GABO
Nina Hagen has announced her 14th studio LP, and her first since 2011’s Volksbeat. Unity is scheduled for a December 9 arrival, and its lead single — a cover of Merle Travis’ “Sixteen Tons” — is out now, accompanied by a visual treatment courtesy of Sebastian Vogt.
The original “Sixteen Tons” was recorded by Travis in 1946. The track — a Kentucky coal miner’s anthem that begins with the iconic line “Some people say a man is made outta mud / A poor man’s made outta muscle and blood” — was later canonized by Tennessee Ernie Ford’s 1955 version. Hagen’s interpolation of the all-American working class staple, stylized with the numeral 16, is more straightforward than one might expect from a German new-wave pioneer born in Soviet East Berlin. She drops her voice way down — below Ford’s, even — and embellishes the instrumentation only slightly, with a surfy guitar and skittering drum beat subbing in for the classic rendition’s walking bass line and snaps.
Vogt’s video, however, makes it clear that Hagen’s song is set in the post-industrial era. (“We’re not goin’ back to those days of 16 tons,” a muffled voice ad libs at the end of the first verse.) Though shot in black and white, the clip stars a cross section of Gen-X and millennial hipster society dressed quite inappropriately for a day in the mines. Watch it below.