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

[highplainsdem]

33. Love that video of a Bulgarian choir! Thanks for posting that!

Very good point about music being reinvented as well as preserved, over time.

I love almost all music, if it's well done. I see it all as important human expression.

So I don't automatically view classical music as superior to all other music, though I know there's a tendency to do so.

And well-played guitar, played with feeling as well as skill, sounds as good to me as a full orchestra does.

Ocelot II had said that classical music is "exalting and inspiring" while popular music isn't. That popular music isn't "something special, that I should be grateful to the universe that it exists."

I can't agree with that. Partly because I don't thank the universe for music created by humans, though there's certainly a lot of natural music in the world that we can appreciate.

I admire musicians, but they're only human, and that includes the best classical composers -- some of whom would probably have created popular rather than orchestral music if they'd been born in modern times.

I love Beethoven's Ode To Joy, for instance. Have loved it from the first time I heard it.

But I do get the same feeling of exaltation from Tage Wie Diese, so I can completely understand Angela Merkel choosing THAT song to celebrate an election victory, even though the band had already warned all political parties not to use it, and she ended up having to apologize to Campino.

Video from German TV about that controversy, with a very brief clip of Merkel singing, and a statement from the band shown at about a minute in.

That statement from Die Toten Hosen (Google translation below, with a few corrections that I hope were correct) was a general statement directed to all political parties in August 2013, a month before Markel used the song and ended up apologizing.

We distance ourselves from the use of our music in election campaigns.

Lately we have been made aware several times that our song, "Days Like This One," is used again and again at various election campaign events, above all by CDU and SPD. Unfortunately, the legal situation is such that we cannot do anything about it.

We have never had a problem when our song brings joy to a wide variety of people, from the punk shed (??? - not sure of the exact translation here) to the Oktoberfest. But we feel it's indecent and incorrect that our music is played at political election campaign events. Here it is clearly abused and taken by people who are in no way close to us. The danger that people can get the idea that there is a connection between the band and the content promoted there makes us angry. It would have been a sign of decency in our eyes to ask us beforehand whether we have a problem with the use of our music on these evenings, and to respect it if we don't.

We wish everyone involved an exciting election.

Campino did throw his suport to Merkel four years later: https://infotel.ca/newsitem/eu-germany-merkel-rock-star/cp1262009600 .

But in 2013 she felt she had to apologize for using Die Toten Hosen's song:

https://www.dw.com/en/40-years-of-german-punk-rock-band-toten-hosen/a-61257232

The faux-pas made such waves that the newly re-elected Chancellor Angela Merkel personally apologized to Campino over the phone: "Dear Mr. Campino, I'm calling because we misappropriated your song on election night. Don't worry, it will not become the next CDU anthem. But that's such a nice song you've written there!"