I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to KLAUS MEINE, of Scorpions, Nordoff-Robbins and Gerhard Schröder tennis court compañero fame, for his efforts on the song Still loving you.
[Yikes, cheesy Scorpions? Now, I guess we can skip all the distinction crap; see Kracht, 1995, Bourdieu, 1984, and Sontag 1964 for comprehensive and ultimate takes on how pointless it has become.]
I therefore feel most obliged to pay tribute to one of the unsung heroes of Bigtime guitar-based German Weltwunder. Klaus Meine is by any standard you could possibly come up with a very, very good Rock’n’roll singer. Also, and crucial to his achievement under consideration here, it is not entirely clear as to whether or not his German pronounciation adds to or subtracts from that.
WALL OF TIME honours Klaus Meine explicitely for his double contribution to Still loving you both as a lyricist as well as a singer. The jury would like to point your attention exemplarily to two aspects:
One being the haunting dynamic range of Meine’s delivery throughout the classically suspended build-up of the song, neatly preserved by pre-compression-craze studio engineers under the auspices of Dieter Dierks (probably also responsible for arranging Meine’s voice in this cozy yet rapturing environment of the flappiest snare sound this side of your mother’s detergent boxes and the most soulful guitar accents ever to make it onto a 1980s Hard rock LP),
Another one being the chorus lyrics pronounced in a decidedly German accent, convoluted with Meine’s recent recovery from vocal chord surgery: A combination that allows for poetic re-configurations in the listener’s mind. Such would have been unthinkable to experience with Meine’s native English Heavy croon contenders back then in 1983: Here we go again, all the way from the stars. Although the actual written lyrics are also very good (feel free to look them up), this version—imprinted in my neural circuitry for 22 years now—is preferable at any rate. The jury was also very convinced by the casual afterthought conveyed in I would try to change things that killed our love.
Thank you, Klaus Meine.
