If the rock band Rammstein announces a new music video at short notice, you should get a bottle of smelling salts or the valerian drops from the closet with the medicines, you should be prepared for anything. In the past, Rammstein have treated cannibalism, incest or sado-masochismthey put on fat suits for video productions, shot in a brothel with porn actresses, played concentration camp prisoners and RAF terrorists in a really lasting crash course on German history. And then “Zeit” will be released on Thursday afternoon, the first new clip after three years of art, pandemic and paper shortage breaks, and after another six breathless minutes you have to take a deep breath and say: It’s in the horrible, marked by war and iron-hard attitude dilemmas March 2022 only this: the musical contribution of the hour.
The piece cannot be a reaction to the events, the visible production effort is too immense, the campaign attached to the song too complex. “Zeit” is the title track of a new Rammstein album, which was also revealed on Thursday and announced for the end of April. The director of the video – which, as is so often the case with this band, has the combined nutritional value of at least three Netflix series, four Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck films and two Ridley Scott historical dramas sprinkled in for spice – is Robert Gwisdek, from Berlin who was previously known for various achievements as an actor, musician and author, but not yet such a work.
It’s never that easy with Rammstein, there’s always a way that leads deeper
The masterful short film begins underwater, a strange creeper rising towards the light, wrapping itself like a rope or umbilical cord around the neck of one of the six Rammstein members floating deep in the ocean. Then everything runs backwards, then back and forth and in circles. You can see the prehistory in which the men flee in the storm with the lifeboat. In which they go into battle as partisans with archaic shotguns, transforming themselves back into their own childish alter egos, playing war with sticks in the forest. They are primal scenes of human violence, of a life that is indeed a struggle for survival, but is always led in community.
In the video, the flow of events is repeatedly brought to a halt by a ghostly presence in a black cloak, which suddenly appears like the monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001”. Death, one might think, but it’s not that easy either – as with Rammstein it’s often not as easy as it first appears: The porn illustrated violence, the fat suits illustrated loneliness and depression (“I don’t feel like it”) ), the RAF/concentration camp inmates pictures the deeply German involvement in unbridled violence and guilt.
In a central scene of “Zeit”, the scythes are now wielded by the Rammstein people themselves. And the supposedly dead eyes under the hood of the creepy messenger are actually more of a glowing kaleidoscope that opens up another productive level in the film. An intermediate world beyond time, in which the dust of pulverized monuments of eternity flows through the atmosphere like a mushroom cloud and the six musicians reverse their own births by pushing themselves back into the womb as babies – and yes, this is where it gets really, really crazy. Someone will probably crochet a scandal out of it in the coming days.
That this big, dark band would give us comfort and love again
“Time, please stop, stop,” sings Till Lindemann to the music of the elegantly elegiac ballad sprayed with the typical Rammstein industrial rust, “everyone knows the perfect moment.” Which you can read very closely and one-to-one, as you wish, as a small reflection on the transience of happiness. Or as a large, spacious vanitas mundi draft, which also tells of how pointless and hopeless the battle for all positions, heroic self-portraits, historical satisfactions and even petrol prices is when it has lost sight of the essence of what is human .
After two weeks of reporting on the war, that too appears to be a rather simple message, but we had better not stop believing in it. If need be, the images also help, between Christopher Nolan, “Metropolis”, a baroque prince’s mirror and a drama about the tree of life, which a pop video like “Time” gives us. A video to watch over and over again. And yes, also: wants. And when you suddenly realize that as a new Rammstein product it will probably be watched all over the world at the same momentwhere people currently still have internet service, in Kyiv and MoscowWashington and Paris, Crimea, Warsaw, Latvia and London.
The fact that this big band would give us comfort and love one day would have been laughed at for that too.