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Bonjour à toutes et à tous!
Oh what a pleasure it is to be back! Welcome to the eighth issue of our newsletter. Did you miss us in January and February? It's already the middle of March!? Well, we've both had a bit of a turbulent and exciting start to the new year, but now we'll try to get back to sending monthly, we promise.
In fact, the newsletter allows us both to escape from the daily routine still dominated by Corona and to stay in touch with our subscribers, who now exceed 100. Yay! 💌 We are happy about every single reader and of course also about feedback and recommendations! This is a project by friends for friends. A little insight into the music we like to listen to or the thoughts that are on our minds.
In January, we had to laugh a lot at this tweet from El Hotzo, because it charmingly illustrated how sick we are of walking and zooming.
We two have always been fans of going for a walk and wrote about it in our last issue. We remain fans of the stroll. But yes, of course, Corona is annoying and we all wish that the restrictions would come to an end. Zoomfatigue is getting real.
In issue seven of our little newsletter, we wrote about how normality probably came to an end in 2020. So now we want to clarify what that actually means. We probably all long for some normality - especially today. So we will devote ourselves to a topic that otherwise often gets cut short, precisely because normality by its nature is rarely the subject of close scrutiny. Moreover, by addressing the issue of normality, we will eventually learn, or at least better understand, what kind of society we actually (want to) live in?
As you may have noticed (a modest introduction to French chanson was already given in edition #006), the two of us are quite the "francophiles" and therefore give this newsletter a bit of a French touch once again.
As you will notice, the newsletter is focused here and there on the German-speaking area. However, we always try to include corresponding English-language links or supplementary explanations where possible.
But now back to normal! Sit back, make yourself a cup of tea or coffee. Enjoy an extra-long newsletter!
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Music N°1
Daft Punk - Veridis Quo
Two helmet-wearing retro-futurists from France stop making music after 28 very(!) successful years. The end of Daft Punk has turned everyone in Paris into Daft Punk lovers for a moment. At the moment, great nostalgia and informal national mourning set in, knowing that the two avant-gardists of French music would not return. Yet Daft Punk released their last album eight years ago, so it had been quiet around them for a while. The huge response to their farewell speaks volumes about the duo's importance for France and beyond.
Anyone with even vague memories of the sound, having heard Daft Punk in the supermarket, knew: we are losing superstars and favorites. In fact, Daft Punk has already ended pre-mortem in 2017, by a medley of the French army at Bastille Day. When Macron can't help grinning proudly and Trump's hair bobs in time, any avant-garde project is finished. Full stop. It's not a bad thing at all, just like the official end of Daft Punkt, because the fantastic music will stay with us for a long time. As someone put it on Youtube: "Daft Punk didn't die, they simply became music."
By the way, the clearly better medley comes from Cologne from the Rundfunk-Tanzorchester Ehrenfeld and can be found here. If you are wondering why Lorenz Rhode always has a tube stuck in his mouth when he "sings", listen to him yourself, search the internet for "Talkbox" and indeed Daft Punk was a pioneer of this technique.
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Photographed by Karl Lagerfeld for Interview Magazine
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The legendary duo, founded in 1993, helped define the French style of house music (French-touch) and democratized it by opening it up. Their first album Homework was a landmark in dance music. Just think of the iconic sound of Around the World. Daft Punk quickly began to become an iconic audio-visual experience - the robotic outfits began to become their trademark - at the latest with the second album Discovery, which we personally particularly like because here vocals and color were added to the technical sound. This is certainly why their meteoric rise began in 2001.
Quo Vadis? Our recommendation is the track Veridis Quo, the pseudo title track from this very album! You do the magic trick by pronouncing Veridis Quo once, realizing that it is a description of the sound of Daft Punk: very disco (verydis co). Read backwards, the result is - Discovery. With the flutes and the beautiful chords, sound selection, tempo, and melody, it is perfect for all its minimalism. What is the point of it all? (Quo vadis?) is a question about the big picture and probably an accurate description of Daft Punk's musical project. They are interested in the human(!)-machine connection and the use of technology by humans like no other. Daft Punk best manifests this in 2005, with a snotty guitar sound: Human After All. With Daft Punk, doubt is constantly present: Is the machine the musician's ally, the extension of his creative power - or is it his enemy, automating him and making him a slave?
Daft Punk's appearance corresponds, to some extent, to the realities of our time: we live through avatars and digital worlds, the real world, and our normality recedes into the distance. The mask, the distance and the use of the machine are an aesthetic testimony to our time. Now Daft Punk switches off the machine and has obviously decided not to submit to its compulsion of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger anymore.
Further tips: Beyond, Instant Crush und Something About Us
R.I.P. Daft Punk and have fun rediscovering this insane music!
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Focus.
Covid sucks. When will the stress finally ease? If you open a newspaper these days, you will find a great longing for the return of normality. "More normality from Easter onwards", "Normality from summer onwards", "A piece of normality", "Must give children back their old normality!" etc. And of course, we don't feel differently. But sorry, what does that mean in concrete terms? Where do we actually want to go back to?
Let's try to start with the basics. Normality is what a society takes for granted. Normal is therefore what we are used to. The normal is given a priori. That is, the common, average life we live. The perception of this is first subjective and we may all have slightly different understandings of normality. Implicitly, however, a society probably always agrees on a collective understanding of normality.
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Statistics can try to describe this reality mathematically. We use concepts such as normal distributions, averages, mean values and standard deviations. We derive the normal from the observed. At the same time, the use of the term normality also implies a norm, i.e. the values to which one should orient oneself. We use the word normal to indicate desirable, acceptable, healthy, promotable behavior. So we see a double meaning of descriptive and normative normality. So far, so good.
Let us add the temporal dimension to these two variants. Let us understand the average, the observable as the present. We describe, for example, how we live. The question of the norm goes beyond that - into the future. We ask ourselves, for example, how we want to live. Now it gets exciting! If we think of normality in terms of temporal variables, conflicts may arise. We note that using normality in a normative way is treacherous.
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“Wer den Normen entspricht, kann es sich leisten zu bezweifeln, dass es sie gibt.”
― Carolin Emcke
EN: "Those who conform to the norm can afford to doubt that it exists."
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Carolin Emcke describes this quite tangibly in her (perhaps best) book Wie wir begehren (How We Desire), which Jan once recommended to Felix, andwhich both now love. She describes, similar to the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, how society assigns us places, pronounces judgments (e.g. what is normal and what is not) that we cannot escape. Possibly unintentionally, this establishes boundaries, and places individuals and groups in a hierarchical order. This narrative is also described in Didier Eribon's work Return to Rheims and even more eloquently in End of Eddy by Édouard Louis. I would recommend both books to everyone!
Normality inevitably plays a role in our everyday lives. It is practicable not to constantly question all conceivable values. Normality enables us to act, but must not limit our ability to reflect. The morally questionable use of the term "normality" in (currently very hip) identity-political discussions is a good example of this. We, therefore, think that normality should not become a category of political debate. A very good and balanced introduction to the discussion on distribution or recognition can be found in the APUZ booklet, which is available online and can be ordered free of charge (by the way, just like the BPB's (German Federal Agency for Civic Education) very readable magazine Fluter!).
In the discussion about identity politics, one part is consistently ignored. As Jonas Schaible writes in SPIEGEL, as long as it stays that way "only produce injuries, not knowledge." (Similiar to the German article is this one in english) Identity politics is everywhere, only it is not recognized as such by the majority as long as they deal with the normal. "The normal is not under pressure to justify itself, the normal is never under suspicion of ideology." This was evident in the mad debate about the single-family house, which rapidly moved away from factual, ecological, and social reasons to immaterial, cultural, and emotional ones - and this is exactly how a group affiliation becomes the focus of politics. The praise of single-family homes is an example of identity politics of normality.
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Music N°2
Jakie Quartz - Mise au point & Yuksek - Icare
It is an anecdote from everyday life that Ariane (Mélanie Thierry) tells her psychiatrist (Frédéric Pierrot): She says she overheard this song from the '80s in the car next to her while riding her bike and spontaneously had to sing along. Mise au point was the summer hit in France in 1983 and is on the playlist of our newsletter. Much more than this track, the series En Thérapie is a hit - a masterpiece, a chef-d'œuvre! And a terrific narrative about normality. Available in German and French at the Arte Mediatheque. Those who can, should watch in French.
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My favorite series this year is about France after the November 2015 attacks. In Therapy allows a profound immersion into French society and its traumas. It has a very sensitive take and a terrific tale of normality. Parisians are used to the lively activity on the terraces of bars, cafes, and restaurants. A normality that is brutally and heinously attacked. The series follows the sessions of a Parisian psychiatrist (Frédéric Pierrot, fantastic!) in his cabinet. From one patient to another, the series takes us to find out: Catharsis is as much individual as collective. Once again, this is collective individualism - kollektiv individualismus in German.
Each week, Philippe Dayan receives in his chamber a surgeon in dissolution, a couple in crisis, a teenager with suicidal thoughts, and a BRI (French Special Forces) agent traumatized by his stint at the Bataclan. The emotional earthquake these shattered lives cause him, is unprecedented. To escape it (and this is the exciting thing about In Therapy) he himself seeks help from his former analyst, with whom he had broken off contact for almost 12 years.
What sets the series apart is its minimalist focus on the pure dialogue between people. The acting, the embodiment of the characters, is excellent in my opinion (the series features a range of French acting stars or aspiring ones like Céleste Brunnquell). In this respect, the series is also not a "simple" series, but quite sophisticated entertainment, whose dramatic content increases from episode to episode and touched me personally. Normally, the work of the psychoanalyst takes place behind closed doors, what is said remains in the room. Now we are right there in all the sessions (one episode = one session). We hear everything and we have to deal with it, like Philippe. As the analyst sits there on his armchair and listens, never saying his opinion, but mirrors and plays back, so one can also very well relate accusations of Adel (the policeman) to oneself: to always remain passive, to dream, and to only think clever thoughts, instead of acting out, so that "the world out there does not collapse".
Recommendation: definitely watch it! You need some patience for the first 4 episodes, then the series really starts to pick up speed. The music for the series was written by the French producer and DJ Yuksek, from whom we hear another danceable track, Icare.
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Naturalistic fallacy
What comes to mind when thinking about normality is a concept of ethics. We'd like to share that briefly here because it often comes up in our everyday lives. Although we as humans often infer what we want from what we are used to, one cannot be inferred from the other - one would be committing a naturalistic fallacy. (To infer from the natural properties of X that X is good. The intuitive idea is that evaluative inferences require at least one evaluative premise - purely factual premises about the naturalistic properties of things do not entail evaluative inferences). For more for philosophy nerds, and incidentally, an excellent resource, see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy page here.
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Music N°3
Arlo Parks – Angel's Song
With so much good stuff, where do we begin? It's hard to pick out only one Arlo Parks song. Let's try Angel's Song anyway, a melancholic ballad. Her best songs get by with very little fanfare because it puts her in the spotlight. But we can undoubtedly recommend her entire, though still relatively young discography. Including: two great covers of Radiohead (Creep) and King Krule (Baby Blue). She strips the originals down until only the lyrics and a single instrument remain, purely focussing on the essentials. This works very well, especially with such strong lyrics. Her songs are cool pop (of the good kind), feel-good music that is sometimes needed. Oh, it's just fun to listen to her.
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Scratches and state failure
Now for something more practical: Corona has scratched at the beautiful surface of our reality, that much seems clear. What is not so clear is where we go from there. In the introduction and the last newsletter, we wrote that 2020 may have been the end of normality. Now we'd like to explain that in a little more detail.
Especially in Germany (but also in many parts of Europe), we came from a time of seemingly great stability into the corona crisis and many now ultimately wish for their old normality to return. 2020 sucked and was mostly just a horrible year. 2020 got quite a bit of bashing for that, too. "I didn't sign up for this" or something like that was often saidabout last year. But when we are all vaccinated, does it then just go back to the supposed pre Corona normality? Is a happy decade finally coming?
Unfortunately, this is illusory bogus. Sorry. The year 2021 will probably bring the realization that the normality we wish for is no longer available. What? Why? Because the current mega-crisis was the consequence of many accumulated crises in the past. We don't talk about that, or we talk about it far too little. Sasha Lobo recently did it in the SPIEGEL (for an English article see here) and explained it to a visibly overwhelmed Mr. Brinkhaus (German member of parliament) on TV.
This crisis is hitting us so hard because we have failed to make important investments in our future. We have cut back on the healthcare system, on digitization, on administration, on the education system, on combating climate change, in short: on the resilience of our society. We find that we are no longer in tune with this supposed normality; our romantic, nostalgic definition of normality no longer holds up against real normality. What we consider normal has less and less in common with current reality, in other words, is illusory.
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Normality as a crisis landscape
We can understand the new insecurity as something negative, but also as the end of the status quo glorification, the glorification of normality that is a crisis landscape.
With all the crises we have already experienced in this century, the financial crisis, the so-called refugee crisis, etc., there was always an attempt to dub them as exceptions. Afterward, people were always surprised that yet another crisis had come along - as is now the case with Corona. The promise was always that we would eventually maintain normality. This stability promise of the Merkel era became the people's claim because it was not refuted or not addressed strongly enough in the last decades. After the crisis, everything went back to normal. But that is no longer the case! That was one crisis too much. That normality will now return does not seem to be an option. The maxim of our crisis management is guided by a great nostalgia for normality. Instead of learning from the crisis and taking a step forward, the goal is always to reach the pre-crisis stage.
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Weekend escape to the Atlantic coast, France 2021
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Nothing speaks against warm memories and a bit of nostalgia. But beware, friends! The longing for supposed normality becomes a problem when it makes it difficult to arrive in the present and when it makes it more complicated to adapt to the here and now and to our tomorrow. A politician like Olaf Scholz, for example, likes to write down what used to be cool two years ago because back then people liked it. That might be a general problem of our times.
"Improve on digitization," still holds as a punchline for election campaigns and is considered progressive, but in the vast majority of cases, it is as void as lyrics in gangster rap. It's embarrassing. Fax machines in 2021 are not normal, this should not correspond to normality. How on earth can Germany be in such a lousy position in terms of digitization and not draw any conclusions from this other than to "improve on digitization"?
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Music N°4
L'impératrice - Peur des filles
T'as peur des filles
Ah si seulement c'était des gars
Peur des filles
Elles préparent un sale coup ça s'voit
We stay in France with the flirty and charming pop of L'Impératrice. The soon-to-be-released album is about the cœur brisé, the broken heart. It's even groovier than their previous stuff, which already had a lot of groove. The video for it is cool with an aesthetic of 1960s movies while also paying homage to horror films, combined with feminist lyrics. But it's the song above all that stays in your head for a long time. T'as peur des filles - hopefully not?
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Between the conservatives in Germany and Instagram in Dubai
The last few years of stagnation were embodied and administered by the grand coalition in Germany of SPD (social democrats) and Union (CDU/CSU - conservatives). This can be stopped this year (with the elections in Germany). New options for action are emerging, and with them, hope for a new normal worth living. Ideally, the self-satisfied trepidation that radiates above all from the conservatives in Germany (who are currently demonstrating, in a gigantic corruption scandal, what governing means to them) will be gone. We can also see the creation of new normality as liberation.
Everything sucks right now, right? But Germany's influencers are traveling to Dubai, as Jan Böhmermann teaches us in his new show ZDF Magazin Royale. We laughed our heads off at t his truly bizarre excursion, which probably says a lot about our zeitgeist (after all, millions of Germans follow these influencers). You can see it here. Recently, Böhmermann is visibly concentrating more on his successful research formats, such as this really funny explanatory video on sales tax carousels. Beautiful. By the way, this very topic is now being discussed for the first time by the renowned Suhrkamp (publishing house) with influencers as symptomatic social figures of our time and the "ideology of advertising bodies". Sounds exciting for us here with our newsletter without advertising and all the nonsense from the Internet.
Towards the end, we want to try to come up with some positive thoughts on normality.
Normality is actually something very reassuring, something to reflect on, a place of retreat, culture in many ways. And yet we all have our very own understanding of normality. Collective individualism. In the end, everyone is equal. Normality is a self-conception, a very subjective one. What we consider normal is familiar to us and we believe in it. It's our comfort zone, and if we like to hang out in the same places. We just shouldn't make the mistake of starting to project our normality onto others or take it as an irrefutable reality.
Stay with us and stay healthy!❤
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Music N°5
Arctic Monkeys - Don’t sit down ‘cause I moved your chair
As we have already seen today normality is or should be in motion. We have to get up and move on. The Arctic Monkeys provide the soundtrack for this. But what should we do?
Some tips: Go into business with a grizzly bear, Bite the lightning and tell me how it tastes, Kung fu fighting on your roller skates or Fill in a circular hole with a peg that's square
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The Pathology of Normalcy
Erich Fromm (be sure to read To Have or to Be?), philosopher and psychoanalyst of the Frankfurt School, has long explored the concept of normality and warns forcefully against the unhealthiness of our normality, a pathology of normalcy. In doing so, Fromm starts with the society-oriented understanding of mental health. He problematizes that mental health means the adaptation of the individual to society. We do well as a society when we humans function in a certain way. The problem becomes obvious as soon as one asks, whether an individual who adapts to a sick society can be healthy. Our society is certainly not in the best condition. As Fromm's colleague Theodor Adorno said in a legendary answer in SPIEGEL 1969:
SPIEGEL: Professor two weeks ago the world seemed all right...
ADORNO: Not to me.
The world is not alright. Our society is not healthy. The integration of the human being into social structures and the harnessing of his strengths for economic and social purposes can be based on exploitation - with the consequence that the individual is alienated from his actual human powers of freedom, truth, justice, tenderness, love, loyalty, etc... It is precisely this level that Erich Fromm calls the "pathology of normalcy." The "human possibilities" are in danger of being socially eliminated. Fromm assumes that people perceive themselves and their way of life as "normal", although they cannot be considered healthy in the sense of Fromm's humanistic conception, rather they suffer from a "socially formed defect".
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Music N°6
Bilderbuch - Magic Life (album)
This is Bilderbuch. Politically incorrect, sexy and obsessed with musical collage - in all aspects. Probably most of you here already know this band, but we wanted to recommend them again, maybe for our English-speaking audience. Sweetlove, Bungalow, Baba and sneakersforfree - the best tracks of the album should be discovered again and again!
The late work of the band is still top class. Bilderbuch remains committed to keeping the level up and continuing to play with clichés, crashing genres and making their ever-growing concert audience dance (okay, maybe again at the end of the year?).
While they still took a sharp change of direction after each of their first two albums, Bilderbuch seems to have arrived meanwhile, with the album Magic Life. They worked on their music for a long time and changed in years from conventional to exciting. From boring indie rock to crazy art-pop, they sunk even further into ironic self-importance. This is very pleasant because before Bilderbuch, it was quite asexual in the German-speaking music world, everything was very correct and oriented to the lyrics.
Lyrically, Bilderbuch play in a region that is usually avoided by German-speaking artists. The others have a hard time with sexiness, which might explain the boom of bands that don't struggle with such inhibitions.
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Le fin.
This was our eighth newsletter, an extra long newsletter. We hope you enjoyed it. We welcome feedback, any recommendations and also new subscriptions. In fact, no one else will know about this newsletter as we do not advertise. So all that remains is your recommendation. Newsletters still have something of spam, advertising, coercion. Unfortunately, because we don't want to have anything to do with that. In the first issue, we wrote why we think email is such a great medium.
Please send us your answers and feedback! The email to the lettre is called: newsletter@kollektivindividualismus.de. And on the internet you can still visit our website, hang out and be amazed. Oh, and we have an archive with all previous newsletters as well.
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