Date: 12/31/2024

Mood: withdrawn

Listening to: Warrior's Dance - The Prodigy

Where I started

A personal anecdotal post about how I became a fan long-term since my discovery in 2006. Please enjoy my whimsical impressions and journey through awkward technology gains.

I always intended to do something like this and never did. Better late than never.

How this happened to me

Sometime ago, I was a 13-14 year old girl. As we all have been. It was 2006. This was the time when I obtained my own bedroom private computer instead of the dreaded family computer. It was my first one, too. My father built the thing with parts and did that for years. When I was in junior high, they invented YouTube. Life changing really when my friend told me about it one day at lunch. I became very tech aware at a young age. My first usage of computers was around 1996. Around 2000 is when I really became good at using them. Because of this, I understood things like torrenting, P2P, file sharing sites, codecs, and formats of files very early on. I only ever obtained a virus once and I fixed it myself with my own ingenuity. I have nostalgia for keygen music lol.

I cannot for the life of me remember how I got to this point. I was somewhere deep in weeb culture with my friend circle despite the fact I barely cared about anime at all. (Long story for why I'd do that but all I gotta say is: peer pressure and self-identity struggle.) This fixated me instead on Japanese music of any kind. Largely idol stuff and this trendy thing with the teens called visual kei. This is impossible to explain unless you know what it is, but technically the genre is rock and falls under what you could probably classify as almost metal sometimes. It was somewhere here where I was on forums related to Japanese rock and heavy music like that where men (think Tonberry, Batsu, etc) were always talking about metal and rock music. Some dude on one of these forums had a bunch of playlists on YT of metal and rock music of many genres and languages. Pretty much anything he liked was harvested on them.

Lo and behold, this man actually had some taste and he had no idea he radically altered the course of my entire being.

This was baby Bree’s first song, yeah. And video. I am not sure if this video was something someone my age should be looking at. I know my first impression was condensed down to, "what the heck was that and how do I replay it immediately?" After another five plays, I used my computer skills to download entire albums. What is a Rammstein and how do I get more right now? Not only did I do that, I wanted videos and I knew how to dig around to get them.

I was hooked. Enthralled immediately by the Reise, Reise album. Whatever this is, I want more now. I had no idea about the live shows yet. I was simply experiencing the music and that was enough. By this point in life, Google did exist and so I started digging for information. Oh man, are you kidding me? This is a European band with music I can actually buy in the US without importing like Japanese music? Sign me up!! It’s time to do the Millennial thing. We are going to the mall to buy CDs. And yeah, I found them all between two different FYE stores at different malls over the course of a few weeks. My grandmother worked at one of those malls as a jeweler so I was there a lot. She also just loved being a shopping addict and I went along often.

I was blessed to exist on the timeline where ISO rips of Lichtspielhaus roamed. I need to get away from tiny 240p YouTube. I need my pretty lovely VOB files. Eventually, I was able to get the physical DVDs myself by buying them all online because I was underage with a PayPal account.

I can tell you, this was significantly the first moment where I actually paid attention to Paul for longer than two seconds and maybe I rewound. Twice. Specifically, 1:42. We haven’t got there yet but my noggin was definitely noticing Benzin of all random video things I had available. By the way, you should absolutely notice on YT that the Paul timestamp and that smoke scene is the most replayed part of the video according to the analytics. The women have Spoken™. Also, you should go notice the Mein Teil most replay at 2:00 and 2:35 because 100% absolutely the Women Have SPOKEN™™™™. I refuse to believe men caused those statistics.

He just looks nice, okay sheesh. Am I wrong? How am I wrong??

Discovering media for the first time

After I started getting into listening to albums and had accumulated DVDs, I hooked myself on concert discs. That is when I started wanting information, names, things. Tell me more. I want to understand who I am looking at and why they’re like this. Where are they from? Why are they together specifically? How did they manage to get Flake into this band? Did they bribe him? Are they his high school bullies? How have they managed no member changes and why? Who is writing and composing all this? Because these CD liner booklets are quite interestingly consistently divided by six. What's the method to the chaos here? What is this? Learning names was easy and took like an hour of grasping some photos. They’re all pretty distinct looking from one another and don’t overlap vibes much.

And that is when I had my first, “wtf do you mean the Paul one isn’t the youngest in the band. excuse me??” moment. Why does he have this chronic babyface problem? How? Is this a joke? Are you fucking with me? I want you to look at that Benzin screencap and guess his age in the photo. When you think you're smart, press here ➟ 41 to realize you're wrong. There's a solid chance whatever you said was between 3-6 years incorrect. Now you understand my own disbelief.

By that point, I was starting to get way hooked on Paul anyway. Doomed. It had to be late 2007 by now when I think about it, when I was entrenched in learning and digging for more than what DVDs offered. That is when I got into file sharing and tape trader garbage deeply. It was through my fixation on videos where I was obtaining way too much resources to stare at men do stuff. That was when I found it. Found the thing I loved in .mpg format 320 pixels big. It wasn’t going to stop me.

Thankfully, within a few weeks I was able to pester enough guys to give me their VOB files in a higher quality. I’m so happy with my 4GB thing. Thank you.

There is something so charmingly quaint about this concert and TV airing. I can’t explain it. It’s both professional and yet feels amateur. The editing is actually quite bad, unfinished, rushed looking, and amateur level. Sometimes the editors make the weirdest cuts and hold on scenes that don’t make any sense to do so from any professional presentation norms. From just Tier alone, the very first song, there’s so many problems with the editing lol. An entire guitar intro from 1:08 in this wide shot with no cuts, with no close ups at all. When it does cut, the editor thinks showing a stage hand messing with equipment behind Olli is a wise choice instead of Paul or Richard. By the time someone thinks to show Richard, his part is over and it’s time to cut to Till. Incredible way to show the opener. Bold move.

And you know what? None of it stopped me even once from finding this to be just like… enthralling again. There’s a certain charm, quaintness, dated feeling, this weird thing to it I can’t explain. It’s so simple. It’s so direct. It is the soft line between really professional and really amateur looking. I think it’s the fact that the setting is an actual festival show really adds on. I believe some of the technical errors make it even more interesting. Like Till’s mic had the volume decreased in Buck dich so you get to enjoy the ambient noise of Paul alone for like 15 extra seconds. This same issue happened in Sehnsucht. And Richard’s mic was left on during part of Engel. So he’s actually legit whistling omg that is a novelty. Not to mention Till’s coat didn’t go off correctly for Rammstein. 10/10. I would watch it again and again.

I know the first time I watched the mpg file, I’d never go back to a life before it. There really is something about it that stood out to me instantly. I haven’t ever figured out what that is. Live aus Berlin takes place nearly exactly a year later and it’s so professional and polished by comparison. It’s not the same. It’s good to have such a rapid improving evolution, but I still find endless better replay in 97 BF footage for being so goddamn weird. I also think the fact it has soft analog noise really speaks to my brain visually. It’s one of the few R+ videos with the noise in-tact. It has this noise overlaid softly to it to be opaque but still there. Most people think of TV noise as stand alone no signal ‘white fuzz’ and not overlaid to the image quality with actual people, but it happens all the time.

Despite every weird thing wrong with it from a pure video making stand point of how to edit footage that is really obvious to me. I think most people can tell it’s ‘off’ in the editing, but likely can’t break down what is wrong with it like I could lol. The editors fumble DRSG and Spiel mit mir’s bridges so badly and the intros to Sehnsucht and Wollt ihr are a disaster. I can honestly go off about this for at least 2 hours with how amateur this is without them comprehending the meaning of cuts or why they’re made or questioning why some footage was shown at all. Explaining the filmmaking nuances of it is simply too niche a subject. And requires me to edit and commentate a video in a YT format. It’s impossible to explain in text.

When and why Paul took over my time

Also, have you SEEN this man in this show? This… this was the moment when I... 👁👁 I am looking respectfully. I was utterly captivated by whatever the hell he’s doing. Because if you look at everyone else on stage, he’s the only one acting like that. Only really rivaled by Till for kinetic movement. Yet they’re nothing alike either.

Why he do that? Why he like that? Why does no one but him do it? Why can’t I stop looking at him doing it?

This was my greatest question and mystery. I learned the answer is: he just is. There’s no deep thing to it. It’s personality. It’s his take on choreography and he knows he’s doing it. I didn’t know I wanted this in my life. I don’t think I have ever seen anyone else play a guitar this way either. Like, okay I didn’t even know it could be done this way. Especially not when the other guitarist in the band is a stiff and extremely tense performer. When I think about how the instrument gets played, the only thing I usually think of is the Richard way it’s done being the most common. I mean just playing is already very intensive on the mind and body. I can see why many players end up being only able to do that. The contrast here is pretty wild lol. Black and white, indeed.

I realized it means he’s able to relax his muscles on stage in his body. A lot of people tense up and technically are in a pseudo-anxiety state from adrenaline. He’s clearly not. I have no idea why. I always chalk it up to a combination of personality and experiences on stage. Which shows me that partially, it’s a learned skill with experience. The older the footage or stage photo, the more tense it is too. Definitely showing the more he’s on stage, the easier it was to reduce the adrenaline effects to have more limber and free movement. It actually makes sense to me why his stage caliber is uniquely different looking when you combine this with personality traits and fitness behaviors for hobbies. Because you have to remember that he’s already 10+ years into his career by the time you see this show specifically and has had the most on-stage hours tallied up in that time span than anyone. There is a way to sort of rationalize and contextualize it. The thing is, I had to learn this with time. It wasn’t an immediate answer given to me.

This is around the time when I decided to pay attention to him in every single piece of media. Only to realize he really is like that in every video I had. It’s everything he does pretty consistently. I really really became stuck on it. No one else is doing it in the band. How do you avoid noticing him? How do people do it?? Five men on stage with minimal movement, and he is the embodiment of ‘man cannot stand still’ at all. I simply couldn’t stop noticing this and fixating on it. I can’t look away. How do people stop looking!? For real, how?? He’s just doing so much, all the time, always.

Like I said about the 97 video, the only person with anywhere near this kinetics is Till and it's not even comparable lol. HOW do you look away from whatever the hell this is?

Technology gains at LIFAD era

By the time you get to LIFAD, we entered the first tour with HD and cell phone camera concepts. This absolutely 100% revolutionized how someone can experience what Paul does on stage. I wasn’t prepared for this to happen to me. Yeah sure, he’s interesting in the past and in media to some degree. However, being handed endless digital cameras, HD, zoomed, and front area phone footage is basically a game changer of changing how someone notices, watches, and experiences this. It completely removed the limit of a professionally edited video needing to choose him. You can just actively seek digital footage that fits needs from the correct angle I want to put him in a frame to see what is happening. You no longer are limited to certain restrictions and this was going to basically send me down a path I didn’t see coming. You really gotta hand it to technology advancements for this one. Because prior to that, I was definitely paying attention. I was interested. I was noticing things. But I was always also being held back by technology every step of the way.

I am quite convinced that if cameras and cell phones did not take the turn the way they did right at the moment it happened between the gap of RR/R and LIFAD, I’d never ever have managed to be where I am today. I am convinced the answer would have been a phase or brief mild interest or like any typical band fandom experience. Where you grow out of it within ~2-4 years. That this would be my teenager phase brain for a bit and then that’s all. Many women do that. Then, technology happened and basically enabled me to be super extra about everything in ways impossible before that. Every single day after school and on summer vacation it was, “well, time to look at hoards of LIFAD tour videos and photos that happened while I was away.” The time zone difference is actually perfect because by the time I was after school, the concert already happened. Giving me lots to read and see like my evening newspaper. It turned fandom things away from hindsight, limited perspective, and more like this very active engagement activity. Sort of like the experience of a weekly show or anime where you’re waiting for the next episode. It gave us stuff to talk about in-between days too. It added rewatch capacity to something that usually is fleeting transient. It also removed hearsay and anecdotes. No longer did we have to hear about Paul’s stage behavior. We could see it ourselves with proof it happened. We didn’t need to imagine it. We could see it and actually understand.

And wouldn’t you know it? Internet technology also caught up with us. We have the concept of tumblr and gifs. We are on the cusp of leaving the 500kb limit in 2011. We’re entering the existence of Twitter now too. It’s a lot of rapidly changing factors that are about to change how I experience this band, how I talk to friends, and what types of things we even talk about at all. Especially when accounting for the in real-time aspect like a TV show where there was always something new to talk about. With actual video, photos, gifs of what we’re saying. I feel like such a Boomer with nostalgia goggles on with “back in my day”, but truly, you cannot manage to replicate something like the LIFAD era and the transition of technology and social media overlapping it perfectly. This era was finally a time period when the North American fandom actually began to have any purpose or meaning.

Without being in the EU, liking this band is basically akin to suffering in purgatory because there is such limited media and everything was 70% in-person experience. LIFAD was the era when North Americans would actually see what the hell Europeans are talking about with tons of footage backing it up. You could vicariously live through EU cameras and still be a burger to get enjoyment out of this in a less limiting way. These factors actually made it viable for this band to gain a structured fandom online with women instead of it being very scattered and clique separatist. There were a lot of issues with the fandom of women basically being divided by country of origin lol. The progression of media and social media started to remove this issue to make us want to actually converse with each other. Giving us something mutually to rally around and that being cell phone media and pictures on levels never seen before.

What do you mean people actually post photos of him in 50 million pixel resolution where I bear witness to skin texture?? I can see the texture fibers of the denim, for god sake. If you told me I could do this in the future in 2006, I’d never believe you. Back in my day, R+ pictures came in 300 pixels and 600 pixels maximum. 800 pixels was like a god tier concept. I also distinctly recall the first time I ever watched 16:9 proshot edited footage for TV and was mind blown by a rectangle shaped video. Who remembers seeing the 2010 Rock am Ring performance for the first time? Oh my god. Also the bizarre Jimmy Kimmel performances I actually got to watch on my American TV. Weird and surreal. But also HD!

It’s these factors for why I could escalate interest beyond a phase or infatuation idea. Where I could become invested in what I am looking at. Anyone can look at a man and have the most basic human brain behavior. That is why such interests never last long and are phases. However, if you have social context and technology behind you there is a chance to turn out differently than this path. The circumstances indicate I could manage this. The stars aligned in some ways to do this. I also know it’s because of my thorough way of interacting with media and how much I scrutinize and overthink everything. If technology didn’t shift, I wouldn’t have been able to do this. If I had to still live in a pre-2009 media landscape, I know for a fact that it would have been a phase for me and ended swiftly. The invention of 1080p rearranged my entire brain chemistry. The fact technology has only gotten better (we got 4K Paul now, I’m crying), is only prolonging me and is chucking more firewood into my issue.