Baby, gib Gas
A little theology of acceleration. Twenty chapters of a story that opens on a spoken sermon and closes on one — and in between: a locksmith from Bünde who learns that Cash tastes even more bitter in German, a woman on a couch who turns into a rocket because nothing else is left, and a beverage-market clerk from Hamm-Westen who can only really live once he stops being himself. Each chapter hands off to the next like a bottle of Brause slid across a kitchen table.
Imitation, Translation, Revelation
The spine is a lineage. Johnny Cash writes the prisoner-songs and the preacher-songs and understands, first, that they are the same thing under different light. Gunter Gabriel — a locksmith from the Westphalian town of Bünde who would one day sit at the Cash family’s kitchen table in Hendersonville — spends thirty years not covering Cash but translating him, weighing every word twice. “I shot a man in Reno” comes back as a German line, and you hear that Gabriel’s whole art is a single decision made over and over.
At the exact center sits the song the playlist is named for. After seven chapters of preparation the organ drops, a pastor speaks — “Liebe ist das Brot der Armen und der Ruin der Reichen” — and then: the couch-rocket, Vitamin L, “ich trinke ihren Atem und ich gehe in die Knie,” Currywurst, Brause, the landlord at the door. For one song, one line, Gabriel stops being a translator and becomes an originator. In our world the song is finally built — by the label’s own Johnny Kovacs, throttle floored.
The last three tracks answer the question the other nineteen only circle. Kapelle Petra’s beverage-clerk becomes a Johnny Cash impersonator and finds a full life only by ceasing to be himself — imitation as redemption. Gabriel brings Cash’s “Hurt” into German three weeks before Cash dies, knowing the chain is at its end — translation as approach. And Cash speaks the apocalypse at the top of his last great song, the way the Louvin Brothers speak the devil at the top of this mixtape — originality as revelation. The circle closes.
Play it front to back. The bottle goes around the table once.
Pairs well with a Pils, a Currywurst rot-weiß, and the decision to leave the landlord outside.
