CITY OF EXILES: VOLUME ONE
Many of the Wahlberliner featured in City of Exiles created some fine music. In homage to Berlin's musical exiles, here is City of Exiles: Volume One, featuring some seminal Wahlberliner songs from the Wall era to the 2010s.
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1. Miss Jayne County - Berlin
American transgender punk singer Miss Jayne County was a regular in Berlin in the late '70s and early '80s. Her 1979 album, Things Your Mother Never Told You, featured the new wave/post-punk trailblazer «Berlin», a song that, according to one reviewer, «put into words everything David Bowie (among others) tried to convey about that city». |
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2. Stereo Total - Ich bin der Stricherjunge Françoise Cactus was 17 when she arrived in Berlin from France in 1981. She didn't expect to hang around very long. After playing in bands throughout the '80s, she formed Stereo Total in the early 1990s with Brezel Göring, an exile who arrived in Berlin from West Germany in 1988. The pop/electro/chanteuse band play to an adoring fan-base stretching from Paris to Tokyo and New York, but their sound, like this classic track from 2007, is born in Berlin. |
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3. Blake Baxter - When A Thought Becomes U
The year that the seminal Tresor nightclub opened in a ruined bank vault in East Berlin in 1991, it became the base camp for Detroit techno pioneers like Blake Baxter, who produced this defining track the same year. 4. Ton Steine Scherben - Macht Kaputt Was Euch Kaputt Macht (Destroy What Destroys You) The band that inspired Françoise Cactus to move to Berlin were part of Berlin's early squatting counterculture. Best known for this rebel anthem, singer Rio Reiser (who came from an itinerant German family) also wrote the protest song that marked the first occupation of a building in Berlin, Kreuzberg’s Georg von Rauch Haus (now part of the Bethanien Art House). |
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6. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - The Carny and From her to eternity, from the Wim Wenders film, Wings of Desire (1987)
Wim Wenders chose this band of mostly Australian exiles to appear in his great Berlin film because they sounded like the city. Wenders wanted to capture the thing that «seems so palpably there when you arrive in Berlin: a feeling in the air and under your feet and in people’s faces that makes life in this city so different from life in other cities». 7. Hanns Eisler - Auferstanden Aus Ruinen (Risen from the Ruins)
Vienna-raised German composer Hanns Eisler, who had become a zealous Berlin Red after moving to the city in 1925, and soon collaborated with Brecht, penned the rather uplifting East German national anthem, Auferstanden aus Ruinen, on his return to Berlin in 1949 -having escaped the Nazis in '33, he was then kicked out of the US during the Red purges. 8. Iggy Pop - The Passenger Iggy wrote the song «The Passenger», perhaps the most symbolic expression of his Berlin exile, during one of his regular aimless S-Bahn train journeys around the city. |
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9. Puppetmastaz - Hammerhead A surreal all-puppet hip hop band with members from the US, Canada and Germany, the act «basically rule over the Berlin underground», said Chilly Gonzales in 2001, having also been a collaborator. 10. Jon Rose - The Long and Short of It
An England-raised Australian experimental violinist, Jon Rose first checked out Berlin in 1981 and moved here in '85, becoming a denizen of the avant-music scene on both sides of the Wall. In 2012, Jon assembled an 11 piece string orchestra in Berlin to perform a work he composed on Australian desert fences. |
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11. Stereo Total - Baby Revolution
In 2003, Canadian director Bruce LaBruce shot the art-porn film, The Rasberry Reich, in Berlin on a very low budget in public locations (without permission), and using both established thesps and local porn actors. The campy parody of the Red Army Faction inspired Françoise Cactus to sing the song «Baby Revolution»—released on Stereo Total’s 2007 album, Paris<>Berlin—which continued the film's theme of sexual emancipation - the video clip is an outtake from the film. |