__
Rammstein's “OK” not okay
Ha disapproved, «No-kay, Nien!» Most likely it was Till who was stubborn, proving Ha's point. The rationale was, ‘It's better to present men as pigs than Ha as a slut’. The song was worked on at some point between 2010 and 2012. Rammstein's producer had a problem, he lusted after SillyTillyHa, but that did not cure him either. She was not anything he imagined. She was... sultry, not kinky. He was in his late twenties or late thirties, she has forgotten. It might have been Olsen Involtini, it might not have been. Fans can probably figure it out better than amnesiac Ha.
Suspect #1. According to RammWiki, «Olsen Involtini aka Olsen Olic is a real Berlin boy. Maybe that's why he almost exclusively worked as a musician, engineer, producer, arrangeur, mixer and remixer for Berlin artists. But he doesn't know, we don't know and at least it doesn't matter.» What does that mean, what he doesn't know, what discussion does that refer to? Socrates? He knows that he works in this or that capacity. Marx.
Loosely inspired by the Beatle's “Hello good-bye” mixed with Stevie Wonder that was not going to be a spoof. It happened to be whatever Ha was working on at the time, trying to make music on her own for a pop audience for the first time in a decade, with no clue about Rammstein's fan base.
Wattie, Ha, and Till (through his producer) argued, three people in the dark. The men won, burying Ha's version together. Wattie was helplessly unproductive after the long-distance sessions got unwieldy and she was a typical uncooperative wuss. She said to Rammstein's liaison in Germany, It wouldn't hurt you to turn bisexual, so you can suck on Till's balls, Ha said. She said nothing about her disappointment that they took Jason Guyker's directive too literally. Rammstein avoided recording a studio album in Germany. She was glad the producer was in Germany, might as well keep him there. Are you a record producer, an arranger, a DJ mixer, a concert mixer?
He said Rammstein was dropping into his studio, he owns his little posh place. He described it as comfortable and relaxing for Rammstein, very friendly, because he was local and they can be normal at home. Do you have a pile of pillows? Ha was silly. Do you feed them grapes and champagne? Do you tend to the fireplace and walk away to wash the dishes while they roll around on the bear rug? I don't know if it's normal, they sound healthier already, but I say that is comfortable!
He explained. They had come back from touring, so he had to do something for the band because their time is valuable, they are making a lot of money for many people. Ha had no idea, she totally forgot about the scale of the Stadia stage she had financed a year or so earlier. They could not have dragged Stadia around and come back to Berlin all ready for the next album. They would have lost at least $40 million in Germany alone. She did not tell him. She guessed there was a lull in management, that Rammstein had become employers. Had she checked the year date, certainly the guy in Berlin was not their original producer from 1993 or so. The first producer exited already. When she did know his name and age at the time, the information confirmed producers were not cheated by Rammstein, thank goodness. Not for Ha to decide whomever they wanted as producer, mixer, arranger, any music talent they wanted. But she also did not say the obvious, that Rammstein's individual names are on their product, so the six members were ultimately responsible for their performances. It's hard to be too nice or too unhappy and get the results one wants. It does not hurt to be polite but firm.
It was Richard who salvaged the music and unplugged the producer from messing with Ha. She said too much about stockings. Obeying Richard, the producer had to inform her there was enough material there to finish a Rammstein version, some of the rhythm and melody had been laid out, while Ha told Wattie what was going on. The Berlin guy took inventory of what he had and did not have a coherent album. Doesn't matter, Rammstein is only dropping in. He knew exactly how he was going to contribute to Rammstein, if only he knew better what it was Rammstein was about at that time. He was candid his side of the work was piecemeal. Rather than doing everything for him and Rammstein, Ha sketched a whole and wanted his contribution to emerge organically, logically, even if it takes five steps “to have one song that flatters you and Rammstein”. Why should that be a compromise of a sum less than — pick anybody they trusted who wanted to lead — Richard's music ideas? By flatter, she did not mean peacock, she meant music they could appreciate, something to rave about, something good or great, an ideal.
The topic of condoms and sex is not topical to Rammstein, why would Till stuff another angelic video up his nostrils in lyrics? Bad topics cannot prettify lyrics (she finally read the song's lyrics in 2026). Who wants to sing that song's topic, from a dingy cabaret, where the patrons are bonkers Frenchies who do not wash their silk stockings. They remove the garter, hang up the garter metal hardware to dry, stick their toes out of the stocking and start ballet dancing. Industrial garments? Naah. Hey, it's Rammstein, let's ballet! France is 350 years ago Rammstein. She spouted all that, not caring whether she was offending French people or Germany or Rammstein. Well, she cared some.
Wattie told Ha, guessing, five steps is minimum for a guy like the Berliner at his age. They do not produce and record the way we do, I don't care why Rammstein is going down that path. I don't care if you give them a whole singing choir, all they do is turn on their Korg and don't listen. I understand the DJ part, I understand the big soap opera videos. I know what they are doing on stage. Ha was guilty of half of those sensational antics. Poor Wattie, his “babies” were drifting so far away. Just yank on Ha like she's wearing a choker, who cares about Rammstein. They have a splendid drummer, how can they not compose whatever they want? she said to him. I'll yank on your hair, Wattie said, Come over to Scotland. Nothing changed between Wattie and Ha since 1993.
What Wattie said was all true. Rammstein was Rammstein by choice. Somebody like Ha really, really understood. Wattie was easier to be about and collaborate. He convinced her their version did not have to Venn anything with Rammstein. He dropped the “Hello goodbye”, which was a Shoegazer thing, who had matured beyond it already. It's a cheap trick for drama to compress opposites side-by-side, Yes and No. She had read Martin Buber's philosophy, in his treatise Ich und Du (I and Thou, 1923 [1970]) at some time between 1994 and 1999, and agreed with Wattie. She had never paid attention to any philosopher's German nationality after Hegel until recently. German philosophy made a few simple mistakes in the twentieth century. In the case of Buber, Christian diest monism does not flow from his opening propositions. Buber is a cheap, low-rent student of Descartes, whose biggest critic in our times did not go far enough (see Descartes' Error, in which Antonio Damasio made a different mistake than Descartes about personality but overall was right about personality; he was wrong about pain and proportionality). Partisans force Ha to exercise: If you want to insult me, do it in one sentence. If you want to praise me, do it in two.
German philosophers plying as professors and book authors do not exist at universities (Gutmann does not really exist, she styles herself as a character) in America as far as Ha has bumped into their writings. They do exist in the Economics department and language departments, the EU can breathe a sigh of relief. No one in those departments are confused that the charlatans are merely misassigned and would appear as convenient commercials trendily reimagined, neither good whatsoever nor intriguing somewhat. The only thing that fits them is their hologram. Kids who came out for their sonograms and x-rays and ultrasounds and biopsies to endorse unscientific applications of dead ass wrong; the technology works but the application is nothing but wickedness. Fraud is an Indian's only friend in the USA: the Jew. The method works to kill somebody does not say much: shoelaces to strangle somebody certainly resists toting a pistol, said the disease-spewing court.
Magic, might, and mystery. Who are the masters of any of those? Or do we qualify a master is not a corrupt villain? In the twenty-first century, there has been one small moral gain. Everything else across the board is, oh, dishonest about the slippery slope in morals and morale when they are at its nadir already. A sympathetic villain suffers less solipsism by a crowd of witnesses who inform themselves on shame and humiliation, on cruelty and misfortune. A sympathetic hero deserves accolades, or he is Hercules and his reward is a forever quibble to be let alone separated from Zeus. One can be informed without deciding anything, and one needs not suffer. Suffer then the consequence of projecting the alibi of perception, of procuring insight that is predicated on self-same denial by borrowing without permission Thou for I, as if still somewhere in the crowd under the magical banner Public, of mirror masking. Jealousy is unbecoming. Gutmann's cracked mirror dialogics was extremely bad in 2003 when Ha went through graduate school, Gutmann would never have qualified for a penny of Ha's sweat. So Gutmann owes Germany and all serious ambassadors. What a yawn of ballooning her IOU with Ha's silent blood thrown into the sewers of the USA. And the USA wants to keep on cheesing for war after war? Ha was not wrong about Harvard and Gutmann, her position has been explicit and unchanged throughout the years. Remember Vice-President Kamala Harris? Instead of two sheets of paper to salvage Harris the cheese in prosecution, Ha's unused idea, Europe did better. About Harris the men quipped in two short clauses, “The American is back. Is that good?” Who says anybody in Germany, with all the permission in the world, can communicate with Gutmann, who? Or which Xerox machine, remember that quip from the 1980s?
At the Defense contract company in Maryland, Ha had hired a PhD-cum-JD guy, and the place was going to explode into colourful telemetry commercials for... weaponized drones. It was so bad, there had to be embezzlement involved. As soon as nice, polite Marines arrived in uniform to meet with the commissioned company, all the project managers left, who were all females. There was one Java programmer who was female in the other department, typical, Java or C++. Every time anything Linux, it goes beyond Linux back to AT&T, all the way out to the same franchise I.T. workers at Amazon. Ha was the only female programmer bridging hardware, application, network, storage, and telecomm. Every programming job on every team she has been on. Do not call it computer science, that is where Java programmers stay for safety. Systems programming is not for Java. That was going to be the last time Ha was going to tolerate crooks still bending and twisting in the wind. She never wanted to work in systems programming again. The men are crooks. Java lost their hardware a long time ago. They lost their firmware. They relied on third-party clustering. They were never the paradigm for a service farm, so they lost their operating system. They did not implement telephony whatsoever, no network protocol either, riding on C all the time. The ultimate Java container back then when it was invented was C programmers' joke about them: it's not virtual if you put it on an aerobee (drone) and use a joystick. Are you developing for warfare? That's not our job.
The English speakers coordinated for the melody. Wattie had two minutes each time, he recorded what he was working on onto the guitar and sent it to her. She gave him some bass line options, sent written material back, he played his bass. It was not his style but it was good enough to style his way. She kept Wattie busy for thirty minutes while she clobbered rhythms together. The producer kept interrupting. They spoke about the thesis. He genuinely tried not to be kinky. Why are we on this topic? I cannot even giggle like a girl, I've been divorced so long. She wanted to skip the discussion of how to have sex: Without a condom, okay. He wanted to skip hearing about Catholic reasons why have sex. He was not married, if she remembers correctly. He believed in love, in falling in love. That was silly to her. She told him, she and her ex-husband did not watch TV, did not have a computer, they spent every evening on comedy and music. Everything they fed their eyeballs was pre-screened by the army, including Rammstein taped in Miami. They were allowed to have VHS tapes imported from England, no local TV, no newspaper, no broadcast media. The one exception was tapes of The Young Ones with musical guests on-screen, because the army needed to provide for her sanity. When they were done with the series, which took over a year to watch, they watched American comedians like Richard Pryor and Dennis Leary. All rough material from unhappy people willing to perform in front of a crowd how unhappy they were.
So, has Rammstein won a Grammy? No. Hmm. Do you want to produce a Grammy-winning single or album? He gave a vague answer. If Ha meant whether Rammstein had acceptability, they did not always win new fans. There is a consistent formula and the people keep coming back. They have an appetite for Rammstein like the band is food, not a lover in bed. That's not bad, is it? Yes, it is, he thought. He wanted to change that. I do not feel I have to be that step-father all over Europe. I am young, I want to have fun. What about not all of Europe but only Germany? It is both a responsibility and it's art. Art? You artists are all the same. You mention the word art, I go limp like you sedate me. I don't know what you are saying. They hired me because it is cold, calculated engineering, that's my job.
Wattie guessed, An orgasm is only a gold record to Rammstein. So Rammstein's going to bring their producer to the promised land. If he doesn't get an orgasm out of the biggest band in Germany, fire him. That is not Richard's job, is it?
Rammstein's producer won by default, and he was young. He said he was drinking and he didn't care. «Time, gentlemen, time». Wattie got the news that would be the title of the album. The producer knew, saying, You need the German translation, you will come back to me, I get the Q album one way or another. True, Ha conceded. The producer's moment of clarity. Wattie guessed again, the Berliner is not going to tell Rammstein, because he wants to have the upper hand. He doesn't. Ha had no problems the old lads from Germany had to do their music more on their own. Rammstein was like a stale orgy, Wattie and Ha agreed.
What are you doing? Quit working on Rammstein, put it away. Oh gawd, men with a studio full of computers want to cost more than drones and weapons. She could present the sketch to Rammstein's producer later, which she had finished, Step 1. Back to Misfits or Exploited or Orgy, she doesn't listen to that much Punk, actually. They were on Steps 2-3, except Ha wrote no lyrics. He had 2 minutes of bass and guitar. His job was to stop crashing at the 2-minute mark. No can do, he was that terse Punk, don't recycle, don't over-explain. What David Byrne of Talking Heads said was the consensus in the 1980s, We say it once, we don't say it again, My lips are sealed. It was easier to gutt out lyrics if Ha had any. So he spent the time describing his visual art idea, which he fulfilled exactly some years later.
Why wasn't Rammstein into Art Rock or Art Punk? Was it only a brief moment in platinum? Does it take a broken wooden ship, more wood, more flesh and hairy chests, for Ha to get Art Industrial. What is Art German? Does it have to be pomo? Sorry, I'm boring you. Don't let me say anything about Scotland. If it weren't for plaid, GenX would have never made it through the '80s and '90s. Till sings like he has a broken heart, in platinum, pants and hair, that's money. Okay, he growls, but he can also pant. Maybe he shouldn't, we thought about that. They show a very composed Richard during that era. He needs that stillness. Magic, might, and mystery is what I considered for Rammstein in the midst of discussing videos for them. But to me, it is a composition, and it is complex. It's challenging for six guys to take on half of one, half of the other, to shoulder elements equally. Who wants magic to win in “Du Hast”? People wish, and it is barely there or not at all. Do they have to compete? Do they always comingle? That was the art theme I gave to them, they could fill in the thesis for their entire career, for the rest of their lives.
If you go to a gallery, you will not see artists who painted rain. Matisse might qualify. I want to see Rammatein surpass French impressionism, something I told my friends when we were teenagers. One of Shoegazer's photo assignments to a professional in Germany was to gather some prerequisites: blurriness in the water, wetness across the land, the sense of the air and temperature and barometric pressure. Boots and mud. Like Jason Guyker jangling on his guitar when the rain started and we actually had it plugged into amps that time. If it's not Hegelian transcendental essentialism — Philosophy of Right makes him better than Kant's Perpetual Peace, his metaphysics is much better — if it's not that guy, it's everybody else who contributed to Phenomonology, an eschatology and cosmogeny Hegel did not have time to elaborate. It's been a long time before then since Germany contributed to Natural Philosophy. The Persians did everything for them. Not many's cosmologies (the universe as it is and how it came to be) cohere with their own cosmogenies (fate and purpose of the universe). The Jews have no cosmology is why they will never matter. Eet Fuk, not even good mythology like Zoroastrianism. Good, bad, or Intrigue. Lots of stories, nothing of knowledge whatsoever, not much of wisdom either. So if you are nothing and have nothing to be, tell stories and charge people for nothing! Like Hannah Arendt. Sometimes, I just want to tell Till that I want a rebate. He's a proven poet, I am convinced. I am so glad I complained only a little, the treasonous frauds at Harvard (Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson cannot teach a whistle out of a bag) in my discipline deserve nothing but Alaska. They should never touch their own illiteracy again. The shallow chatter is extreme noise pollution already wrong around the globe many centuries ago.
I believe what Richard set out to do is more vague, but not a lesser form of knowledge, than what Till imposed and fulfilled. The body breaks down, you see it on the band growing older then growing stillness and slightly declining. I predicted as much, they are pacing along adequately except for artificiality disturbing everybody. That's not Rammstein's fault, they get pulled into it also. It might be a trick of the camera, but Richard is the only one who would fold himself in like he wants to curl into a basket of furry fluff, he could fit a small round bail of hay. He likes to play up that exact German kookiness that French and Dutch women abhor. Sometimes Schneider also. The young old man in fascination, the good ol' fascinans. We fold ourselves in to avoid a blow coming, horror, terror, fright, and ugliness.
Last updated 2026 Aug 05 PM 12:24 UTC.
Servicemark (sm) Rgo artHausDC, 2025-2026; a sample statement by government.
This international website is located in the USA. Information provided is a work of nonfiction or art.
Library of Congress book catalogue information, Smithsonian Institution (Rgo Year1 Orders, 1993). Noncommercial, unautomated copy-without-transfer personal use granted by Rgotek 1994 from this URL.