Category — Writing

Get Your Muckin’ Groove on with German Hair Syndrome

by O. Hannah

It’s a midsummer’s day when I pull up a gravel driveway into a thick patch of pines about twenty miles outside Durham, North Carolina. Despite 90 degree heat, or maybe because of it, there’s a thick cloud cover and a distant rumble of thunder. As I pull up in front of the sprawling ranch house where the East German ladyfinger quartet German Hair Syndrome has made their home, Heike – most well-known to fans for her spritely electric viola riffs and hardcore Dinglish punk lyrics in songs like ‘Monatskarte, yeah’ – motions me over to a side clearing twenty feet in front of the goat pens that border the driveway.

“Herzlich wilkommen,” she says, and shakes my hand with a firm grip, asking “You have found us alright?” She smiles from underneath the clean cuts of an 80s glam mullet, and despite the overwhelming incongruity of goats, socialist rock, mullets and a thick German accent, I feel completely at ease. Whether it’s her smile or some magic fairy tale spell cast over me on my journey into the forest, I’ll never know. “It looks like it’s gonna rain,” she says, “we should go in. I’ll introduce you to the ladies.”

“Maybe you should like some tea?” she says on the way up the path, “We’ve just cut some fresh herbs from the garden.” I giggle until I realize, mid-chuckle, that, my god, she’s not kidding. “There’s fresh peppermint. It’s good for the digestion.”

German Hair Syndrome was hardly a blip on the rock and roll radar of the early 80s, when their first album, Spargelzeit, was released on LP by Krautrock Records in Dresden. They were part of a small east German punk/rockabilly scene in Mecklenburg-Vorpommen, the German state bordering the Baltic Sea, and GHS plodded along in relative obscurity until 1985. That was the year they got their “big break,” opening for the Russian glam band Gyka on a tour of the Soviet states. Apparently they were just what the Kazakhs had been looking for: Casio beats, sparkling folky charm easily confused with an acid trip, and just a little bit of smoldering resentment aimed at the State. In one of the more contrived moments of modern rock history, GHS eventually boarded a US-bound flight while trying to find a gig in the United Arab Emirates, and has remained – oblivious at first to the fall of the Wall – in the States ever since.

“So it was,” Dagmar will remark laconically when I ask GHS about their haphazard emigration, “So it was.” She takes a drag off a freshly rolled cigarette, and then peers at me threateningly from behind an ever expanding cloud of exhaled tobacco.

They have now lived in the US for almost 25 years, having purchased their farm outside Durham as a collective in the early nineties after a successful tour opening for punk darlings Spin the Toad Locket. Heike Kleene-Jungfrau, Samantha St. Pauli, Dagmar van Lindenhuus and Jörg Öztürk live together, make music, raise goats, rabbits, cattle and sheep, garden, drink schnapps and smoke under the shade of stately pines, persisting in a nostalgic Ostbloc haze in the middle of the deep American South.

“It’s not really that strange,” Jörg remarks, “not really. Look at Cat Stevens, he was kind of strange, that man. Or who was that woman, sang jazz, she went back to an ashram for thirty years, only came out after her husband dead and gone. We always just want to make music. And music, that you can make anywhere.”

And make music they did. The nineties saw a burst of creative production emanating from GHS: Flucht Versuch came out in limited release in 1992, followed by Pupsegal (1993), Du warst mein letzter Versuch (1995), Das Leben ist öde (1997) and Tja (1998). Their newest release, Ja, ja, kommt schon (2004) has just been released online with a pay-as-you-can download from their website, www.germanhairsyndrom.com. In just a few weeks, their revenge pop melodies had spawned animated YouTube cult videos, late night open air jams in the Piedmont, and touring offers from The Bandits, Ärbele, and Armitron. GHS rejected the offers politely, citing irreconcilable political differences. Later that evening, Samantha, the bands clarinet/spoken word artist, told me “We’d rather not cooperate with the fucking capitalist pigs,” a statement as jarring from its rhetorical anachronicity as from its timing. Samantha had said absolutely nothing for the several hours since I’d arrived, only to break her hour-long silence by protecting what seemed to be wounded socialist pride. Jörg, Heike and Dagmar inhaled slowly on their cigarettes in the ensuing pause, and nodded their heads seriously to repeated “ja’s”. But after the awkward assertion of political sympathies had been dealt with, I suddenly found myself in the presence of the whimsical cult personalities from the GHS albums I’d been listening to for years.

“Do you want to see our wig room?” Jörg asked.
“How about bowling, do you bowl?” said Dagmar. She exhaled in my face. “Probably not,” she surmised, looking me up and down, glaring at my khaki pants.
“I don’t,” I had to give in, and she gave a self-satisfied puff. Off to the wig room it was.

“When we first got here, we realized that we would have to create our own spaces” Heike said as she opened the door to a huge room on the first floor, “and one of our top priorities was creating space for our personalities. Which we hide in our music, but mostly our wigs.” The room I was led into looked like a hyper-techno riff on Today’s Special: hundreds of mannequins and heads, all sporting variations of the layered mullet, bobby cut, and Rocketman styles GHS has sported over the years, an immense wave of browns, blacks, blonds and redheads, all in immaculate condition – some of them even on mannequins sporting the touring costumes of the late 80s.

“First thing we did here was hire a wig nanny,” Dagmar exhaled, “Anne shows up once a week, comes in and dusts and combs.”

“Want to play dress up?” Jörg asks, halfway into a mullet sporting a foot long rat tail. Who could ever refuse an invitation like that? “Can I wear this?” I asked, pointing at a bright pink Jem-style number. “Whatever floats your fancy,” Jörg said, “As long as it makes you feel invincible.”

Much has been written about the transformative potential of masks. I won’t bore you by referencing that here. What I will admit is that under the influence of a certain bright pink wig, German Hair Syndrome convinced me to try bowling (my score? 13 points, but Dagmar said it was a merely a matter of rigid shoulder rotation), half and hour spent on the trampoline with GHS and their favorite goat, Ralf; and finally a soothing plunk in a mineral mud bath pit GHS built themselves, sipping fuzzy mineral water all the while.

Thank goodness. Given the mad romp and constant hilarity, I was beginning to think I’d never actually get to ask GHS any questions. In limus veritas, so they say.

O: You know, there’s a lot of folks out there that would like to see you live. Do you ever think you’ll go on tour again, capitalists aside?

(Samantha glares in my direction and sips water through a straw).

Heike: Perhaps we will tour again one day. If we were to receive an invitation from a Party, or perhaps if there were a Worker’s Tour. I had a friend, she sang for years with the USO, but I’m sure you see the difficulty of engaging with the Empire.

Jörg: But I am hopeful. I would like to go on a Green tour, but it’s very difficult to find Green venues to perform in. Maybe we could do a campsite tour? But they often don’t appreciate our gravitas.

O: Gravitas? What do you mean by ‘gravitas’?

Dagmar: Schatz, you must understand that all of our music is seething with the joke the world has played on us!

Samantha: (snorts) You must remember capital.

O: I’m an American. Spargelzeit is about global capital?

Jörg: Do you speak German? Or do you just like our groove?

O: Well, I speak a little German, but –

Jörg: It’s immaterial, actually, I remember these lines are in English: “Poles and the Russians come to harvest it/ Migrant Labor fuels the free market” – these are some of our earliest lyrics, and I say them now to you because in our new album, Ja, ja, kommt schon, you can see that we have not lost ourselfs in the now pervasive global corporation. Have you heard the album?

O: Yeah.

Jörg: You know the song, “Hartz IV”? “Und alles was sie wollen/ kommt mit dem Hartz IV-Holen // die Neo-nazi-Kohlen/ findet man (verdammt) ganz oben/ oben in Mecklenburg-Vorpommen” This is about reunified Germany, you know?

Dagmar: Economic stagnation and, how do you say, brian-drain! The State fucked us over!

(Samantha rolls her eyes while she rolls a new cigarette).

Samantha: Capitalism fails again. Surprise.

This is the moment where two things happen. As if on cue, GHS decides that we have spent far too much time in the mud bath, and exiting requires being hosed off and then led to one of the many bathrooms for showering and changing. It’s also the moment where, for at least a brief while, gravitas makes sense as the descriptive adjective for German Hair Syndrome. Maybe the mineral water and the mud stuck in each and every fold of my joints contributed heavily to this moment of clarity. Even so, when I pulled out into the gravel drive, waving to GHS and Ralf, the pink wig in my passenger seat as a present, I realized the unbearable lightness of gravity. It is both the quality that holds us here, keeps us on the ground, and the frustrating condition that keeps us from flight. In their wacky self-sufficiency and political agitation, German Hair Syndrome keeps hammering away at the most obvious of global circumstances that so often hides behind its own invisibility. Ja, ja, they seem to say in my rearview mirror, waving and knowing the realization will eventually sink in, ja, ja, kommt schon.

“As Rubin says, ‘The new scholarship on sexual behavior has given sex a history and created a constructivist alternative to sexual essentialism. Underlying this body of work is an assumption that sexuality is constituted in society and history, not biologically ordained.’ In this paper, I intend to illustrate these constitutional constructionalisms.”

Gayle Rubin ordered her thinking, sexual universe with line-drawn brick walls and pie charts. Moving walls of straight stone and slices of sex/gender cheesecake. Take a big bite out of the pie, chew, swallow, go back for more. Break your teeth trying to chew a brick. When you spit it out, here’s what you’ve got: a million points of contact and a mouth that’s starting to bleed.

Thinking is a brick wall.

Sex is a pie.

Gender is a polo shirt. A polo shirt with too-long, too-wide short sleeves, the result of a men’s department hangover until that third cup of coffee made it abundantly clear that no amount of wishful thinking was ever going to fill out a men’s shirt. Five-foot-three-inches tall and one hundred and eight pounds soaking wet: everything they sell in a mall is too BIG. Where the hell do small men buy their clothes? Mix and match, androchic, call it something stupid to make it sound fashionable. You’re a medium boy on top, size 10/12, with a 28 inch waist and legs a half inch too long for the jeans they sell to teenagers. Don’t put them in the dryer, and they won’t shrink. And get that cotton to relax.

But your youthful exterior serves you well. That young jawline, defined and a bit sharp, means people want to feed you. Children think you’re cool because you look like a big kid, which is a lot better than looking like a grown-up, especially because you never could master looking disaffected. And when you try to speak Turkish with the men who own the cafes in Etiler, in Istanbul, they always smile. They put a strong, thick, men’s hand – the kind of hand you definitely don’t have – on your bony shoulder, they squeeze you and they smile.

Grown women smile at you, too. They try to throw you out of the women’s bathroom, but they do it with a smile, not a scream. You look so small, so harmless, so young, so boy that they smile at you and call you yavrum, take your shoulder and guide you down the hall, to the other one, to the tuvalet with your name on it.

Bay.

They scream in Germany. Twelve preteen girls, indignant, their dignity impugned by your presence in their bathroom, scream at you that THIS is the GIRLS room and then gasp in group shock when you let out a long, low, drawn-out German growl: ja-aaaaaaaaa. I. KNOW.

You can make them dance in the U.S. Just stand there, at the sink, where they can see you when they open the door and it’s time for an excretory fox trot: Enter. Look. Pause, turn. Exit, confirm, re-enter. Repeat. Enter, look, pause, turn, exit, confirm, reenter.
Repeat.

* * * * *

“Judith Halberstam posits that ‘misrecognition necessitates narrative, either a narrative which corrects the mistake, a narrative which names the effects of gender variance or a narrative which manages the shame of the encounter.’ In this paper, I intend to correct your mistakes.“

Self-generated motion creates peripheral vision. Crawling teaches babies to see. It doesn’t work just to push them in a stroller, which is why you can’t remedy your mistakes on a moving bus.

Two buses depart from point A, both traveling at 45 kph. If one bus holds a femme, and the other bus holds a butch-boy, how long will it take for both buses to crash into each other, provided that one bus is fueled by winks and the other is fueled by an unrelenting desire to please?

Force equals mass times acceleration, but you’ve forgotten how to take into account the friction of feminine wiles and boyish charm, which leaves you with simultaneous calculations of eight point two months and/or eleven days.

Sitting while in motion makes you tired while self-generated motion develops peripheral vision. A sideline crash you see coming. But you’re a feminist. You have no problem with women driving buses, and this one here is out on the open road, taking stock of the lay of the land, which just happens, on this November evening, to all belong to you. She wants to map the terrain, smooth out some of the peaks and valleys while planting her own surveying stakes at crucial junctures marking notable formations.

Two hands on your hips. This, she says, I’d pay more attention to. And the sides, here, I’d give them more thought. With an expert flick of a surveyor’s wrist, a lackadaisical acknowledgment of what sits on your chest, she says: And this – this – these – I’d focus on less.

You’ve seen those medieval manuscripts where the world sits inside a body – head up top, feet below and two white hands on either side waiting to snatch up each corner. Even if the world ever had been round, you’re not sure it will be able to stay that way. Two hands, on your hips, seem to be applying enough pressure to turn hills into desert, marsh into rock, to raise up new ridges on the sides of a plain; two hands are suddenly able to transform your globe from its classic Mercator sphere into a radically different universe. Which raises the following question: WHAT PLANET ARE YOU ON?

You’re beyond the force of gravity, my dear, floating in some ethereal tumult that has cast you out – out of what? Of time? Of planetary orbit? Of earthly pleasures and desire? Because if this is the sublime, my friend, I want nothing of it. No, no – keep that swagger in your back pocket and give it a shake at the stars. They’re the only ones with a chance of understanding why what was has been.

* * * * *

“As Andre 3000 holds forth on Outkast’s 2000 album entitled “Stankonia”: ‘What if I looked at you in a microscope/saw all the dirty organisms/Living in your closet/would I stop and would I pause it?’ In this paper I intend to investigate the Stopandpauseit.”

These are the cycles of your thoughts. Stop. Rewind. Play. Stop. Rewind. Play. Rewind. Play. Rewind. Play. Rewind. Play. Pause. Play. Pause. Rewind. Play, rewind, playpauseplaypause stop. It seems you’ve picked up some contagion out in orbit. Brought back hallucinogenic moon dust or some other such rarity that infects whoever it touches and spreads like wildfire. It is a silent killer: invisible and asymptomatic, but still strong enough to shut down organic functions. The uncertainty of What prompts panic and a meticulous, calculated rhythm of doubt. Rewind. Play. Stop.

Locks, sponges, band-aids, warm water, anti-bacterial soap and an aversion to spoons: you’ve assembled your own weaponry, but your defenses still shatter upon contact. Stop. Pause. Stop. Stop.

There is no such thing as certainty anymore, but you still attempt to fill this lack with repetition. Twice.

Rewind, rewind.

To examine this cell microscopically would be a disappointment. Nothing but earthly pathogens hiding in there. No evidence of this supernatural disease you’re positively carrying, infecting anything you set eyes on. Play.

The forward march of time is the only antidote to this insidious, invisible stop. There are always technological advances developed with rewind. Chronological time must move forward, it is a system of progression, a time stop. Give it a second play. You’re extrapolating ill. Logically. Stop. Rewind. In this rewind. In this mo’ stop. Play. Rewind, rewind, rewind. What play. What is stop. What rewind what rewind what re what wind. Rewind what? Stop.

* * * * *

“As Yogi Berra once said, ‘When you come to a fork in the road, take it.’ In this paper, I intend to collect my forks.”

Your bus broke down twenty-one miles back when you slid down a slippery mud slope and ended up parked sideways in ruts ten feet deep. A hypoteneutical sign pole, knee-deep in the mire, with what were once two green street signs stacked cross-wise on top, wackels like a lazy metronome, ticking off erratic seconds that match your stagnant heartbeat. The roads have washed themselves out this time. What remains is a four-pronged gnarled fork, anxiously ticking with a perverted sense of direction.
Four years ago was your last encounter with muck, but there seemed to be so much less of it. You didn’t notice until it was up to your ankles – but there it stayed. A patient mess, surrounded by reeds on an island only four miles wide. Walking around the coast would get you anywhere you wanted to go, with fresh water all the way to Canada.

This is not what you’ve found at the fork. This is a continent, right at the base of a mountain range that’s been ravaged by natural mistakes. Good thing you wore boots. Tarzan could have survived barefoot, but you’ve got soft-soled city feet that are used to socks – though there may still be time to learn to swing on a vine. If you can just yank that first foot up out of the mire, hold tight to the ticking street sign and pull yourself up. Your boots stick with you. The weight of you on this ticking piece of round metal slows down its musical marking of time to a slow ringing, its great dips preparing to catapult you off into the wild. That kudzic southern parasite teases you with its tickle. You cast it off to find a tree branch underneath, and a shove from that mile marker throws you into the trees. They grow so close that you’re confronted with a million forks. Three prongs up, three prongs down, three prongs sideways and a choice between deciduous, conifer or firs. It’s an orientation of the body dependent on the whims of a soul.

It’s a bit slippery, but the truth is, trees too dense up here to fall. Worse thing’ll happen is you get yourself blown off track, or try to change course on the echoes cominup from below. Don’t trust the snippets you think might be human voices. The time it takes to reach you tweaks what was uttered into little more than half a yodel. Learn to orient yourself by the calls of the birds. Fifths and thirds, those prime number constants much more stable than seconds, whose whole tones threaten each other’s peace.

Tweet, tweet.

Tweet.

Tweet.