Skip to main content

Klaus Nomi Performs with Kraftwerk on German Television (1982)

You’ll hardly ever run into a description of German New Wave wunderkind Klaus Nomi that doesn’t contain a reference to Weimar Germany. It would seem like a serious oversight not to mention Nomi’s embodiment of Weimar cabaret mannerisms, fitted for a space-age late-20th century. But the influence was far more than a stylistic borrowing. Nomi wasn’t just “the most German act ever,” as blogger Debris Slide writes; “Weimar Republic comes to Danceteria, except with spaceships” may also have been the most historically gay act in modern pop.

The Weimar Republic is well known as “a period of remarkable artistic energy,” writes Andrew Dickson at the British Library, “a roaring surge of modernist art, theatre, design, dance and film.” It was also a time when “the constraints of 19th-century manners and mores were torn down.” Hidden sexualities could emerge in public in Berlin, thanks a relaxed policing policy, as historian Robert Beachy shows in his book Gay Berlin. The fine arts and culture of Weimar flourished alongside the cabaret scene, whose camp showed up in everything from German Expressionist film to avant-garde opera.

“I think there probably had never been anything like this before,” Beachy tells NPR, “and there was no culture as open again until the 1970s.” Klaus Nomi arrived in the 70s with his cabaret space alien act to announce that the creative and personal freedoms of Weimar had returned, and he was their avatar, freely mixing opera and pop with astonishing facility, incorporating mime and vaudeville. “The influence of playwright and theatrical icon Bertolt Brecht would come to serve as a definitive touchstone” for Nomi’s career, writes Evan Zwisler at Flypaper.

“One of the ideas that Nomi incorporated into his own act was Verfremdungseffekt (or, ‘the distancing effect’)”—drawing heightened attention to the performance as performance, a significant feature of nearly all avant-garde theater in the early 20th century. Klaus Nomi was also the most Modernist act ever, at least in pop music. He would have fit in with a Dada cabaret revue of sixty years earlier. I’m not sure what it says about Berlin in the 70s that Nomi only truly found himself while onstage in New York. He moved to the city in 1972 after working as an usher in Berlin opera houses, where his astonishing soprano went unappreciated.

Nomi became “a quietly revolutionary part of the New York City art scene,” notes Zwisler, inspiring Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. He appeared on Saturday Night Live with David Bowie in 1979 and in the 1981 documentary Urgh! A Music War. Had AIDS not claimed his life in 1983, Nomi’s fame may have spread even farther and wider. As it stood, however, the year before his death, it had at least spread to his home country, where he was welcomed by TV host Thomas Gottschalk on the German program No Sowas!, performing with Kraftwerk, the biggest German pop cultural export to date.

See Nomi sing the aria from Camille Saint-Saens' “Samson and Delilah." Then, we have a rare treat: the very Caligari-like cabaret of Kraftwerk, at the height of their austere synth pop fame. Nomi returns to sing “Total Eclipse" from his first album. You can read an English translation of Nomi’s between-song interview with Gottschalk here. The host wraps up this segment by saying, “he is already a big name in America, and now we present him here in Germany.”

Related Content:

The Enchanting Opera Performances of Klaus Nomi

Klaus Nomi: Watch the Final, Brilliant Performance of a Dying Man

David Bowie and Klaus Nomi’s Hypnotic Performance on SNL (1979)

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

Klaus Nomi Performs with Kraftwerk on German Television (1982) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/2U4qemE
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

Howard Zinn’s Recommended Reading List for Activists Who Want to Change the World

Image by via Wikimedia Commons Back in college, I spotted A People’s History of the United States   in the bags and on the bookshelves of many a fellow undergraduate. By that time, Howard Zinn’s alternative telling of the American story had been popular reading material for a couple of decades, just as it presumably remains a couple more decades on. Even now, a dozen years after Zinn’s death, his ideas about how to approach U.S. history through non-standard points of view remain widely influential. Just last month, Radical Reads featured the reading list he originally drew up for the  Socialist Worker , pitched at “activists interested in making their own history.” Zinn’s recommendations naturally include the work of other historians, from Gary Nash’s Red, White and Black: The Peoples of Early America (“a pioneering work of ‘multiculturalism’ dealing with racial interactions in the colonial period”) to Vincent Harding’s There Is a River: The Black Struggle for ...
Post a Comment
Read more

1,100 Delicate Drawings of Root Systems Reveals the Hidden World of Plants

We know that plants can inspire art. If you, personally, still require convincing on that point, just have a look at Elizabeth Twining’s Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants , the drawings of Ernst Heinrich Haeckel , Elizabeth Blackwell’s  A Curious Herbal , and Nancy Anne Kingsbury Wollstonecraft’s Specimens of the Plants and Fruits of the Island of Cuba — not to mention the paintings of Georgia O’ Keeffe — all previously featured here on Open Culture. But those works concern themselves only with plant life as it exists above ground. What goes on down below, underneath the soil? That you can see for yourself — and without having to pull up one of our fine flowering (or non-flowering) friends to do so — at Wageningen University’s online archive of root system drawings . “The outcome of 40 years of  root system excavations in Europe,” says that site, the collection contains 1,180 diagrams of species from  Abies alba (best known today as a kind of Christmas t...
Post a Comment
Read more