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Hit Rammstein Sonne on Saturday evening for the second time was banned in Russian figure skating. Little-known Taisiya Proskuryakova decided to skate the program to the same music that the winner of the Grand Prix Final, Petr Gumennik, was forced to abandon. Sports tell the amazing story of this music.
Success story and connection with Klitschko
Rammstein came quite late to recording studio albums. For a long time, future industrial legends felt comfortable in the status of a club band presenting songs to a small audience. And then it began to grow rapidly, and it became obvious to everyone that the game was worth the candle. So in the mid-90s Hertzeleid's debut album appeared, a couple of years later Sehnsucht came out with two powerful hits (Du Hast and Engel), and Rammstein from a local gang from East Berlin grew into a powerful stadium team.
The group existed for a little over 5 years, and in Europe everyone already knew it — from ordinary music lovers to higher-level personalities. The Ukrainian boxer Vitaliy Klitschko had gone through approximately the same path, only not in music, but in sports, by that time — a quick, steady rise in professional sports. Vitaly and his brother Vladimir began in Germany, where Rammstein thundered from every iron. So it’s not surprising that when Vitaly needed a title track to enter the fights, his team turned to them.
It was at the turn of the 90s and 2000s. Then “Ramma” was collecting material for their third studio album – and then an order arrived from Klitschko. At that time, he had already had nearly 30 professional fights without defeat and was preparing to move to the American market. A powerful title track was needed for it, which would become its calling card. This is how the song appeared — no, then it was not Sonne yet, but… Klitschko.
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“When the request came, Till (Lindemann) sat down and described the boxing theme in words so that it didn’t look flat,” rhythm guitarist Paul Landers told Rock Hard. “And then this song appeared in the rehearsal room. We really thought it through: the whole arena counts: one, two, three and then up to ten. And then: Aus! Exactly on Aus! Klitschko enters the arena and goes to the ring. At the moment where he raises his hands in the ring, the chorus sounds: Hier kommt die Sonne. This is how it was all planned.”
What is the meaning of the “forbidden” song
The idea of the song revolved around the image of the Sun — bright, huge, scorching and invincible. Vocalist and lyricist Till Lindemann thus poeticized the customer. At that time, Vitaly was already an iconic boxer, the World Boxing Organization (WBO) heavyweight champion, but his star had yet to rise (in fact, this would happen after the fight with Lennox Lewis a few years later), and with each new knockout (there were 41 out of 47 throughout my career) The sun is shining brighter and brighter. And the knockout countdown is carried out right during the song — this is the meaning of counting from 1 to 10 in the chorus.
It was practically never performed in its original form. Perhaps the only surviving version of the track before its transformation into Sonne can be considered a live performance at a concert at the Berlin club Knaack in March 2000. In the official setlist it went under two pilot titles — Der Boxer and, in fact, Klitschko.
It is generally accepted that the song has undergone significant changes since then, but in reality this is not entirely true. From this recording we can conclude that in the original version the chorus was less accentuated — probably so as not to distract the audience from the boxer's entrance. Instead of words, it contains a knockout countdown until the final part of the track, but the subsequent lyrics remained virtually unchanged. Otherwise, both versions of the track are a typical example of industrial with a strong emphasis on a dark atmosphere.
A hard guitar riff sets the tone and frames the vocal and other instrumental content without drawing attention to itself. By the way, the recognizable piece with female vocals in the final part was recorded without the participation of the band — they simply borrowed one of the samples (ready-made musical fragment) from the Spectrasonics online library, which was used by many famous composers, including Hans Zimmer and Danny Elfman.
There is a version that Klitschko was supposed to use a new song during the fight with Chris Byrd or immediately after it. The Ukrainian was a clear favorite — despite a good professional record, Bird was inferior to Klitschko both in size and in level of training. However, it was the American who managed to inflict his first defeat, without, however, putting Vitaly on the canvas — during the fight he suffered a shoulder injury and refused to fight during the break between the 9th and 10th rounds.
And allegedly, immediately after this fight, Rammstein received a message with a refusal — they say Vitaly listened to the song created for him, but it seemed to him “too heavy” both musically and from a semantic point of view. It is not entirely clear what exactly the boxer’s representatives had in mind, because by that time the group’s work had already been well studied, and their discography included only one lyrical composition, but nevertheless Klitschko preferred a much “softer” hit as the title track Tina Turner Simply the Best, which «Rammy» repeatedly ironized in various interviews.
Russian trace
However, Rammstein only benefited from this. After being rejected, the band slightly reworked the original material and released the lead single of their third album, Mutter, entitled Sonne. Under it, the track went down in history as one of the main hits not only of rock, but also of modern music in general.
By the way, if you really want to, you can even spot a Russian trace in the composition. Well, more precisely, not in the composition itself, but in the video for it, but nevertheless. Its plot is as far from boxing as possible — the seven dwarfs (the band members starred in their roles) work in a mine to please their Snow White, played by the Russian ballerina and model Yulia Stepanova.
Despite the fact that Sonne written at a fairly comfortable tempo, and some of its fragments are quite melodic; it practically did not sound in figure skating. Quite possibly, for the same reasons why Klitschko did not take her for himself — “too heavy.” So the program of the Russian figure skater Pyotr Gumennik, set to a variation of this track, could well become innovative and be remembered by a wide audience not only in Russia, but throughout the world.
But…