Dance, dance, dance!

The Lemon Club heads to the dance club and shines with the song "Wake Up!" Here's a practical guide so you can dance along. Hot off the streaming studio: Today's dance exercise. A lyrical context follows.

>>Today, dear people, we welcome Colombian dance professor Isabel, who — as she does every new morning — motivates us to dance and encourages us to take on the day with a positive spirit. The day before yesterday the exercise was "Tighten your belt, make the schnitzel last" and today Professor Isabel shows us that hips don't lie. And here we go: And left. And right. And reft. And light. Check it out. Hips don't lie. So, now take a quick moment to think about your next working holiday while shaking it all out — shake and shake and shake and wake up, ladies and gentlemen, Wake Up! Here comes the next dance move, the one we also know from Shakira, The Spanking Human Spank-ipede, but with plenty of girl power and awareness work — you have the right to say no, but also to say yes. "You have a right to say no, / If it's that what you need, / And if you wanna say yes, / Don't be afraid of the heat!" Now direct your attention to what matters and pour even more passion into your dance manifesto — hup and hey, and hup and sway, and now pay attention, unbuckle and let your mind loose! "Shake your hips like Shakira and your body like a queen / Wave your hands, greet the day, feel the rhythm sink in". Yes, exactly like that and no other way. Dance the Shakira, dance the Waka Waka, and now a vertical figure-eight — but be careful, this move requires strong core muscles and great control over the hip and pelvic muscles, and never lose sight of the sky, "and there's the sky, it's feeling so blue, / and then there's you, what are you gonna do?" And now shake out your mind and body again, swing your arms, circle your hips, a little faster now and faster still — and don't forget to always isolate the hip movement. Just like Shakira can move individual body parts independently — ribcage, belly, hips. So let's do that too, and off we go! "Now wake up! / Wake up dancing! / Wake up! / Wake up dancing!" Pay attention to your flowing movements, your hip shimmies, and the wave-like motion of your upper body! And hip and hop and hip and hop and from the top: "Shake your hips like Shakira and your body like a queen / Wave your hands, greet the day, feel the rhythm sink in". Well done — now wake up again, free the legs, but don't empty the brain, and always remember: you're part of a group of professionals who go above and beyond, but may not always be recognized for it. "So there's the firemen saving a child, / and there's a doctor whose hours are wild, / and there's the teacher making it work, / and there's a dancer shaky-shake twerk". Now it's gradually time to find your emotional range and your center again. Oh my, we've already reached the end of the song — what a shame. Well, next time Isabel will show us Shakira's Bhangra 101 — until then, take care, and don't forget: "Shake your hips like Shakira and your body like a queen / Wave your hands, greet the day, feel the rhythm sink in".<<

The Dance of Intertextuality

For all its playfulness and its function as dance music, "Wake Up!" by The Lemon Club also leaves traces that lead into pop culture on one hand, and into the songwriting world of Simon Matthias Maurer on the other. "Wake Up!" draws on the Pilates, Supercycle and fitness culture of the 2010s, and could easily be the opening of a girlpower film narrated in diary-style from the perspective of a strong woman — or equally, it could be a millennial's ringtone. In the lyrics, the song also plays with queerness ("body like a queen / body like a king") and offers glimpses into the songwriter's poetic world. Specifically, the lyrics of "Wake Up!" connect to a poem called "Unfertig" ("Unfinished"), published in the Trapez anthology "Feuer Flamme Staub" ("Fire Flame Dust") in 2025 — here ironized and brought to the dancefloor. In the poem, "dancing" is the central theme: "when lifting my left shoulder, / one, two, three, and go, / i feel the beat, / i feel the warmth of the music, / did i switch to the club scene, / did i trade in day for night, / and clarity for the rush, / did i lose myself and fall in love with being lost, ..." Meanwhile, the narrator's poet-friends sit quietly in a corner and write. Just as the narrator also writes, but while dancing ("I dance against death"). The link to "Wake Up!" is clear: the call to dance, to let the rhythm sink into the body, is a bodily act of resistance.

Another dimension of the song reflects Simon's broader approach to the album "The Times We Live In", namely, not to take it all too seriously. Beyond the pleasure of songwriting itself, he experiments with different corners of pop. "Yet," as he puts it, "the aspiration is always a poetic one, and a song is never to be seen as complete in itself alone, but also as part of a whole." Finally, there's one more idea at play — one that comes from his own way of listening to music. Simon: "I personally find it very funny that Wake Up! comes right before Me, Myself, A.I., since they convey two very different musical directions and feelings. But that's exactly how I listen to music myself: I'll listen to Skinny Love by Bon Iver, then Shiver by Ed Sheeran, then Techno Pop by Kraftwerk, and from there land on Total Eclipse by Klaus Nomi, before returning to folk with Girl from the North Country by Bob Dylan. The album is structured the way I would naturally listen to music."

Written in German by Manfred Horak, translated into English by Claude (Anthropic). If you know a translator who would like to organically translate this and other pieces into English, feel free to contact us via our contact form.