It's very easy to look at Scooter and snort derisively. It's very easy to look at Scooter and think, "Christ, what the fuck is that all about," It's very easy to look at Scooter and fall into a state of deep, deep depression. The thing is though, anyone who does those things is, to be blunt about it, a fucking idiot. They're an idiot because Scooter represent something pure, something essential, something the club community at large tends to forget is important: Scooter are the unselfconscious manifestation of fun. Like, actual fun. The kind of fun that actual people actually have, rather than the sneering, defensive, irony lacerated fun that dour pricks like myself trick themselves into thinking they're having. Scooter are the antithesis of everyone with a Twitter account, a Chain Reaction 12" and some Solid Opinions on the State of Contemporary Clubbing. And that's why we need them more than ever.
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We're currently living in a period of time where the fun and the frivolous feel, well, just that: frivolous. The world gets shitter and shitter day on day in literally every single way. There is nothing to look forward to. People might fool themselves into momentarily thinking that a new Star Wars film is a reason to wade through that shit, might, for a minute or two, remember that they're booked into Pizza Express on Tuesday week and allow themselves to smile, but really, deep down, we all know that nothing is going to get better. And because we know that, because we know of the unending, unceasing horrors that assault us on an hourly basis, the idea that feelings like fun and enjoyment have any importance, any bearing on the world, seems redundant, reductive, nothing more than an avoidance technique. So fun has become this weird thing that other people have and experience and do. Those other people are probably really, really, really into Scooter.
Scooter are, if we're honest, absolutely terrible. They're clunky, brash and utterly artless. They've taken the Sunny Delight charms of happy hardcore's endless sugar rushes and chucked a tonne of Saxo in the mix creating a kind of oddly unpalatable facsimile of something that was already relatively difficult to stomach in the first place. Just think about "The Logical Song" , which might just be one of the most abominable pieces of art ever shat out by mankind, for a second. Everything about that record is bargain bin dross. It's music for people who eat chips on Christmas day and keep budgies in their lounge. And that, my friends, is the bizarre charm of Scooter in a greasy nutshell.
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Formed in 1993 by Rick J Jordan and his mate, H.P Baxxter, AKA Whistling Dave AKA Bass Junkie AKA The Chicks Terminator AKA the bloke who looks like a bloke you've seen in a terrifying German porno with one of those dicks that's so wide it's horrifying to even look at, Scooter have sold a genuinely unbelievable 30million records and have racked up up an astonishing 80 gold and platinum discs and I'm going to stop writing like this before the whole thing descends into a bad voiceover on a terrestrial documentary about pop music, but the point remains: fuck me Scooter are popular. Let's try and work out why that is.
THEORY ONE: SCOOTER ARE THE ANTITHESIS OF AUTHENTICITY
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