We're having fun

Neu! - Lila Engel (from Neu! 2)
Iggy Pop - Funtime (from The Idiot)

I'll admit it, I've been in a bit of rut lately. I commute to and from work at about the same time every day; I get caught in about the same goddamned traffic every day; perform the same set of tasks at work; eat the same things for breakfast, lunch, and dinner; and, with the gracious exception of the Winter Olmpics, I watch the same schedule of television programs every night. I don't go out as often as I first did when I moved to Cincinnati, but when I do, part of me wishes I had just stayed in to avoid disrupting my comfortable monotony. This is the result of no one's work but my own. In other words, I'm an 80-year-old shut-in.

Maybe that explains why I've been listening to Neu's second album, appropriately titled Neu! 2, so religiously this past week and a half. The songs pound and swirl and fly and sputter with astronomical simplicity. Klaus Dinger's locked-down, methodical grooves and Michael Rother's spaceshuttle atmospherics only seem to grow more powerful and more necessary the more I hear them repeated. It's not for everyone.

If you do choose to write a song with only one note, there's only so much you can do: speed it up, slow it down, layer different tempos, play it louder or quieter, or simply repeat that perfect note ad infinitum. The gambit, of course, is that in doing so you're forced to walk a very fine line between bravery and boredom.

Neu!, more often than not, made it sound like that one note was all it ever took. But here's the catch: while half the songs on Neu! 2 are masterpieces of stripped-down, soul-scraping rock music, the other half literally takes the same handful of songs, and plays them faster, or slower, or takes the tape and chews it up. This can be maddening, especially if you insist on playing the entire album on repeat as I did, out of habit. Although some people make the mistake of calling this the first "remix" album (it's not), the real reason is that the Dusseldorf darlings simply ran out of money and their label refused to foot them any more funds. As a result, or in proto-punk defiance as it's been remarked, they made do with what recordings they had in Conrad Plank's barnyard studio and four songs and some odds and ends and created a full length.

The track here, "Lila Engel" (Lilac Angel), is Neu! at their most cavemannish. While Rother was known for pulling the band's strings toward ambience and melody; Dinger ran toward abrasive and confrontational sounds. "Lila Engel" is a Dinger song. I imagine if Animal from the Muppets ever went solo, it would sound something close to this.

As I listened to this, I couldn't help but notice the similarities to another song recorded around the same time in the mid-1970s in a politically divided Germany, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. I kept hearing the screams grow louder until I finally heard the observant words of a detox Iggy Pop: "Baby, baby, I like your pants." Click.

After the Stooges' combusted, Iggy fell into some unfashionable squalor. Lucky for him, as legend has it, David Bowie saw his old chum lying in the streets and said something to the effect of, "Iggy, you're a wreck. Let's get you cleaned up and we'll head on out to Berlin where there are trannies and anonymity and make beautiful new music." Bowie also inquired whether Rother would be interested in doing some guitar work with them while they were in Germany. Rother declined. Thankfully for us, imitation was never one of David's ethical qualms.