Does anybody have any insight as to where Dangerous Mindshas gone? The link goes straight to a generic Nexcess page (sic) and all the archive is unavailable . . . .I have written to him via Facebook but not heard anything back as yet
Now I adored Dangerous Minds and frequently (tho’ maybe not frequently enough - ED) shared the amazing breadth of articles from pieces on Body art to musical review and articles all with a particular radical bent. So this is has happened before I think and he returned but there is no indication either way.
We are all the poorer for his absence but I have asked if he intends to return and will post here if and when he might reply - noting it is that season of the year from about Easter on when bloggers seem to take a holiday or early Spring break so fingers crossed . . . . . Art From the Future being a case in post when we haven’t noticed any new images for an age (not over a month)
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’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 thatRolling 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…
