Blixa Cooks Risotto

Last weekend, I had a bee in my bonnet to re-watch Urgh! A Music War. This was movie of a bunch of live concert films of musical groups from the early ’80’s, and predominantly not music that was played on the radio. Of the popular, commercial sort, there were bands like Police, UB40, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, Echo and the Bunnymen and then there were bands that were only on college radio, or only playing live and you had to catch them if they came to your town on tour (Dead Kennedys, X, The Cramps). Some of the latter group made it to MTV but mostly not. We knew about some of these groups at the time, but not all.

The movie came out in 1982, so it was six years before the fall of the Berlin Wall just to situate it. There were two things about re-watching it that were really fun; the film on Youtube is presented as a series of videos so it’s easy to zap through the unlistenable stuff (I mean, I know he’s supposed to be great and all but I never “got” Père Ubu) and all the track listings are on Wikipedia, so it’s possible to get information about the musicians as we watched. (Klaus Nomi was an early victim of AIDS. Magazine was founded by a guy from the Buzzcocks, that sort of thing.)

And all that, of course, brought us to talking about the other stuff we might have listened to at the time. We went through what was popular from the German side, since my partner’s a German speaker (Nina Hagen, Falco) and I remembered something so very silly that I found online a while back. Blixa Bargeld (of Einstürzende Neubaten and who was one of Nick Cave’s original Bad Seeds) has done a few cooking videos. You can watch Blixa Bargeld in Einstürzende Neubaten trying desperately to give you a headache (https://youtu.be/qgXvzMCinog) and, many years later, trying to give you advice on how not to have your risotto stick (https://youtu.be/PdBrATEMPjM) . Then more recently there’s a video of him making braised Savoy cabbage, looking his age (https://youtu.be/84fh_fv5BTY)(he was born in 1959). It just seemed so very silly and so very…sweet.

Things seemed so scary back when the movie Urgh! was made, with the nuclear arms race going full tilt, and the Soviet Union about to crack at the seams (but that wasn’t in the cards just yet). And now, today, we’re back to a scary time. I am curious, though, about music today. Is there anything now that has the raw power of some of those punk bands? Did it help that at the time we were in an “us” vs a “them” situation, whereas now we are in a time of “me” vs “my neighbor”?

I don’t have any answers, but enjoy the links. It was not a simpler time back then, but it has the glow of nostalgia now. If you were alive at the time, you were younger, and there were more doors open for your future. Now I just want to know how to make braised Savoy cabbage.