Experience the song for yourself

It was not quite Lionel Richie with Diana Ross, nor even George Michael crooning alongside Aretha Franklin. But as R&B duets go Frank and Bernard were not too bad.

In a worthy but almost certainly doomed attempt to give some street cred to the Berlin-Paris axis, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the German Foreign Minister, and Bernard Kouchner, his French counterpart, travelled to a hip recording studio yesterday to cut a song bemoaning the lot of immigrants in Germany.

The ministers signalled that they meant business by taking off their suit jackets, handing their mobile phones to aides and then, after a short rehearsal with Muhabbet, the German-Turkish composer of the song, launching into the chorus with the elan of Welsh rugby supporters.

“Germany,” they trilled in German, “Germany.” That was about it.

The chorus continued: “Why do you cut yourself off/Germany, put your cards on the table . . .” But that was a touch on the controversial side. So instead they shook their hips and clicked their fingers. Mr Steinmeier is 51, Mr Kouchner is 68.

The point was to show that Germany and France are taking their immigrant population seriously.

It was underlined by the two leaders, Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, and Nicolas Sarkozy, the French President, who visited a Berlin school yesterday with a large number of Turkish children. But the singing foreign ministers stole the show. The song, entitled Deutschland, was performed mainly by seven young pro-tégés of Muhabbet, and seems destined for the charts.

It should be placed on YouTube this week and can be downloaded on www. plakmusic.de or on the German foreign ministry site www.diplo.de.

“We are very pleased with their performance,” said Jochen Kuehling, who runs the Plakmusic label from a Turkish recording studio in Berlin. “Their voices were good, strong – we wouldn’t have let them do the whole song though.”

Which was perhaps just as well: the song is a scathing account of how Germans ignore their immigrants. Perhaps the ministers did not have time to study the whole text.

“Do you think I’m going to surrender?” runs one verse. “Do you think I won’t oppose/Do you think that I’ll just lie quietly on the floor?”

The song, a mixture of R&B, and Arabesk – using Middle Eastern instruments as backing - is an appeal from an immigrant in Germany to be accepted: “What’s going on inside you, what makes you so angry?” asks the song, addressing native Germans. “Don’t yell at me, stay sensible I understand you clearly/You just have to speak German to me.”

By German standards this is quite explosive material. Unlike France, Germany has had no ethnic street violence. Immigrants in France (5.5 million) and Germany (3.2 million) make up more than half the Muslim population within the European Union. Most of Germany’s Muslims are of Turkish origin and, though increasingly frustrated by their lack of career possibilities, they have been much less volatile than the North African immigrants in France.

The song is an attempt to break the taboo on discussing German indifference to the Turkish community.

The debut of the ministers thus has a far sharper political edge than the forays of other politicians into the musical world: Bill Clinton’s saxophone playing, Boris Yeltsin’s clumsy alcohol-fuelled dance routine.

Singing politicians are still a rarity: the trend seems rather to be for singers to indulge in global political campaigning.

So Deutschland could set some kind of precedent.

“I think it would be really good if politicians would sing rather than speak in parliament,” Muhabbet said. “More people might listen.”

Music to our ears . . . or not

— In 1998 Peter Brooke, then Northern Ireland Secretary, sang My Darling Clementine on a TV chat show, hours after an IRA bomb killed eight people near Omagh

— The former Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s Elvis impersonations are credited with boosting his popularity with voters in the 2001 election

— Peter Lilley, a Tory politician, used to sing at party conferences. Highlights included a 1992 pastiche of I Have a Little List by Gilbert and Sullivan, admonishing benefit cheats: “Dads who won’t support the kids of ladies they’ve kissed/ And I haven’t even mentioned all those scrounging socialists/ I’ve got them on my list”

— In 2003 Silvio Berlusconi, the former Italian Prime Minister, wrote and released an album of Neapolitan love songs. Berlusconi began his career as a singer on a cruise ship

— Hugo Chávez released an album of Venezuelan folk songs last month, featuring songs he sang during his Hello, President television and radio programme. It will be distributed free

— The former presidential aide Karl Rove, below, provoked the ire of the animal rights group Peta after he performed a rap at the 63th Annual Radio/TV and White House Correspondents’ Dinner. It included the words: “Listen up suckers, don’t get the jitters but MC Rove tears the heads of critters.”

Source: Times archives

Times Recommends

• Karadzic found freedom in the Madhouse
• Bears kill guards at Russian mine
• Hotel is a monument to new North Korea