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