Interview: "I like Tokio Hotel"
Mr. Uhlmann*, have the dealings with German pop music become more relaxed?
I'm not sure. Recently I heard Coldplay, one of the currently greatest consensus bands - and there I noticed that such lyrics had never worked in German. A song like "Yellow", there the radio is saying, the song is too extreme, because the guitars are distorted. And if an album would be called "Death to all their friends", everyone would be surprised what a tough title you’ve chosen. In English it is okay, not in German.
How important to you is the rhyme in pop music?
Unimportant, the sound is more important. I have noticed that as strongly as never before while working on our latest album "Heureka". I take my arrogance to say important things to me, to revise and tweak the lyrics until they sound good - but they do not have to rhyme.
What is a good example for the right sound?
"We are forcing the future to work." Many Zs, many Ks - great.
In English pop music, one loves the pathos - why not in German pop?
I wonder about that, too. In French chansons, the gents are singing "You're the only one, I will kill myself tonight." That bothers no one. But in our country, it goes too deep for the people. We were once on tour with an Israeli band. The singer said to me one evening: You Germans have a stick in the ass when it comes to great feelings.
But you like pathos, don’t you?
For Tomte, a mixture of pathos in a positive sense and the experiments with the German language plays a role. We are expanding the meaning of the language. We go to the grammatical boundaries. Sometimes I hear: You cannot sing it like that. - But that must be sung like that, because I want to say just something that is incorrect German.
Pop music is successful with incorrect or correct German.
You know, you can also write against Ich & Ich or Silbermond, but the older I get, the more I come to the conclusion: if 20,000 people are happy and do not punch each other in the nose, it can not be basically bad.
As with Tokio Hotel.
I like them.
What does the band stand for?
It stands for a self-dissolving image of masculinity. We are seeing screaming girls who experience their first sexual feelings - but towards a boy who looks so androgynous that you do not know whether he is a man or woman now. Or his brother, looks like a Jamaican with his dreadlocks, but comes from Magdeburg. That is the tabloid compression of teenage anxiety and emo-rock.
When you look back on the year 2008, which pop phenomenon has impressed you?
What has fascinated me: That "Drei Tage wach (Three days awake)" has become an “Abi (A-levels/university-entrance diploma)”-anthem. A beat-impregnated top song about health-damaging party excesses. That heralds the second techno wave. I needn't take part in it. But it is interesting when friends call me on a Sunday afternoon to tell me that they are dancing in an adult-playground, while I am occupied on a children's playground with my daughter. I admire the stamina of the people.
Do you think pop music belongs to youth culture like in your youth?
Definitely. People with a cell phone are just rabble; the phone is the silent ghetto blaster of the new millennium. This works based on the principle "I'm me - and I show that through my music, that you are just hearing so annoying in poor sound quality." It has the same function as a sewn-on badge of the favourite band in the past.
(Uhlmann is the singer and guitarist of the German indie rock band Tomte)
Fuente: http://www.zitty.de/kultur-musik/30941/
Uhlmann (Tomte) "Me gusta Tokio Hotel"
