Don't play with the dirty kids

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Don't play with the dirty kids
Studio album by Franz Josef Degenhardt

Publication
(s)

1965

Label (s) Polydor

Format (s)

Record , CD

Genre (s)

Chanson / singer-songwriter

Title (number)

13

running time

49 min 45 sec

occupation Vocals and guitar :

Franz Josef Degenhardt

production

Jimmy Bowien

chronology
Rumpelstiltskin (1963) Don't play with the dirty kids Father Franz (1966)

Don't play with the dirty children is an album by Franz Josef Degenhardt that was released in 1965 on the Polydor label . It was the songwriter's second album after Rumpelstiltskin and was produced by Jimmy Bowien. The songs were also published as a book in 1969.

Texts

On this album, Degenhardt expressed the narrow-mindedness of the German post-war years (especially in the chansons Spiel nicht mit den Schmuddelkinder and Deutscher Sonntag ) and also incorporated the anticipated hope for the student movement in his lyrics . The texts are predominantly characterized by social criticism and surrealism .

The song of the same name contained on the album, Spiel nicht mit den Schmuddelkinder, is one of the artist's best-known songs and representative of the chansons and petty songs of his first two albums. It tells the story of a boy from a “better” home who liked to play with working class children as a child, but was then forced into high school and made the social career that parents and teachers expected of him. Don't play with the dirty kids has become a household word. Among other things, the German hip-hop band Anarchist Academy released a song with this title. It is also one of the best known and most successful songs by Degenhardt; the songwriter later announced the ballad of the prodigal son as "the dirty child's song of the 70s" (documented, among other things, on the live album Liederbuch - Von Damals und von That Zeit , 1978), and Degenhardt's novel Zündschnüren was featured in newspaper advertisements with the catchphrase "Schmuddelkinder- Atmosphere ”advertised. In his song, Helge Schneider adapted Katzenoma Degenhardt's song, but directed his criticism there to an unjust, state-supported discrimination against senior citizens and the like. a. through pension cuts.

The song A beautiful song tells in a calm, lyrical tone the story of a “burned child” who flees his homeland by boat, is at war, and dreams of a land of peace. It alludes to the Vietnam War .

The song Deutscher Sonntag (“Sundays in the small town”) caricatures typical Sunday bourgeois scenes in a small town, which the lyrical self sarcastically denies itself . As elements of this "Sunday monotonous" daily routine, the morning bath, the attendance of the church service, the sumptuous lunch including dessert and subsequent afternoon rest with cigars, the attendance of a football game, the walk through the city and finally the evening in front of the television are named.

On the espresso machine, a love relationship determined by consumerism is caricatured in very graphic language . It is characteristic that the element chromium used for metal finishing is mentioned in every stanza .

The song wedding tells a love story amid dark metaphors that allude to the danger of nuclear war , but also to space travel . In one of the stanzas Degenhardt parodies the famous lines by Walther von der Vogelweide : Unter der linden, bei der Heide / where both of us have a bed ... Already in A beautiful song , Degenhardt made a reference to the minstrel with the phrase covers leg with leg . In the song: Ich saz ûf eime stones it says: (I) behind leg with legs.

The song wolves in the middle of May tells how wolves slowly gain control of a village. The metaphor alludes to fascism .

In the song This time I'm not explaining to a former warrior (possibly a Viking ) that he no longer wants to go out on a war voyage .

The song The One Who Sings My Songs is one of Degenhardt's most elaborate songs and presents a difficult-to-interpret reflection on his own role as a songwriter , alcoholic , husband and father. This song also works with numerous impressive images. In each of the four stanzas the thematic sequence of the refrain is repeated: singing, drinking, wife, children.

content

  1. Don't play with the dirty kids
  2. A beautiful song
  3. German Sunday
  4. On the espresso machine
  5. wedding
  6. Promised Land
  7. Old friends
  8. Wolves in the middle of May
  9. The black man
  10. The man next door
  11. Two and two
  12. This time I won't
  13. The one who sings my songs

Criticism and appreciation

Matthias Henke did not compare the song Spiel with the grubby children due to the "conceit passed down from generation to generation" described in the lyrics to the novel Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez . The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote in 2001: "Since then it has never again been so aptly and lovingly cynically demonstrated what deadly rigid boundaries the petty-bourgeois convention draws and that only those who were, at least at times, a dirty child really live."

In 2010 a jury on behalf of the German edition of Rolling Stone magazine selected the album to 42nd place in the category The 50 best German albums . In the reason it said u. a .:

“A moral painting of the Federal Republic of Germany's economic miracle in the mid-1960s, the title of which has long since become a household word. Three years before the student movement, the bailiff singer with the cutting voice and the powerfully plucked guitar takes on the bourgeoisie and the only partially hidden Nazism with ridicule, wit and surreal poetry. [...] A historical document and at the same time a work that is still valid today. There are 13 songs on this record that are still horrible today. "

- Rolling Stone (2010)

Since 1968 the song Spiel nicht mit die Schmuddelkinder has been in the songbook Die Mundorgel .

Cover versions

The song was recorded by the German punk bands Falling Brieftauben and Dieselknecht , among others . The hip-hop band Anarchist Academy released a version with changed text and recordings of the chorus from the original version by Degenhardt.

literature

  • Franz Josef Degenhardt: Don't play with the dirty children: ballads, chansons, grotesques, songs . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1969, ISBN 3-499-11168-3
  • Franz Josef Degenhardt: Come to the table under the plum trees . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1986, ISBN 3-499-15774-8
  • Katharina Götsch: Left songwriters . Limbus, Innsbruck 2007, ISBN 3-902534-04-4 , pp. 60-64

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ CD review on laut.de.
  2. ^ Matthias Henke: The great chansonniers and songwriters. Important interpreters, important poet singers. ECON Taschenbuch Verlag , Düsseldorf 1987, ISBN 3-612-10052-1 , p. 77
  3. ↑ It's worth grumbling: Franz Josef Degenhardt on his seventieth in the FAZ on December 3, 2001
  4. ^ Daniel Koch: The 50 best German albums I (50-36 place). In: Rolling Stone. October 7, 2010, accessed May 22, 2019 .
  5. ^ Matthias Pesch: The mouth organ turns 50. In: Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger . February 18, 2003, accessed December 27, 2016 .
  6. ↑ The article says "in the 70s the songwriters were honored (for example Degenhardt's" Don't play with the dirty children ")" , but between 1968 and 1982 there was no further edition of the mouth organ . (See http://www.mundorgel-shop.de/epages/63372638.sf/de_DE/?ObjectPath=/Shops/63372638/Categories/50_Jahre_Mundorgel )