As mentioned before the Nine Inch Nails were booked headlining for the Frequency festival. But they had a very hard stand. The organizers gave them the next to last slot at the main stage on the 2nd day (starting 10:30pm). Generally this is not a bad slot– prime time at the evening, main stage with room for a lot of crowd, not too late – so the crowd shouldn’t be completely exhausted. But due to some unfortunate circumstances it ended in a scandal.

The slot was between the two German bands “Beatsteaks” and “Die Ärzte”, those two bands share a lot of fans. One reason for the Beatsteaks success was advertising of “Die Ärzte”, who referred to the Beatstakes in on of their songs. Also both German bands play German punk rock, where NIN’s style is American industrial rock from that point of view, they would have been far more compatible with Interpol (they are doing American indie rock). But Interpol was put into a similar slot trapped between two other German bands (“Jan Delay” and “Freundeskreis”) at the second stage.

Plenty of people attended the Beatsteaks’ concert, who afterwards stayed in the front rows waiting for Die Ärzte, without any interest in the performance of NIN. Even worse, a lot of them was not open minded enough to take the NIN performance and started chants demanding Die Ärzte on stage (“Wir wollen die Ärzte sehen! Wir wollen die Ärzte sehen!”. So the atmosphere got really screwed. NIN lead Trent Reznor commented the show

“the worst performance and certainly the worst crowd of the whole tour by far.”

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Event at 17:54 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Today a friend of mine drew my attention to a website almost glorifying the vandalism of a car at the summer breeze festival. A person was drunken driving at the festival grounds and almost injures other participants running over a few tents, after having a discussion with those people he leaves his car open and unattended. Within the next day this story spreads around the festival ground and somehow almost everybody seems to know this person and has had problems with him. Then the car of this person becomes target of the arising aggression… So the abandoned car gets demolished by a mob of festival participants. Obviously no one at the festival site was sober enough to prevent this. At the the Wacken-message board a discussion amongst regular festival visitors about right or wrong of this action was initiated.

This discussion and the whole website might be quite interesting for our sociologists around. Some of the “offenders” reveal there identity and are even showing off that they were part of the events.

I would have expected a little more civil courage of people at the festival – in my opinion there is no justification to take the law into one’s own hands.

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Lost and Found at 19:03 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

For days I’ve been thinking about a high sophisticated topic to blog about. Today a short article on the World Youth Day in Cologne gives me an impulse to reflect a little bit on the changing relations in our society. A generation away, when my parents had my age it was not that common to travel foreign countries. A visit to Paris was a real highlight at that time. But during the last years Europe and our world grew quite close together. The enhanced mobility with fast train connections in Europe and discount Airlines did their part to make traveling very easy. Some 25 years ago it was something special to visit a football game at the other end of the country – new you visit a Champions League Match at the other end of Europe.
So it is no problem to have international gathering of people! And if one of the biggest communities – the Christian church – invites you can get 400000 young people gathered together. With his business Know-How the german President Horst Köhler encouraged the participants to use the chance to form new friendships.

“Enjoy your stay in Germany. I hope you will return to your home countries with new energy and confidence, remembering the impressions of this World Youth Day with lots of new phone numbers and e-mail addresses in your pockets. Do not let go of the hands reaching out to you over the next few days.”

I think it is a real good chance for our youth to get in touch with different cultures and will help them to lose xenophobia. The xenophobia issue reminds me a little on Arthur C Clarke’s “Childhood’s end”, which I read last week. To really work together with an alien race, it takes two generations, until the humans are finally allowed to see the alien race – first the humans got to learn to accept the aliens. Globalization and global collaboration takes it’s time – but with events like this World Youth day we really have a great step towards becoming a worldwide community. Gathering of the youth will help people to become more tolerant, and enhance the willingness to work together beyond national borders.

With study programs, which bring you abroad, and the traditional school exchange many people get the chance to form networks around the world within their education. Communication over a global medium like the internet brings people together, too. (Without playing Astrowars I would probably never know that there exists a place like the Prince Edwards Island – no I have some friends over their, and I’d really liked to visit them some day!). There are many more new developments, which bring people together all over the world – let’s hope that we all make the best of it. So I’m connecting to Horst Köhlers appeal – make the best out of your chance to get connected to the world!

Interesting is that of course the issue of sexuality amongst the youth is an issue. The point of view of the Catholic Church, which is head of the gathering, is “no sex before marriage”. And as Pope John Paul II put it the use of condoms is a sin. But for the young people an open dealing with that issue is common sense. This does not mean that young people would get intimate with each other in an ill-considered manner – they make their decision dependant on the feeling of love not onto the institution of marriage. In a conservative community where the intuition of marriage is still one of the most important institutions this paradigm shift is not accepted. So it is not surprising, that authorities of the church get annoyed asked about that issue. But as it is a important issue for the youth I think this topic will be discussed amongst the participants. I think many participants are going to discuss. Partnership and sexuality go together and partnership is an important issue for young people, who seek there place in live. So it will be an issue, trying to ignore it, because it is a explosive topic will not prevent that.

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Daily Life at 07:25 | Comments (2) | Trackback (1)