Nina Hagen: Crazier Than Bjork

I have met them both. Björk is a hot mess in real life. Nina Hagen is actually a bit of a Hausfrau, and at the time I knew her, a doting mother.

R1, what was Bjork like?

Nina Hagen has become crazier with age, r1. There are few things more cringeworthy than her appearances on German talk shows in the last decade or so.

Nina singing "Over the Rainbow".

Nina's all religious now.

Here is an embarrassing interview from 2011. She's going to be 60 this year.

Her teeth are all yellow and falling out of her head. She must have done every drug in existence.

Oh how I love her.

She certainly has her style. She cannot be compared. Lol.

Bjork's songs seem conservative in comparison to Nina's!

She is a doll

What about that Nena with the 99 balloons pour la fete de Grand maman

Nina is batshit but straight. Bjork is bi.

Let's go to Las Vegas, Datalounge. Let's try our luck in a casino, there.

Back in the 70's Nina memorably masturbated on live broadcast TV on a late-night talk show when the topic was sex education.

Imfao,R13. Nina is...nevermind!

Bjork's problem stems largely from the fact that she became famous too young. She was already a celebrity in Iceland by age 11.

Such child prodigies usually have issues with entitlement and how the world should revolve around them. Bjork is no exception. Therefore I think her heartbreak from Matthew Barney [another person who hit massive success at a young age] might be a blessing in disguise. Hopefully she will become more mature, more grounded as a result.

99 Red Balloons:

Sounds better in German and French, non?

Who's the host/presenter at r4? He's very CUTE.

Nina also has a much better voice than Bjork.

Nobody has forgotten Nina and I don't get the comparison to Bjork.

Nina is a legend of her own. In Germany she's also known as an actress who was in a comedy movie franchise that spoofed Snow White called 7 Dwarves (the dwarves and other characters were played by popular German comedians of that time) where Nina's daughter (Cosima Shiva Hagen) plays Snow White.

I love her ice cream.

OT trivia: NENA was a huge career inspiration to odd little Betthäschen Bill Kaulitz, of Tokio Hotel.

I love that while he simpers over her here, his twin brother (with the dreads) eyes up her tits.

More Bill x Nena. He was very young (about 13?) and this was their first meeting. Again, twin bro has his eyes at chest level (although that could be a height issue) and otherwise he seems uninterested, lol.

@R18 His name is Marco Schreyl. He is now 42, now even hotter, still gay and still glass-closetted. He was rumoured to be together with German soccer player Arne Friedrich.

Danke dear r25!

My pleasure / gern geschehen !

This is not a thread about Nena but Nina Hagen, stupid cunts.

R13 I came here to see if that got mentioned. I lived in Germany for a few years and remember that getting played a lot on "Crazy Moments in TV" type shows. Good times. Sucks about the quality, but you see what you need to.

[quote]Bjork is bi.

What? Where did that come from?

Nina's take on the 'If I were a boy' concept is somewhat different from Beyoncé's.

"Wenn ich ein Junge wär'

dann wüsste ich so gut

was so ein junger Boy

aus lauter Liebe tut

ich würde in die Schwulen-Szene geh'n

und sexy Boys den Kopf verdreh'n

ich hätt' genug Verkehr

wenn ich ein Junge wär'"

I think Nina's always been religious, R4. Or at least she seems fascinated by religion.

It's a really hard listen, but Nina's 'Nunsexmonkrock' is (Oh alright, fucking arguably) one of the best albums of the Eighties. I loved her earlier, more conventional, but still oddball rock LPs-'Nun' was like a smack in the face. I went from hating it to hardly going a week without slapping it on the turntable for another listen. Pure art.

'Smack Jack' is my favorite, and apparently it's about her relationship with a junkie.

In college everyone loved her but me. I found her songs limited and Nina herself grating, hoarse, fugly and old. It is hard to believe she is only 60, I would guess much older.

Geez, R33. Talk about Lesbian Thread Death. (g)

Nina's assuredly not for everyone, but limited? When she cuts the the crap (even as a fan, I have ..errm, boundaries) she's a seriously good singer. The tune in OP's post shows off her abilities, but I prefer the studio version, the closer on the first side of her first album, IIRC.

This tune, while featuring too much of what was wrong with a lot of 80s music, has a beautiful opening. I wish she'd done it up that way, instead of going all 'New Wave'(grrr..that term still gets on my nerves) with it.

N.B. Nina was only ugly when she wanted to be ugly.

Chill, R28. Nina Hagen is a German performer, so we just expanded the discussion slightly into other weird German performers. No big deal.

For the record, Nena is also a lesbian/gay icon, also. She's just more conventional pop/rock in style, that's all. Same could be said for Tokio Hotel.

Remember that collab Nena did with Kim Wilde? It was called 'Irgendwo', or something. That was a Euro Les anthem, for a while.

Why keep making Nina's thread about Nena? STFU already.

You forgot the color film, OP.

I saw her at St. Andrews Hall in Detroit in the mid-1980s. She didn't seem weird at all, just a beautiful, strong, healthy, good-humored German woman, more like a gym teacher than a New Wave rocker.

It was before my time so I don't know for sure obviously, but it sure sounds like Nina was quite a fixture in the LA scene in the early 80s. She dated Anthony Kiedis and he wrote a song for her, and I am sure I read somewhere that a young Tori Amos trying to make her way in LA ended up at the same parties as Hagen.

NunSexMonkRock is one of my favourite albums, full stop. The more you listen to it, the more it reveals. You can listen to it and always hear new things in it. Not for everyone, obviously, but if you do like that kind of thing, you'll be very much rewarded.

I saw a series of interviews with her recently, where they went through most of her career. I was surprised because she was so down to earth and honest in this interview (perhaps she really liked the people who were interviewing her). Usually she seems to be "on" whenever she is interviewed from what I've seen, but here she was just being open and honest about it all, it was fascinating. Wish I could find it again. I remember her talking about her voice ("I knew singing with Nina Hagen Band I would never be able to keep singing like that for a long time without ruining my voice"), and spoke about how "Universal Radio" was recorded in a way she didn't want to, but was forced to by the record company.

Re: masturbating on Austrian television, she was more demonstrating what women need to do to get pleasure from sex too. In the interview above I remember her saying something like: "I escaped a dictatorship where you weren't allowed to say anything, and were censored all the time. I don't see why I couldn't say what I wanted in the West when they claimed they were the ones who were free." In "Einfach Nina (Junkie)" she sings "Ich wohn doch nicht im noblen fashistischen Wien. Ich brauch freiheit!" and I wonder if she's referring to this incident in particular?

I wish Spotify would release her early albums, the earliest they have is Nina Hagen, and I really only like listening to everything up to then. There is no Nina Hagen Band, Unbehagen, NunSexMonkRock, Angstlos or Fearless, Nina Hagen in Ekstasy or Ekstase.

R31, that song was originally sung by Italian 60s singer Rita Pavone. The part that Nina changes that I enjoy is that she sings that if she were a boy she would hang out in gay clubs and turn on all the boys and have lots of sex.

I just endured her caterwauling on the soundtrack of the Eurotrashtastic filck THE YEAR OF THE JELLYFISH (84--Cohen Media Channel on Amazon).

She was also featured on a recording of THE THREEPENNY OPERA--which I immediately tossed in the trash.