Rammstein's growing club of celebrity fans

US director David Lynch become one of the world's best-known filmmakers with signature works like "Blue Velvet" (1986), "Wild At Heart" (1990) and "Mulholland Drive" (2002). His often dark and nightmarish visions of middle America echo the intensity and theatrics of Rammstein's music, so it was unsurprising when the song "Rammstein" featured on Lynch's 1997 masterpiece "Lost Highway."

For the soundtrack to "Lost Highway," Lynch collaborated with Trent Reznor of iconic industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails. Reznor's use of two Rammstein songs for the film soundtrack ("Rammstein" and "Heirate Mich") drew attention to the underground German act. It turned out to be a career breakthrough for the band as their single "Du Hast" rose to number 20 in the "Billboard" charts.

"Their whole show is in German, not one kid understands what it is yet everyone's rocking out. That's rock 'n' roll," said Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler of the first time he saw Rammstein live in the US. "I'd never seen anything like it," he added of the stage show pyrotechnics."Flames were shooting out of the stage so hard, so high and so hot, that it melted my glasses from 100 feet away."

The son of John Lennon and Yoko Ono plays sweet pop music but is a fan of the German dark rockers and even tried once to visit them backstage. But as Rammstein keyboardist Flake recently explained in his own radio show, singer Till Lindemann threw Lennon out because he thought he heard Sean introduce himself as "John Lennon," and was being obnoxious.

When the "Zeit" weekly in 2008 accused Rammstein of appealing to neo-Nazis, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek pushed back: "Rammstein subverts totalitarian ideology not via ironic distance, but through confrontation with the obscene corporeality of the rituals associated with it, rendering it harmless," he said. Rammstein are not only not Nazis; they "undermine" extreme right ideology.

In 2013, German pop and Schlager legend Heino changed his look and took a stab at the rock metal genre with an album of cover songs. One of his inspirations: Rammstein. The band even invited Heino to perform at the Wacken Festival. But the relationship may have soured when Heino covered the Rammstein song "Engel" on his last album in 2018 — allegedly without asking Rammstein for permission.

In the documentary "Rammstein in Amerika" by Austrian director Hannes Rossacher, numerous US artists talk about the ways Rammstein has inspired them. Among them Iggy Pop, Marilyn Manson and actor Kiefer Sutherland (pictured), who said of the band's universal appeal. "You need this level of authenticity, style and culture — then people all over the world will understand your language."