From The Beatles to Jay-Z, pop-music sensations have always had a mystifying effect on adults. The sound, the look, the lyrics, the squealing, hair-pulling fan mania—it's all entirely incomprehensible to anyone over, say, 21. For fresh proof, look no further than Germany's Tokio Hotel.
This glorified boy band's U.S. debut, Scream, overrunneth with the sort of flowery, illogical language that gives adults the shivers. Dark clouds are coming up again. The world is crashing down. Fading half moons are lost without you. The only thing to do is run. Through towns. Through monsoons. Toward the edge of the world and beyond time, always but not necessarily forever.
Amid this uncertain apocalypse stands Tokio Hotel's lead singer, Bill Kaulitz, with his boyish looks, girlish hips, and streaked, gravity-defying mane (think Sonic the Hedgehog meets Nikki Sixx). Kaulitz is certain he can make it after all, which is exactly what his group has done. Teenage Americans are rabid for these Teutonic brats. And the media can't get enough either. I'll admit there's something fascinating about the group, but the real reason I'm writing about them is simple: my boss told me to. He's hoping to attract hordes of Googling teenage girls to the site. Don't laugh: it's happened before. "I was writing about them for the MTV News blog just sort of as an experiment," Alex Mar, a producer at MTV news, said after Tokio Hotel's recent visit to MTV studios in New York. "It was a slow day so I thought, Let's just put something up about this band, to amuse ourselves. By the next morning, we were completely flooded with comments. This is the sort of reaction that's reserved for, say, 50 Cent."
Musically speaking, Tokio Hotel is the fallout from Fall Out Boy. The sound is just as calculated, contrived, and unintentionally comical as the look, but the whole package works anyway. Just look at the press photo, a masterpiece of mixed messages that conveys seduction, androgyny, and the lead guitarist's anachronistic allegiance to the St. Louis Cardinals in one shot. Now that Kaulitz's flawless complexion and soft, anime smile has propelled Tokio Hotel to fame, it's just a matter of time before the rest of us come around to the truth: these dudes are painfully likable.
—Bill Bradley
Band photograph by Thomas Raabsch. GermanV.F.* cover photographed by Ellen Von Unwerth.*
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