Keyboardist Flake (pronounced flah-keh) Lorenz descents from a riser to join songer Till Lindemann at the front of the stage. Sporting a mans and ball gag, a prisoner's neck chain and quasi-futuristic silver and black apparel, FLake jerks about the stage while Lindemann, holding the neck chain's business end, leads him onto a monitor.
FLake complies, bends forward, and then --zzzip! Lindemann undoes two zippers on the back of Flake's shorts. The audiance, much of wich appears just past puberty, squirms in antipation of the unknown, and then --wooshj! Down goes the seatflap; out comes Flake's bottom. Lindemann reaches into his pants and whips out a formidable looking rubber penis; as he slaps the dildo against Flake's hindquarters, a jet of white liquid arcs out from it. Lindemann turns the jizz stream on Flake, then on himself, then on the crows, whose collective looks of horror is priceless. And nearly 15.000 audiance members here still haven' seen the set's grand finale.
The next afternoon, inside Rammstein's dressing room at Minneapolis' Target Center, FLake unminds on a sofa while his bandmates- Lindemann, guitarists Richad Kruspe and Paul Landers, drummer Christoph Doom Schneider and bassist Oliver Riedel- tend to do business elsewhere, The S&M gear won' come on for several hours; for now the keyboardist's wearing an orange-and-yellow cotton pullover and khaki cordury baggies. His hair's fashionably unkemt, his eyeglasses are a hip clear plastic set and my first question is obviousL How closely does this sharp, affable gentleman resemble the bungling sibmissiove we see on stage?
"It's like any from of theater- once you're on stage, you become a character," Flake explains via an interpretender. (I's an interview stipulation, as the East German band's English is rough.) "Once you'e off the stage, you go about your privet life; you're like an actor."
Or, in this case, you're a rockstar. By late october, more than ten months after its U.S. release on Slash, Rammstein's second album, Sehnsucht has sold roughly 732.000 copies in America, with expectations of platinum sales by Christmas. (In Germany, the record's gone double platinum) It's remarkable when you consider thatthis is a band who defy trends by nearly abused basso profundo singing (complete with rolled R's) with tuneful industrial metal; who in their all-German lyrics cruise the outskirts of human experience- not the Aryan dramlands of WW 2 in Germany, as some critics hae specuated. not coincidetally, Rammstein's in the U.S. press team has issued a detailed press release concerning the band's lack of political agenda.
"We are not Nazis, Neo-Nazis or any other kind of Nazi," reads a statement from the group. "We are against racism, bigotry or any other kind of discrimination.
However," it ads comically. "We are the best rockband."
Where the nearest musical counterparts, the Slovenian band Laibach, might've invited controversary by empliying fascist imagery, Rammstein make explict, if easily misinterpreted, use of melodrama, sexual innuendo, pyrotechnics loaded on stage- and more than a little homour.
"Very much ja," Flake affirms. "For us the live performance is like a comedy show, with Till stumping around singein 'Grr, grr! We are evil! We are evil!' He exaggaretadly imitades Lindemann's "burning man" routine, in witch the singer, engulfed in flames, performs the band's namesake song. "Sometimes it's jsut poor joking, liek the sexual effects. Nobody means it, really."
So the sodomy act is supposed to be funny?
"Ja, but for me it's not so funny," Flake says giggling. "Nobody does that except us- that's why we do it."