From the Department of Hasselhoff

As some of you no doubt know, I take perverse pleasure in finding new and strange musics when traveling in foreign lands. I came back from Central America with Salvadoran folk-punk about Oscar Romero. I took perverse pleasure in looting a friend's collection of pop and punk from New Zealand. Naturally, I was most eager to find something new and amusing from Germany. Never in a thousand years would I ever imagine I could find something so bizarre and yet so German as I did this past weekend.

A new friend of mine (a PhD candidate in Late Renaissance and Early Modern History) and I took off for Berlin to amuse ourselves for the weekend. The plan was to hit the Pergamon and whatever else struck our fancy. Saturday morning, we found ourselves at a café in the shadow of the Berliner Dom, sipping Cafe au Lait and munching on croissants. As our meal was drawing to an end, therestaurantt staff changed the music. The music they put on was something like a cross between the Crash Test Dummies and the Cowboy Junkies, gone honkey tonk. In relatively short order, we recognized that the song was a cover, but try as we might, we couldn't come up with what it was that was being covered. I eventually figured out that the cover was of a song performed by a woman. Two bars later, my friend shouted, "Oh my God! It's Toxic!"

So it was.

After "Toxic" came a cover of "Hey Ya!"

It was, frankly, to surreal to be true. It was also freakin' hilarious. Naturally, we asked the waitress what the music was. She kind of laughed at us but went and asked the bartender what he was playing and returned to tell us that it was The BossHoss.

Apparently, The BossHoss is a group from Berlin that lives to do perverse covers of American songs that weren't all that good in the first place. The result is just too damn funny. Seriously. Robert Palmer's "Unbelievable" as honkey tonk? Iggy Pop's "Eyes Without a Face." Nelly's "Hot in Here."

Yeah.

Nelly.

As German honkey tonk. Naturally, I went and bought their album. We found out on Monday that not only is The BossHoss a group from Berlin, but they're actually kinda popular the German youth.

And, of course, what's a post like this without the promise of video confirmation. Go have a look at the videos for Hey Ya! and Hot in Here.

So yeah, there ya' have it. Post modern weird German pop honkey tonk.

Isn't that special?

This entry was posted on 30 June 2006 at 9:17 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.