Goethe-Institut, a German culture website, has posted an article about Tokio Hotel and how they became so successful. The article talks about the band’s success in Europe and America, the styles of the members, and the impact they’ve had on the world so far. It’s a very good article, which you can read at their site in English or German, or below the break.

Bill instead of Brecht: Tokio Hotel conquer the world

In February 2008 the city of New York was once again invaded by hordes of screaming girls and it could mean only one thing – another boy band was in town. This time however there was something different about the whole thing – all the slogans and declarations of love on the T-shirts and posters were not in English, but in German. “Bill, ess briiingt miiiisch oummm,” for example, (“Bill, it’s gonna kill me”) as the line from one of the band’s hits goes. This was also the refrain sung by most of the female fans at the Tokio Hotel gig at the Fillmore NY club – New York’s legendary concert venue that in the past has seen fans reeling in the aisles to such musical greats as Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

After taking Europe by storm the band went stateside and – to everybody’s amazement – managed to conquer America, too. At first the media back home in Germany were in some cases more amused than impressed, they did try however to find an explanation for the phenomenon. How could it be that four young guys – in fact, barely-of-age guys – from the town of Magdeburg in eastern Germany had now become icons of global youth culture, or even sex symbols?

Hair like a porcupine

Without doubt their look most definitely played a crucial role. The lead singer, Bill, has spiky hair like a porcupine, eyes lined with kohl and he is dressed like a punk, which makes him look like one of those Japanese manga figures. The guitarist, Tom, Bill’s identical twin brother, goes more for shaggy Rasta dreadlocks and the baggy hip-hop look. Fan forums are equally as obsessed with the way the brothers look as they are with the music.Of course, there is never success without money. Tokio Hotel’s label, Universal, is one of the biggest on the music scene and has spared neither effort nor expense to market the quartet to a young audience via websites, publicity campaigns and magazines. This however is not enough to explain their success, especially when you think that only one tenth of all performing artists manage to bring home a profit for their recording companies. Promoting a new act, as we see, can quite definitely involve quite a few risks, as one of the business’s top dogs found out to its dismay – SonyBMG had signed on Tokio Hotel, but terminated their contract just before their breakthrough in 2005.

By word of mouth on new grapevines

Another vital publicity factor these days is the effect of internet platforms like YouTube and MySpace that enable new trends to spread like wildfire. It is a form of the classic word-of-mouth advertising that uses different channels to not only overcome international barriers, but also linguistic ones. This is in fact what makes the success of Tokio Hotel so surprising – most of the lyrics they sing are in German.

Before Tokio Hotel there were of course other German success stories. Kraftwerk, for example, who, with their song Autobahn, pioneered the myth of fast-lane freedom for fast-lane individuals. Nina Hagen is still a well-known face in the USA, famous for her outrageous performances; the same with Nena who managed get to number two in the US charts in 1983 with her song 99 Red Balloons. Since the end of the 1990s Rammstein has been the most successful musical export in German. With their explosive stage show, brute-force arrangements and their sometimes controversial lyrics the group promotes the cliché of the remorseless, sinister Teuton.

German graffiti in Rome

Tokio Hotel have also pulled off another great feat – they have triggered a huge, new surge of interest in the German language. “German is sexy,” as two female fans at the concert in New York told the German magazine, Focus. “Young Americans and Canadians have started learning German so that they can understand the lyrics better,” says Wolfram Hermann of the Goethe-Institut in Boston. “There has been a huge response,” confirms his colleague in Rome, Elisa Costa. In Italy ten per cent more teenagers between the ages of 11 and 16 have enrolled in German courses. In France, according to information published in the German news magazine, Spiegel, it as many as 25 per cent. On the institute’s website in Italy there was a competition in which you could win 100 Tokio Hotel concert tickets – in two weeks 5,000 people took part in it. They had to answer the questions in German. On the Rome underground graffiti has now appeared exalting the names of the band members and proclaiming in German messages like “ich liebe dich” (I love you) or “du bist mein Engel” (You are my angel).

Another clear sign of the group’s potential is the fact that T-shirts, posters and biographies are available all over the place, whether you are in Palermo or Istanbul, New York or Paris. Tokio Hotel has furthermore paved the way for other young German bands to make it in a big way, for example, Cinema Bizarre or Nevada Tan. This is the reason why branches of the Goethe-Institut in Europe and in North America are planning further online campaigns and cooperation projects with both schools and the press to enhance the spread of the German language.

Young, surprising and sexy

The aim here is to achieve what Hesse, Goethe and Grass, etc, did not quite manage to do. The fans at the Fillmore NY concert all sang in unison “Wir häm unns toadgeliiebt” (We’ve loved ourselves to death) from the Tokio Hotel song, Loved To Death. It might not sound quite as elegant as Goethe’s Wayfarer’s Night Song, “In allen Wipfeln spürest du kaum einen Hauch” (In all the treetops you feel hardly a breath of air) – maybe that is the reason why the quality press and state institutions were initially so reluctant to jump on the Tokio Hotel bandwagon. Can a band with such bizarre hairstyles and lyrics oozing with the Weltschmerz of youth represent a country that is respected as the world’s top exporting nation?

The answer lies with the fans. Not just in Germany, but everywhere the fans camp out for days in all kinds of weather in the hope of getting the best concert tickets – be it in Geneva, Tel Aviv or Moscow. It is hard to put into a nutshell why there is so much enthusiasm for Tokio Hotel. One thing is for sure – they have certainly managed to introduce the world to a new image of Germany – one that is young, surprising and sexy.

Hamburger Morgenpost has published an article about the boys talking about their American popularity and the upcoming album. To read a translation of the article by kennedyrosewhith of our forums, look below the break.

US Fans send Bill to the top
Tokio Hotel continues the conquering of America, in Hamburg a third album is in the works

LAURA SOPHIE BRAUER & JANE MASUMY

From Stockholm to Tel Aviv, from Lisbon to Moscow. Everywhere Tokio Hotel leaves their fans in hysteria. Now the chosen Hamburgers continue their conquering of America. The kids in the states are crazy about the hit “Monsoon” (”Durch den Monsun”), and sent the video straight to the top on MTV USA! R&B megastars like Nelly and Chris Brown are left behind.

The critics of the New York Times themselves were flabbergasted about the first US concert of the rock boys, and judged: “Surprisingly appealing from beginning to end”. And the US magazine “Rolling Stone” found that Bill’s “odd English pronunciation” makes their music only still more charming. In August, Bill (18), Tom (18), Gustav (19), and Georg (21) give concerts in Chicago, San Francisco, and Dallas, among other things. But work also gets done back home. Currently, the twins spend every free minute with Tokio Hotel producer David Jost (35) in their Hamburg studio. Jost: “Bill covers ever last crumpled piece of paper in his pocket with lyrics. Mostly there’s still a hotel logo from the last foreign trips on it. He’s a little chaotic, and he has also already lost a lot of these papers. But he unfortunately isn’t interested in typing any of these ideas onto his laptop himself.”

Tokio Hotels tredje album sägs komma i November 2008.
Första singlen från nya skivan släpps i oktober
och kommer finnas både på radio och på TV, tack vare en ny video.

Denna skiva kommer att spelas in både på tyska och på engelska,
för att sedan kunna släppas i hela världen.
I Frankrike kommer gruppens fans enbart kunna köpa den tyska versionen.
Det finns inga tvivel om att detta album är början på en ny del i bandets historia,
som Tom Kaulitz berättar i
Episode 35 av TokioHotelTV: http://youtube.com/watch?v=yo6vdHv-MP4


Översättning av min (Mirre's) vän Celine som även vet att sidan är officiell!


Källa: http://tokiohotel.blog.jeuxvideo.com/317819/Nouvel-et-3eme-album-en-novembre-2008-toutes-les-infos/
Source : THTV Episode 35
___________________________________

New album in November 2008

Tokio Hotel's third album will be released in November 2008.
The first single will be released in October and you'll hear it on the radio and on TV. Thank god for a new video.

This CD will be recorded in German and English, so it can be released all over the whole world.
But, in France they only get the German version of the CD.
It's no doubt that his will be a new beginning for the bands history, like Tom Kaulitz says on TH TV episode 35: http://youtube.com/watch?v=yo6vdHv-MP4

translated by Celine who knows the site is official.

look here: http://tokiohotel.blog.jeuxvideo.com/317819/Nouvel-et-3eme-album-en-novembre-2008-toutes-les-infos/
Source : THTV Episode 35

English part, translated my me, (JennyTH @ tokiohotel.org.uk) so sorry for any mistakes ect

(AND: haven't found out if this is confirmed by universal or not, so.. It may be fake, it may be true. not sure yet, so just check this blog for more news about this!)

any comments ?