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  • Amok Mama: The worst buskers in the world

Politics

Amok Mama: The worst buskers in the world

Jacinta asks why Berlin's buskers so bad. She doesn't know, but she has a solution.

So, one of my German friends wants me to write about Matussek and that lot and how they hate gay people and everything – and I just can’t. I guess I must be slightly latently homophobic, but I just can’t muster up any rage. I know we don’t live in a gay utopian society and I think it’s a fucking Schande that we don’t have equal marriage in Germany and I think people are really complacent about it and I think teenagers are really homophobic and cruel and I think Birgit Kelle’s an evil cunt and I think Germany needs to always watch itself, vigilantly, like, to make sure it takes the “humane” path and not the silly-billy, slightly evil, tiny bit Nazi path, and I also think if people listen to Kelle too much it could be really dangerous and that. But I just can’t find enough anger in me to inspire a blog.

All the gay parents I know are really brilliant, and their kids are really relaxed and happy and chilled-out. I don’t want to down-play the importance of this new, self-confident Christian right in Germany. I just find it hard to get angry at people whose arguments are so mind-bogglingly stupid.

My other German friend, Jens, he wants me to write about Oliver Polak waxing lyrical about rape jokes in the Taz and also that rape joke that they published in the Bild the other week.

“I can’t,” I said to him. “I’m all raped out. I’m just exhausted.”

“That’s what they want,” he said. “They want the anti-rapists to get tired.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I said. “I can’t write a mad rape joke blog every single time some unfunny cunt makes a rape joke.”

“Yeah, but now they’re really German. All your last blogs were totally irrelevant. But now you’re right. Your prediction has come true! You have to write a blog about it, it’s really weird if you don’t.”

But I just can’t. I’m too tired – or maybe I’m too peaceful and happy at the moment. I want to talk about U-Bahn-Musiker. Why are the U-Bahn-Musiker in Berlin SO fucking bad? They’re really appalling. Everyone slags off the ones with the tiny hi-fis and the plastic trumpets, but none of them are really that much better, are they? I once told my son that we only needed to give the U-Bahn-Musiker who played good music money. This was a BIG mistake. Every time a musician played his music and then handed round his little coffee Becher for the coins, my son would inform him happily: “Sorry, we only give money when we liked the music, and we don’t like yours. You should practise more.”

I was on the U7 earlier when a really terrible musician got on. Really fucking appalling – an insult to mankind. There was a kid in front of me, a toddler, Migrationshintergrund, (since the Romanians came to town I can’t tell what anyone is anymore, everybody could be Romanian now) and he was just enraptured. His granny – a skinny, hard woman, who looked like she’d had a hard life, her face was all gnarled and wizened – held him up to see. His face burst into a smile of joy, he literally lit up. I started crying when I saw how delighted he was, not because I was, like, full of despair at his bad taste in music or anything, but at how huge his joy was, and how fucking terrible the music was. Imagine how his face will light up when he hears truly beautiful music, I thought to myself. And it was a bit embarrassing, really, coz I thought maybe everyone else in the carriage would be thinking I’d been really moved by the terrible, terrible, terrible music.

All these problems we have – rape and racism and homophobia and bad spelling and all of them – bad buskers on the U-Bahn, violence at Alexanderplatz, people distrusting each other, basically, they wouldn’t disappear completely but they would exist a lot less if we got these kids when they were young, when they were toddlers, and played them beautiful music and showed them beautiful things and read to them, well, maybe not beautiful, but interesting stories. Then we would just like have a nation full of wonderful people, trying every day of their lives to make and do beautiful things. We would save a lot of money if we just spent like, half our domestic budget on making toddlers’ lives beautiful and interesting. God, you should’ve seen his face. He exploded with joy.