This song from a German band (Toten Hosen) reminds me of U2 at their anthemic best

[highplainsdem]

23. LOL! It means "deadbeats," according to articles I've read.

I also read that at one of their early concerts, whoever introduced them got one of the letters of the second word in their name wrong and introduced them as Toten Hasen, or the Dead Hares or Dead Rabbits. (Hasen is another of those words that if paired with another adjective means something very different, because in German "old hares" means "old hands" or "old-timers."

And yes, it's a weird name.

But a great band.

Now one of my favorite bands.

And after years of wishing there were new bands around as good as U2 or other favorite bands from the classic-rock era, I was thrilled to find out there was a German band that good, one that's created a lot of music over four decades, music that's still new to me.

I do wish they'd recorded in English instead, the way Golden Earring did when they chose English over their native Dutch.

Campino is English on his mother's side, even became an English citizen recently, dual citizenship, and he and his siblings were raised to speak English as well as German. (see the video interviews above, one where he's talking to Joey Ramone, another where he's being interviewed by a British journalist.) But I don't think as high a percentage of the German population speaks English as the Dutch population does (I've read that over 90% of Dutch adults know English), so writing their songs in English would have left a lot of their German-speaking audience out. And with Austria and Switzerlad included with Germany, that's a population of over 100 million, several times the Dutch population, so recording in German was a smart decision (and since they started out as a punk band, making a decision to aim for the English-speaking market, the US and UK, might've seemed too commercial).

I've found myself wishing they'd at least recorded English as well as German versions of their most popular songs, too, so those could've been hits here, but German is different enough from English that it would be really difficult to come up with a good translation using the same number (or close to the same number) of syllables per line.

I had two years of German in high school and a few more years in college, and I've forgotten a lot of it, but it's been coming back as I listen to more of their music. Still not enough to follow interviews in German very well, but I did find something really interesting with subtitles that I'll be posting later.

And besides their music being so good, they've been political and social activists for decades, something I think DUers appreciate. I don't demand that artists whose work I like share my political beliefs (I can separate the art from the artist), but it's great when they do. And DTH won't let themselves be used for politics they don't agree with. As I posted above, Angela Merkel ended up apologizing to them for using Tage Wie Diese to celebrate an election victory. And when a Swiss band espousing far-right politics changed the lyrics of the song to promote their neo-nazi ideas, Die Toten Hosen immediately shut them down with a lawsuit.