Bis nach Toulouse (Bonus Edition)

Music knows no borders

     

What tragically small-minded fool wrote the iTunes album review for this? "The debate as to whether Euro-rock is a legitimate musical style is ongoing..." ??? How insular and shortsighted. Music is human, based on universal emotions and experiences. If you've got hands and vocal chords and a working brain, you can pick up a guitar and sing some words with it. There may be languages that are harder to adapt to the forms of rock music, but I think it's utterly baffling and rather disgusting that American and British culture critics and audiences should buy into the notion that English-language rock music is somehow first-class and everything else just shabby imitations.

German in particular is a language that works magnificently with songwriting structures for rock and pop, and in case we've forgotten, Germany has centuries of musical preeminence in their history, with a deeply rich and vibrant tradition of emotional, beautiful, astonishing work from composers and musicians. The electric guitar came to being in the States at a time when Europe happened to be in the throes of political and military upheaval. Naturally there wasn't much infrastructure in Germany or other places to support the rock music industry for a while. Nonetheless, the inherent potential in German artists or artists of any other nationality, European or otherwise, to produce great rock music, is just the same as the potential of any American or British artist. We really need to lose the nationalistic chauvinism in regards to popular music. Maybe it's just that the American masses are too lazy to learn other languages, so they don't understand foreign rock. That's their loss. "Euro-rock," as the reviewer put it, is amazing.