Thirty Seconds on Every Station

Die Ärzte—Germany’s most beloved punk band, three idiots who have been making smart, ridiculous rock music since the early eighties—released Schrei nach Liebe in 1993. It translates roughly as "Cry for Love," and it’s a three-minute dressing-down addressed directly at right-wing skinheads, diagnosing their politics as emotional damage: your violence is a mute cry for love. It charted. It became a classic. It became the kind of song everyone in Germany had heard.

In the summer of 2015, as refugee homes were being firebombed and the familiar arguments about "concerned citizens" were cycling through the news again, a campaign called Aktion Arschloch—Operation Asshole, more or less—decided the song needed to come back. Stream it, request it on the radio, play it in clubs. Get it back into the charts. Make it so that someone on their way to shout about borders would hear it leaking from a café window and have to spend three minutes being told exactly what they are.

It partially worked. The song re-entered the charts, got airplay, trended. Whether the people it was aimed at heard the diagnosis is another question. Probably not. It never is. The person being called a coward by a punk song rarely processes the message—they process the noise.

But I still like the gesture. Not the naive idea that music fixes politics, but the refusal to let the moment pass without some reply. That summer had the quality of an emergency that people were already deciding to treat as normal. Schrei nach Liebe on the radio at least disturbed that process, if only for a few weeks.

The song holds up. Hard, direct, a little camp in the best Die Ärzte way. If you haven’t heard it, hear it.