex. And we liked the English stuff because the singers would sometimes scream and get loud. They never did that in Germany before, except for Marius Müller Westernhagen and maybe Rio Reiser. Everyone else always just crooned, which I found boring.
MC Motherfucker: I discovered my mother's flamenco guitar when I was ten and tried to strum on it. My mother must have thought: "This is something he could do." At first, they wanted to send me to tennis lessons, but that didn't work out. I was even briefly in ballet. That didn't work out either.
So I was signed up with a conservatory teacher for classical guitar.
Until around '77. I had received an old radio from my grandmother. You could buy a stick-on pickup for your acoustic guitar for 9.90 DM. It was a very cheap plastic part that you could solder into the back of the old tube radio, and suddenly it was a guitar amplifier. Because of this cheap pickup, it was always incredibly distorted. But it sounded great. I liked it so much that I eventually stopped going to the conservatory to learn guitar and just made noise at home.
Zip Schlitzer: I decided very early on that I wanted to make music. But I was looking for something that didn't require extra lessons. I played bass lines on the guitar in the schoolyard because I found them more interesting. But that was all too complex. Until I actually heard SEX PISTOLS on the radio and thought: I can do that too.
MC Motherfucker: At that time, my girlfriend's father, an old rock 'n' roller, gave me his old Höfner guitar. No two weeks later, my band SEXUALTÄTER was formed. It was just a buddy and me with our two guitars. We played weird songs. For example, we rewrote the song from "Biene Maja": "In an unknown land, there was a cunt very well known."
Johnny Bottrop: A lyrical masterpiece.
MC Motherfucker: Then the female variant came into play. We played with our tube radios at a party. We had three songs and played them constantly. And suddenly I had the prettiest girl at the party on my arm. I didn't even have to hit on her; she came by herself.
Frank: After the Biene Maja song?
MC Motherfucker: It doesn't matter what you play. When we played in Trier recently, I noticed that. I was standing behind the open-air stage warming up, and next door, there was a cultural center with a kindergarten in it. Kids came out, including a little girl. I looked at her, and automatically she looked at me as if I were her new friend and started tapping her foot. She didn't even hear what I was playing. Apparently, an instrument in the hands of a man has something magnetic for women, regardless of age.
Zip Schlitzer: The guy I learned guitar with was really talented; I still meet him from time to time. He could sing well and even memorize the very long lyrics of "Hurricane" by Bob Dylan. I think he got almost every girl there. It was really crazy.
King Kraut: Finally, connecting the dots from the very beginning to today. How much of what once drove you is still in the music today?
Johnny Bottrop: Standing on stages, writing my own songs, releasing my own records, and even those of other bands. Being able to live off music. Everything I set out to do at 12 or 15 years old has come true. I have really fulfilled everything around it.
King Kraut: The eight girls?
Johnny Bottrop: With the girls, I really overdid it for a while back then. Well, actually, you can't overdo that. But that's calmed down now. Much calmer.
Zip Schlitzer: For me, it's not quite the same. My problem all these years was that I wanted to make music professionally and not just as a hobby. The people my age always have their families and jobs. That's why all the bands, with whom I play, have always gotten younger.
MC Motherfucker: "Grandpa Zip."
Zip Schlitzer: It can't be helped. The two here are also a year or two younger, but that's still okay. The advantage is, of course, that the girls you meet are also getting younger. That has its perks.
Part I can be found here.
