What I Did During Donauinselfest

The line up at the SJ-Bühne, where I spent a good deal of my time

What exactly is Donauinselfest? It's a free three-day music festival on the Donauinsel (as the name suggests, an island in the middle of the Danube) held over the Corpus Christi holiday weekend and one of the major events in town during the year. The Straßenbahn lines run late into the night, the U-Bahn comes more frequently, and it can feel like everyone in the city comes out for the party. Here's what I did:

1. Partied with Socialists
The SPÖ is the traditional and still the lead sponsor of Donauinselfest, although the Austrian music industry (radio stations) and growth machine also put up some money. That means that left-leaning leaflets flutter about on the ground, and that the various stages are named after various wings of the party -- die sozialistische Jugend (from the youth wing of the party, and my favorite stage, actually: heavy on indie rock and ska), die junge Generation (for kids who want to grow up socialist, and where I saw teenybopper sensation Massimo Schema, who was actually decent), die sozialistischen GewerkschafterInnen (for union members -- aka older people -- and therefore heavy on the Schlager), etc.


2. Learned the Definition of "Prolet"
When I decided I needed to bump up my German-speaking music collection last fall, I bought some gift cards for the Austrian iTunes Store and started clicking around. Coincidentally, this happened to be the same week that a rap duo from Oberösterreich by the name of Trackshittaz performed the song "Oida Taunz!" (roughly translated from Dialekt: "Dance, Yo!") on the TV show "Helden von Morgen" (Heroes of Tomorrow) (which has a similar concept to American Idol, but is not a franchise of it) and took the entire country by storm. McDonald's, whose advertisements here are always full of puns in English and German, did a variation on it for a billboard campaign, and the Bundeskanzler invited Lukas Plöchtl, a half-Chinese member of the group, to perform the song for China's party leaders during an official state visit celebrating 40 years of diplomatic ties between Austria and China. (Lukas apparently speaks Chinese, like he speaks German, with a very thick Oberösterreich accent, which must be hilarious.)

I, too, fell in love with the pumping beats and tongue-twisting (for me) pronunciation of this song, so I was incredibly excited to see the Trackshittaz live in concert. I had to damper my enthusiasm a bit in public, though, because while Austrians might unabashedly listen to Katy Perry and Ke$ha, admitting that you actually like something like the Trackshittaz, Skero or Aggro Berlin (German gangsta rap) is a little uncouth.

Which brings me to the word "Prolet." The Trackshittaz have emerged as the voice of the Proleten in Austria -- their upcoming album is called "Proleten feian längaah" (Prolets party longer) -- and they even wrote a song about what it's like to get called a "Prolet" all the time by people who think they're classier than you.



Thanks to seeing that song live, and watching the many many Prolets in the audience going nuts, I finally think I understand what a "Prolet" is. Probably the best one-word translation into English would be "Eurotrash," but this phenomenon doesn't really exist in America, so it's hard to know for sure. The word "Prolet" itself comes from proletarian, but this isn't about Marx. It's about men in their 20s who ride souped-up cars with the windows down, blasting not gangsta rap but house music, and who wear their sunglasses at night. They dress a little like Kid Cudi and his hipster rap friends: hip-hop influenced, but with clothes that fit a lot more tightly (it is, after all, Europe) than most gangstas would be comfortable with.

Unrelatedly, saying the name of the band is always an exercise for me in German pronunciation, because somehow, saying "Tray-eck Sheet-ahs" makes me feel less idiotic than "Track Shitters."


3. Earned at least 1000 Hipster-Points
After the Trackshittaz, I needed to resurrect my musical reputation a little, and catching Bakkushan with the German* hipsters was just what I needed.

Here they are, the German hipsters, in all their glory.

They were awesome! The pit was energetic, but not terribly intense, and everyone just seemed to be having a really great time, especially when they played this song, which was something of a YouTube hit in the German-speaking world:




4. Skanked around with Europeans
But not that kind of skanking, silly! I was in heaven -- I've never seen so much ska on one program before. There was British ska, Russian-Jewish mixed with Austrian ska, straight-up Austrian ska, and much more.

New Riot, one of the ska bands I discovered this weekend, ended their set with this song:



The chorus was incredibly appropriate for Donauinselfest:

             Let's go crazy, crashing parties all over town.
             We'll get so messy, till our heads hit the ground.
             And when we wake up, we'll start over again.
             A new day, a new start, a new riot begins.

5. Met up with old friends
Austria is a small place, so when the entire country (and all of its musicians) decides to attend one concert, you're bound to run into some people that you know. I spent most of Donauinselfest with Sarah, a friend from high school who is also in Vienna this summer, because our musical tastes align well, which is important for an event of this size, when there are always multiple shows you could be watching. But I also ran into two other groups of friends during the festival. And then, of course, there was the fact that almost half of the German-speaking bands that I listen to made an appearance. In addition to Trackshittaz and Ich + Ich (both of which deserved their own items), I got to hear Sido, a German rapper and one of the founding members of Aggro Berlin, and Massimo Schena, an Austrian rapper who also took part in Helden von Morgen.

Massimo Schena ist jetzt da für dich.

6. Realized that dreams can come true

During my first trip to Austria in 2008, "So soll es bleiben" by Ich + Ich was getting heavy radio play. When I got home, I downloaded it and two other songs from the same album to my computer. For a long time, they were the only three German songs I knew, and I memorized them before my German was even good enough to really understand the lyrics. Ich + Ich was the first German music I listened to for fun, and hearing them was the first time I really understand (emotionally, not intellectually) that there was an entire German-speaking society out there, full of things and people that were worth knowing, and that I could actually be a part of that society, just because I had memorized some vocabulary lists and verb tenses. So to see Ich + Ich live in Austria packed a very deep emotional punch, far beyond the music itself.

It was in some ways the culmination of a three-year dream -- I can still remember sitting on my bed, listening to Ich + Ich, and wanting so desperately to return to Austria. During the songs I knew, I went nuts -- screaming, jumping up and down, shouting out the lyrics, even crying a little. It was like I was a teenybopper again, only this time, it was an entire country I had fallen insanely, inexplicably and totally in love with.

This is what happiness looks like. Sarah and I at Ich + Ich.

* Sign that you've been in Austria too long: People speaking German German -- you know, that thing you learned in school for six years -- sounds odd to you and even grates at your ears a little.