Born In Xixax

Every once in while I hear a piece of music that impresses me so much the moment is permantly burned into my brain. Doesn’ t happen very often. I usually come to music via a gradual build-up of awareness. I’ll always remember the earth-shattering moment I first heard Nina Hagen. I don’t exactly recall the date, not even what year it was. I’m guessing in the vicinity of me being between the ages of 10 and 15. It was a family vacation. It was night. I was in the back of the family vehicle pretending to be asleep so as to avoid being drawn into any kind of conversation. And then I heard that voice. “This is Radio Yerevan”. Life changed forever. After the vacation, I found the tape, copied it, and listened to it on my little walkman ad nauseum for the next 5 years. I surely have to thank Nina Hagen for helping me maintain my sanity throughout my torturous years in high school. As it happens, Born In Xixax is not the opening song on the album Nunsexmonkrock. The opening song is Antiworld. The tape was set on side B, as if the previous listener had been unable to proceed after experiencing the unmitigated weirdness of side A. Since my first experience was so deeply imressive, I’ve continually insisted on playing side B before side A. I think the songs hang together better and it was the artist’s own mistake to sequence them any other way. The narrative makes more sense, if you will. Such is the magic of vinyl and cassette. When I finally bought it on cd, I had no choice but to play it in the sequence I consider to be wrong. Now I’ve moved past cd and keep all my music on my harddrive. The beauty of playing music through the computer is complete freedom of sequencing. I’ve given up on the old series of mixtapes and switched to compiling the perfect playlist. With all this digital freedom, it seems that the album inself will soon cease to be considered an artistic statement in and of itself and be seen more as a kind of mix and match set of individual songs. Wether or not this is the tradegy of our times, as some critics would have it, I don’t know. All I know is, Born In Xixax is the fucking first song. Ok?

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