Reflections on Ekstasy - NINA HAGEN! | Bitterness Personified

 This is fun! From the excellent Graham Russell’s blogspot  Bitterness Personified and I don’t post enough from him

Bitterness Personified

Reflections on ... Nina Hagen in Ekstasy (1985)

From the genius who brought you this one of my favourite albums by Nina  and a legendary place in post punk music history . . . . . 

Nunsexmonkrock (1982)

and we mentioned this legendary album before but here Graham explore’s the album three years later Ekstasy

• Nina Hagen’s ‘Nunsexmonkrock’: Greatest (and weirdest) unsung masterpiece of the postpunk era?

Nina Hagen HAPPY 69th BIRTHDAY | (for Brother Jobe! [he lurves her!] )

Happy 69th birthday to Germany’s berserk punk diva Nina Hagen (née Catharina Hagen, 11 March 1955). Fearless (1983) and Nina Hagen in Ekstasy (1985) are both wildly enjoyable, but Hagen’s defining meisterwerk is NunSexMonkRock (1982) which still sounds like bleeding-edge science fiction all these decades later. Her later work is best approached with caution, but she did a fun heavy metal version of Elvis’ “Viva Las Vegas” in 1989.

“Nina Hagen is at once the most outlandish of rock clowns and the most intensely committed and flaked-out female pop visionary since Patti Smith herself.”

/ From Tim Holmes’ review of the album Nina Hagen in Ekstasy (1985) in Rolling Stone 

Nina Hagen NunSexMonkRock - Dangerous Minds

Check the name tag for previous entry  . . . . . . . . 

Nina Hagen : : 'NUNSEXMONKROCK' - Dangerous Minds

NINA HAGEN’S ‘NUNSEXMONKROCK’: GREATEST (AND WEIRDEST) UNSUNG MASTERPIECE OF THE POSTPUNK ERA?

Dangerous Minds has covered an absolute stone cold post-punk classic and it brings up a legendary euro post-punk goddess, Nina Hagen. I first came across Hagen through my brother's Dutch friends and a man who became our friend who ran the record department of the Amsterdam De Bijenkorf department store at the time, Jan who was mad keen on Hermann Brood and by extension his co-collaborator (and then wife!) at that time, Nina Hagen THE high priestess of punk!

Nina with then husband Hermann Brood

Here’s what they say in the intro:

Nina Hagen’s 1982 album NunSexMonkRock is one of the single most ground-breaking and far-out things ever recorded and it deserves to be considered a great—perhaps the very greatest—unsung masterpiece of the post-punk era.

I’ll take it even further: To my mind, it’s on the same level as PiL’s Metal Box, Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica or Brian Eno and David Byrne’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Or The Dreaming by Kate Bush.

There I’ve said it.

Make no mistake about it, artistically NunSexMonkRock is a monumentally important recording.

by Richard Metzger 

Richard points out that Rolling Stone called NunSexMonkRock the “most unlistenable” album ever made. Which is always one of those subjective challenges that has been said of his choice of Beefheart's magnum opus of Trout Mask and PiL's Metal Box but leaves out Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music (another choice of Jan's and one he celebrated by playing us in total last time we stayed with him just off the Dam. I LIKE this album! It is certainly listenable and I actually find it  a total classic of the era. but then again I like Metal Machine Music and saw Einstürzenden Neubauten live at the ICA! So maybe my taste is somewhat more catholic). Either way this album desires more of our attention and if you can indeed buy it for a penny buy it! I would!

“This is Radio Yerevan and this is the news…”

“Dread Love,” Hagen’s paean to masturbation, sung like a Valkyrie sitting on a Pocket Rocket…
 

“Cosma Shiva,” about Hagen’s newborn baby daughter, who grew up to be an actressin Germany.
 

“Future is Now.” First the 1982 studio version.

Nina Hagen - Nunsexmonkrock - Dangerous Minds