Her hair, tinted the color of carrots, lay flat against her skull except for the randomly spaced spots where she allowed it to pop up like rigid orange antennae. Adorned with several crosses and Nazi emblems, the woman, Nina Hagen, prowled the stage and assaulted her capacity crowd with shrieks, whoops and demented operatic wails. Onlookers in the packed Hollywood club either danced the Spaz, laughed out loud or tried to avoid looking nervous. When Nina, an East German native who calls herself "Buddah No. 5," launched into "Taitschi-Tarot" (sample lyric: "I will find the spiritual director one day"), my personal blasphemy barometer registered an overload. That's when I began squirming toward the exit, gingerly sidestepping the people who looked as though they had just slithered out of my worst nightmare.
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