2009 December for Eén Belgium

Interview: December 2009, Eén Belgium

"What is it exactly that makes 10,000 people out there scream? We have no idea. We really do not know. The music is good, but I don't know if it's that good? (shrugs) We try to seek boundaries. That's the task. What's the boundary of acceptable taste? For example. In this case, where does that end? We like to stir things and provoke a bit. Not really about us caring about what is allowed and what is forbidden. Sometimes it happens where people who mean well think they have to intervene. [Referring to LIFAD being "indexed".] We don't really care about that. We just do our best as we can with our work and do what we think is good and if we like it, we just do it. We don't care what others think.

It [Pussy] wasn't that important in how it's now being perceived. It was more about a fun joke on our side. We thought it'd be good to film a video that couldn't be shown anywhere else. However, we were shocked too that it worked so successfully. More people have seen that song's video more than all of our other videos combined together. [It was well over 12 million in mere weeks and crashed the porn site's servers for a bit lol.] It's the only video you're prohibited from seeing. From a business standpoint, it was quite stupid. It was dumb to make a video you cannot show. Firstly, it was stupid after such a long time [passing]. Idiotic. Then, you have fans who always actually seem to expect harder stuff from us. Then to have such a shallow type of pop song for our fans was stupid to those fans. Then we always sing in German, and then suddenly the English was foolish too. You shouldn't use pussy in the chorus even when using English because then nobody in the USA will play it. So really, the song is totally crazy from a perspective of business. However... (hand gesture) (smiles)

Only possible because of us being worldwide [famous]. If the world didn't exist, they would have already banned us in Germany. Yet the Germans aren't seemingly ready for Rammstein. They're a bit trapped in history, a bit stuck in the past. It will improve but we may not be here to see that happen. Recently this English journalist was here and told me that he didn't understand why U2 played a show for the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall because we're the best example of something in the 20 years since the wall fell. (smiles) For example, this Englishman said that the Germans would rather blow up the Brandenburg Gate than let us play there.

Germans are still too ashamed of their country. Much more than any other country is ashamed of their own country, so to speak. They have to learn again slowly that you can like your country without being extremely right wing. You can have a totally normal relationship with your country. As a German band, we wanted to be candid and genuine. We didn't want to be English or Americans. In the search for our own identity, we came across the German one. And this, how should I say it... this way of confronting of one's own identity is too much for many Germans. They're not ready and that's what we're doing now."