Wednesday, December 27, 2023
Book excerpt by Monika Gruber Why the Greens are the true bourgeois for me
FOCUS online
Book excerpt by Monika Gruber Why the Greens are the true bourgeois for me
Wednesday, December 27th, 2023, 11:14
In “Welcome to the Wrong Film,” cabaret artist Monika Gruber takes a funny and bitter look at the state of our current society. No matter whether green “heat pump fetishists”, “deluded woke activists” or unworldly politicians: everyone gets their fat off here. A book excerpt.
Opinions can certainly be divided about the level and style of some German songs from the “party hit” genre. Whether you want to sing along to “Ten Naked Hairdressers” or “Go get a beer, you’re getting ugly again” is up to you. I find traditional ham street chansons with titles like “The Raspberry Toni from the Strawberry Farm” or “Big Tits, Potato Salad” difficult to bear.
But even if you can't laugh at rhymes like "Her friend is also a pineapple from Blas-Rawall/just has a really big bang/because she likes a good threesome/but she needs four balls for that" (thought up and intoned by someone, by the way likeable gentleman with the beautiful stage name Ikke Hipgold) - one thing you definitely shouldn't do with it is load it with any political message.
Ingratiation to the woke zeitgeist
I remember an impressive scene at Oktoberfest 2022, basically in year 1 after the pandemic. The year in which some submissive Oktoberfest hosts, in pandering to the woke zeitgeist, announced long before the event that the party hit by a brothel mother named “Layla” would of course not be played in their tent because it was misogynistic and therefore for that The level of their tents is unbearable - mind you, in places where people have been puking under the table, peeing on the neighbor's leg at the "Bieselrinne" or smacking in the toilet for decades.
So there I was sitting late one afternoon with friends in one of the smaller Oktoberfest tents. As expected, after two unusual Oktoberfests, the mood was exuberant, not to say completely unleashed. The beer and other spirits flowed freely, the ladies took the walk in their most beautiful dirndls with their advantageously staged balcony, the waitresses increased their speed even further in view of the generous tip that was to be expected, so everyone present without exception was in a great mood.
A three-man band was playing on the small podium, whose singer suddenly paused, looked around at all the exuberant, chattering people in dirndls and lederhosen and said quietly: “I have to tell you something now – and you have to join in!”
We are in a beer tent at the Oktoberfest, not in a university lecture hall in a lecture on feminist foreign policy
The audience looked at him spellbound and waited for the story. The singer grinned slightly crookedly and continued quietly, almost conspiratorially: “I have... I have... repeat after me: I HAVE...!” Everyone repeated after him, slowly at first, then the rhythm became faster and faster, like the Icelandic one Clapping choreography during the World Cup: “I have… I have… I have… I have…” Finally the bandleader sang very loudly into the microphone: “I have a puff…”
At that moment the entire tent - women and men, young and old, locals and Zuagrias, suspected brothel visitors and volunteer street workers - began to shout: "And my brothel mom is called Layla!" The rest is history.
Firstly, this was no surprise given the media hype in the previous weeks. And secondly, especially not, because this song was what it was and never wanted to pretend to be anything else: a catchy mood hit with a shout-along melody that is kind of stupid, but also a bit funny.
Because... once again for everyone to take notes: We are in a beer tent at the Oktoberfest, the largest folk festival in the world and not in a university lecture hall in a lecture about feminist foreign policy in 2023. People come here to celebrate, To forget their everyday lives by eating too much, drinking too much, smooching the wrong people and swaying and singing along to banal nonsense songs.
“The more profane the songs, the higher the beer consumption!”
The song “Layla” has roughly the intellectual nutritional value of “My Baby baby balla balla” by Chubby Checker from 1965 or the Burger Dance by DJ Ötzi, which lyrically cannot compete with Schubert’s Winterreise.