In February 2008 the city of New York was once again invaded by hordes of screaming girls and it could mean only one thing – another boy band was in town. This time however there was something different about the whole thing – all the slogans and declarations of love on the T-shirts and posters were not in English, but in German. “Bill, ess briiingt miiiisch oummm,” for example, (“Bill, it’s gonna kill me”) as the line from one of the band’s hits goes. This was also the refrain sung by most of the female fans at the Tokio Hotel gig at the Fillmore NY club – New York’s legendary concert venue that in the past has seen fans reeling in the aisles to such musical greats as Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
After taking Europe by storm the band went stateside and – to everybody’s amazement – managed to conquer America, too. At first the media back home in Germany were in some cases more amused than impressed, they did try however to find an explanation for the phenomenon. How could it be that four young guys – in fact, barely-of-age guys – from the town of Magdeburg in eastern Germany had now become icons of global youth culture, or even sex symbols?
Hair Like A Porcupine
Without doubt their look most definitely played a crucial role. The lead singer, Bill, has spiky hair like a porcupine, eyes lined with kohl and he is dressed like a punk, which makes him look like one of those Japanese manga figures. The guitarist, Tom, Bill’s identical twin brother, goes more for shaggy Rasta dreadlocks and the baggy hip-hop look. Fan forums are equally as obsessed with the way the brothers look as they are with the music.
Of course, there is never success without money. Tokio Hotel’s label, Universal, is one of the biggest on the music scene and has spared neither effort nor expense to market the quartet to a young audience via websites, publicity campaigns and magazines. This however is not enough to explain their success, especially when you think that only one tenth of all performing artists manage to bring home a profit for their recording companies. Promoting a new act, as we see, can quite definitely involve quite a few risks, as one of the business’s top dogs found out to its dismay – SonyBMG had signed on Tokio Hotel, but terminated their contract just before their breakthrough in 2005.
By word of mouth on new grapevines
Another vital publicity factor these days is the effect of internet platforms like YouTube and MySpace that enable new trends to spread like wildfire. It is a form of the classic word-of-mouth advertising that uses different channels to not only overcome international barriers, but also linguistic ones. This is in fact what makes the success of Tokio Hotel so surprising – most of the lyrics they sing are in German.
Before Tokio Hotel there were of course other German success stories. Kraftwerk, for example, who, with their song Autobahn, pioneered the myth of fast-lane freedom for fast-lane individuals. Nina Hagen is still a well-known face in the USA, famous for her outrageous performances; the same with Nena who managed get to number two in the US charts in 1983 with her song 99 Red Balloons. Since the end of the 1990s Rammstein has been the most successful musical export in German. With their explosive stage show, brute-force arrangements and their sometimes controversial lyrics the group promotes the cliché of the remorseless, sinister Teuton.
German graffiti in Rome
Tokio Hotel have also pulled off another great feat – they have triggered a huge, new surge of interest in the German language. “German is sexy,” as two female fans at the concert in New York told the German magazine, Focus. “Young Americans and Canadians have started learning German so that they can understand the lyrics better,” says Wolfram Hermann of the Goethe-Institut in Boston. “There has been a huge response,” confirms his colleague in Rome, Elisa Costa. In Italy ten per cent more teenagers between the ages of 11 and 16 have enrolled in German courses. In France, according to information published in the German news magazine, Spiegel, it as many as 25 per cent. On the institute’s website in Italy there was a competition in which you could win 100 Tokio Hotel concert tickets – in two weeks 5,000 people took part in it. They had to answer the questions in German. On the Rome underground graffiti has now appeared exalting the names of the band members and proclaiming in German messages like “ich liebe dich” (I love you) or “du bist mein Engel” (You are my angel).
Another clear sign of the group’s potential is the fact that T-shirts, posters and biographies are available all over the place, whether you are in Palermo or Istanbul, New York or Paris. Tokio Hotel has furthermore paved the way for other young German bands to make it in a big way, for example, Cinema Bizarre or Nevada Tan. This is the reason why branches of the Goethe-Institut in Europe and in North America are planning further online campaigns and cooperation projects with both schools and the press to enhance the spread of the German language.
Young, surprising and sexy
The aim here is to achieve what Hesse, Goethe and Grass, etc, did not quite manage to do. The fans at the Fillmore NY concert all sang in unison “Wir häm unns toadgeliiebt” [LOL...Toad?](We've loved ourselves to death) from the Tokio Hotel song, Loved To Death. It might not sound quite as elegant as Goethe’s Wayfarer's Night Song, “In allen Wipfeln spürest du kaum einen Hauch” (In all the treetops you feel hardly a breath of air) – maybe that is the reason why the quality press and state institutions were initially so reluctant to jump on the Tokio Hotel bandwagon. Can a band with such bizarre hairstyles and lyrics oozing with the Weltschmerz of youth represent a country that is respected as the world’s top exporting nation?
The answer lies with the fans. Not just in Germany, but everywhere the fans camp out for days in all kinds of weather in the hope of getting the best concert tickets – be it in Geneva, Tel Aviv or Moscow. It is hard to put into a nutshell why there is so much enthusiasm for Tokio Hotel. One thing is for sure – they have certainly managed to introduce the world to a new image of Germany – one that is young, surprising and sexy.
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