But let's start from the beginning: there are few female artists in the German-speaking world who carry the word icon as justifiably as Nina Hagen. And yet the term falls short. Anyone who only remembers Hagen as a punk frontwoman of the eighties or as an eccentric television presence of the nineties has overlooked her entire oeuvre, e.g. that fascinating turn into the spheres of the spiritual and the recurring gospel songs of the early and late eighties - as for example on her first English-language album "Nunsexmonkrock" in the biblical song "Antiworld", or, somewhat later, in the first traditional gospel hymns, in the Mahalia Jackson cover "Hold Me" from her self-titled 1989 album "Nina Hagen" and, last but not least, in "I'm Going To Live The Life" and "Right On Time" from "Revolution Ballroom" (1993).

This development culminated in the release of her album “Personal Jesus” in 2010. Now, 15 years after its initial release - and to mark Nina Hagen's 70th birthday - the album produced by Paul Rössler is being reissued - for the first time on vinyl and with the addition of a new track, a cover version of Washington Phillips' “I Am Born To Preach The Gospel”. A re-release that is less a retrospective than a prophecy.

Even back then, “Personal Jesus” was a courageous album - in the name of love, because God is love - which she loves to proclaim! Nina Hagen simply made a friend of the often strict zeitgeist, while pop exhausted itself in self-ironization, she confessed to Jesus Christ, to gospel and to redemption; without cynicism, without distance. And yet - or precisely because of this - with the dazzling radicalism that has always characterized her. Her interpretation of Depeche Mode's title song - once a gloomy commentary on the appropriation of the divine through private projection - becomes an ecstatic affirmation with Hagen: yes, the personal Jesus is possible. And he sings, shouts and prays in tongues.

Between honky tonk and southern vaudeville, soul, country and gospel, twanging guitars and banjos, jubilant organs and choirs, but all filtered through her very own spoken language between opera and powerlessness, she moves on “Personal Jesus” with a disarming mixture of technical virtuosity and somnambulistic fervor. 

You can listen to this album as a curious footnote to an eccentric career. Or you can recognize it for what it really is: a spiritual manifesto in the guise of pop, the testimony of a seeker who has found her God not only in the silence, but also in the noise of this world.