Sometimes it is not easy to be 35 years old and still be blindly fascinated by rock music, unable to criticize it and even forgiving the most stupid songs by saying that they are down-to-earth and beautiful in their simplicity. Under the influence of rolling drums and roaring electric guitars the lack of poetry and content becomes sometimes irrelevant.

But then again, it is not that bad at all and during the last years even some German bands found ways to combine music and message to popular songs. One of these groups is "Tocotronic", who's around already since 1993. The first song I heard from them was "Die Welt kann mich nicht mehr verstehn" (The world cannot understand me anymore), a plain punk-rock song. Some of their songs bombastic and loud, others are of a meditative slowness. Their songs have titles like "The idea is good, but the world isn't read yet", "I want to be part of a youth movement" and "I wish I would be interested in Tennis" and most of their lyrics are suggestive, not to say surreal.

Their latest album was released in 2005 and is entitled "Pure Vernunft darf niemals siegen" (Pure reason must never prevail). The title song of this album is masterpiece, it sounds like a credo, is full of metaphors and nonetheless every line is a statement which can be unambiguously understood. I love this song, it makes me feel like in the very early 80s, when I switched my radio to the only rock channel that existed at that time and after five minutes knew that some noisy boys and girls had understood me better than I have had myself up till then.

So I sat down and translated the text – the translation is not perfect and you can blame me for every incorrectness. Read it, listen to the song, watch the video. Enjoy!

» German text of this song
» Video of this song

» Tocotronic Homepage (in German)
» Tocotronic in English Wikipedia
» Tocotronic in German Wikipedia

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