Polka Will Outlive Us All

Marilena is a teenage singer from Fulda, Germany, whose entire musical project seems to be a cheerful rebuke to anyone who thought traditional folk pop had died out under the weight of electronic music. Her track "Hey DJ leg a Polka auf"—roughly: "Hey DJ, put on a polka"—is exactly what it sounds like: a request, issued with complete sincerity, that the club abandon whatever minimal techno it’s currently committed to and replace it with an accordion.

Germany has this parallel universe of Volksmusik and Schlager—a tradition of folk-inflected pop that never went away, never became ironic, and fills enormous venues with audiences the cooler end of the music press pretends don’t exist. The Musikantenstadl, a long-running TV variety show in the Bavarian folk-music tradition, was appointment television for millions of Germans for decades. Marilena fits somewhere in that lineage—young enough to be incongruous in it, committed enough to make the incongruity funny rather than embarrassing.

"Hey DJ leg a Polka auf" is a bad song in the best possible way. It has the structural confidence of something that knows exactly what it is and has no interest in being anything else. There’s a version of music criticism that would find something to say about the polka’s Eastern European roots, its transformation into German folk kitsch, the way novelty tracks like this function as a pressure valve for anxieties about cultural change. I don’t want to write that version. It made me laugh. That’s probably all she was going for.