Rammstein's 10 Biggest Controversies
8. Stripped
In their storied career, Rammstein have very rarely covered the works of the bands they love but the group surprised their fans in 1998 with a cover of Depeche Mode’s Stripped. Naturally, they toyed with it in a way that made it their own - dropping the second half of the chorus line “let me see you stripped [down to the bone]” just to give it that extra saucy Rammstein-ness, proving that it wasn’t just deutsche Sprache they could play with.
It wasn’t the choice of song, or the song itself, that caused the controversy this time - in fact, Depeche Mode have gone on record as fans of the reinterpretation. It was Rammstein’s first taste with backlash to a music video.
The video contained footage from Olympia, a documentary on the 1936 Olympics that took place in Nazi Germany. That, in itself, is an interesting historical study - none more so because the film is often credited with pioneering the way sports would be filmed throughout the rest of the century and onwards. This choice, and Olympia’s director Leni Riefenstahl’s own personal history as a Nazi sympathiser by post-war authorities, saw Rammstein threatened yet again by the press and the general public.
In the ensuing years, the question chased the band from interview to interview and every time they clarified yet again that they did not share Riefenstahl’s views, only appreciated the startling footage she had captured.