Soil, Blood, Wrong Facebook Page
The outline is probably familiar by now. Frei.Wild—a rock band from South Tyrol, the German-speaking autonomous province tucked into northern Italy, with a relationship to nationalism somewhere between "complicated" and "obvious if you read the lyrics carefully"—got nominated for the Echo, which is Germany’s main music industry prize. Their category also included Kraftklub, an indie rock band from Chemnitz, Mia., the Berlin pop-punk act, and Die Ärzte, who are essentially Germany’s household-name punk institution. Nominating Frei.Wild alongside them required significant willful blindness from whoever compiles these shortlists.
Kraftklub withdrew their nomination first. Then Mia. withdrew theirs. Both cited the Frei.Wild nomination, which is the polite way of saying they didn’t want to be in the same room. The Echo organization eventually pulled Frei.Wild from the ceremony entirely—inevitable once the thing became a news story—and the band responded the way it always does, insisting it is not a right-wing band, that it opposes racism, that it is simply proud of South Tyrolean identity, a people misunderstood by the press and the cultural establishment. The fans agreed. The fans were also, it turns out, catastrophically stupid.
A portion of the Frei.Wild fanbase decided to go after Mia. on Facebook to punish them for the withdrawal. So far, so predictable. The problem is they found the wrong Mia. The German Mia.—the Berlin band led by Mieze Katz—has a Facebook page. But so does M.I.A., the British-Sri Lankan rapper born Mathangi Arulpragasam, known internationally for Paper Planes and for a certain Super Bowl halftime moment. The mob chose M.I.A.’s page, specifically a post about her new mix for the fashion label Kenzo, and unleashed everything they had.
The documented results are something. Petra wrote: YOU are disgusting! Ignorant, red-painted fascists. YOU are pathetic and uptight! Pfui!!!!!
—the word "fascist" deployed against a Tamil refugee’s daughter by defenders of a band that markets carefully deniable nationalist imagery to teenagers in villages. Christian offered philosophical cover: It doesn’t really matter whether Frei.Wild is right-wing or not! As long as a band isn’t extreme and isn’t as undemocratic as you…
The "as long as" doing extraordinary heavy lifting there. And Steffi asked whether Mia. had Angst vor der Konkurenz?????
—"competition" misspelled, five question marks, no discernible self-awareness.
Frei.Wild has always operated in the productive grey zone where nothing is quite explicit enough to be actionable but the meaning is legible to anyone paying attention—songs that evoke soil and blood and a threatened people without saying anything a lawyer couldn’t defend. It works especially well in places where the state feels distant and the local identity feels besieged, and there’s no shortage of those places. The Echo affair was supposed to illustrate that the cultural establishment was persecuting them. What it actually illustrated is that their fans will harass a Sri Lankan artist’s Kenzo playlist by mistake and still feel completely righteous about it. Sleep well, stallions.