Stripped

Stripped live from Völkerball - And Till teasing
an entire audience of poor females!

I’m back again! After a rather long break. Personal things have been keeping me from this blog, but I’m back, stronger and happier than ever, and of course eager to bother people with what mess is inside my tiny Rammstein-obsessed brain. So here we go!

Stripped. One of the only songs that Rammstein has done in all English.

Most people appear to, most of the time, only acknowledge this brilliant song for the vibes it sends out. No doubt that this is a very erotic song, Tills deep voice and electric guitar makes it easy to understand why a lot of people tend to view this as one of the most erotic songs by Rammstein, and on this layer, I will agree with them.

But I do believe that this song works on several powerful layers.

An imagine from the movie "Metropolis".

There’s a certain nostalgia that hits me when I listen to this song, and think outside of the obvious sexual intention. Being the sucker for German history that I am, my thoughts reflect back to a very certain time period in Germany. What I think about is the period around the late 20’s and 30’s.

The song uses the name Metropolis. It’s a sci-fi movie from 1927. “You’re breathing in fumes; I taste when we kiss”. Now this line becomes very relevant, as Metropolis is portrayed as a huge industrial city, which is constantly covered in smoke which produces fumes.

To prove this point, I also want to include the recordings that Rammstein decided to use for this song.

Rammstein used Leni Riefenstahl’s recordings of the movie “Olympia” from 1938, which I also believe that they did to emphasize on the specific period, and not to cause all the fuss that they had afterwards with all the nazi and political accusations. 

All of these nostalgic perspectives renews the lines of the song where he sings “Come back to the land”. It is as if he beckons us to come back to the Germany that existed back in the 30’s, and as he continues “Where everything’s ours”, which in my opinion gets scarily close to what happened in World War II, but clears it out with “For a few hours”, and reminds us that this is only a short nostalgic reminiscence.

From Leni's "Olympia". 

Rammstein, and Till especially, always seemed to be directly against mindless consumerism. In many interviews, he claims that traveling is one of his greatest joys, and that he dislikes staying in the big cities for too long; it makes him depressed.

In many other of his lyrics, he launches an attack on the capitalistic USA, and the consumerism that comes as a result. Just listen to “Amerika” for further confirmation.

“Let me hear you make decisions without your television. Let me hear you speaking, just for me” seems to me like a blatant attack on consumerism. The lyrics clearly imply that the person is not able to make a decision for themselves without having to consult their TV (phone, computers, etc). It makes you think of a mindless person, almost a drone, or a ‘slave’ worker from Metropolis. “Let me see you stripped” could also apply for this person, the urge to strip them from all the products that enslave him/her, simply to find personality in this person, find some core and life.

So what do I think this song is saying?

A story about how things used to be. Before the consumerist society. Till takes us on a nostalgic trip back to society before the introduction of the consumerist mindset. A time before Mc Donalds, TV, Starbucks, MTV, the internet, everything that we can associate with consumerism. Maybe to find the values which we have forgotten, since he wants us to be “stripped” from all of these things.