In Defense of Scooter, and I Won’t Be Taking Questions

How much is the fish? H.P. Baxxter shouts, and wherever you are when you hear it—a car, a festival, a kitchen at midnight—you’re somewhere specific in your past again, in whatever year it was when Scooter first rearranged your idea of what a song could get away with.

Scooter—the German eurodance group built around Baxxter’s voice, his shaved head, and an absolute refusal to be embarrassed—spent the nineties and early two-thousands making approximately the same record forty times, and it kept working. They sampled freely, shouted things over four-to-the-floor kicks, and did it all with the conviction of people who had decided early on that critical regard was something other bands could worry about. Nessaja used a Peter Pan metaphor without a flicker of irony and was enormous across Europe. Maria (I Like It Loud) made no argument except volume and succeeded entirely on that basis.

There’s a specific pleasure in music that operates completely outside of taste—music that doesn’t ask for your respect because it doesn’t need it, that bypasses whatever critical apparatus you’ve built up over the years and goes straight to wherever the good part of your brain lives. Scooter did this better than almost anyone working in their lane, which was a lane most respectable people pretended didn’t exist while driving through it with the windows down.

Baxxter had—still has—the quality of absolute conviction. He decided very early on that self-awareness was someone else’s problem and stuck to that position through three decades of releasing music. The spoken-word catchphrases, the screaming, the samples that the original artists were probably surprised to hear deployed this way—all of it delivered with the face of a man who has never once considered that any of this might be embarrassing.

Some of it you outgrow. Some of it you spend years pretending to outgrow and then put on at sufficient volume when nobody’s watching. Scooter is mostly the second thing, and I’ve stopped apologizing for it.