Un cafe au lait, garçon

There you are living your adult life with adult concerns at the bus stop on a frigid morning when Nina Hagen careens across your headphones. Suddenly, it's an '80s musical foodfight, or three and a half minutes with the class clown doing her best impression of French culture cribbed from National Lampoon's European Vacation. Rivaling only Screamin' Jay Hawkins's geopolitical antics, Hagen collides the insipid with the infectious. More and more, I'm convinced that those heroic choruses only work when the singer is slapping herself in the face with a wet towel. Which is when my idiot heart melts.

Nina Hagen — Springtime In Paris