Of course, you listen to this podcast in order to enjoy the unlikely heroic journey of three outsiders to the center of German pop music: On the first day of their law studies, Jan Müller and Dirk von Lotzow, who moved from Offenburg, run into each other and recognize each other immediately: training jacket, matted hair, spiral notebook seemingly carelessly in a plastic bag – that must be a kindred spirit. They founded the band together with Müller’s childhood friend Arne Zank Tocotronic and hit a nerve with their music and lyrics. Journalist Stefanie Groth tells the band’s rise with a collage of old and new interview snippets, stories from, yes, contemporary witnesses and of course a lot of Tocotronic music – entertaining, but not necessarily surprising. With the fourth episode, however, a false bottom opens up and Groth examines the gap: the band talks about addiction and depression, about injuries. “Shadows don’t cast shadows” was once said in a Tocotronic song – but the podcast at least manages to shed light on the dark sides of success and fame. Moritz Baumstieger
50 years of hip hop
“We will fail spectacularly.” Hosts Alba Wilczek and Falk Schacht make this unconfident forecast at the beginning of their podcast, a Bayerischer Rundfunk production. In it they want to take stock of the first 50 years of hip-hop. In each of the ten episodes they take on a song, embed it in its contemporary history and clear up any misunderstandings. Despite their flirtatious announcement, Wilczek and Schacht manage to do this quite well. Because they have important interlocutors. Like Cindy Campell, who threw the famous block party in the Bronx with her brother Kool Herc in the 1970s, which is considered the birth of hip-hop. But founders of the German hip-hop scene such as Eko Fresh and Lady Bitch Ray also have their say in later episodes to classify topics such as political rap and feminism in hip-hop. This creates a differentiated picture of hip-hop history. Leonie George
Crypto guru
It was one of the biggest financial scandals in recent years: the crash of the crypto exchange FTX. The man behind it was for a long time known primarily as the abbreviation: SBF, also known as “crypto guru” or Samuel Bankman-Fried. The son of two Stanford professors and an MIT graduate had built a marketplace for trading cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin according to his ideas. He portrayed himself as a headstrong genius who also appeared in cargo shorts at panel discussions with former US presidents. Investors threw their money at him and, as we now know, Bankman-Fried was similarly careless with it. In 2022 he was arrested in the Bahamas on suspicion of, among other things, fraud and money laundering. The podcast team of Mirror Regina Steffens and Christoph Scheuermann visited Bankman-Fried in California and interviewed him in his parents’ house, where he was allowed to stay with an electronic ankle bracelet. They tell the story of a group of young, presumably highly intelligent people who probably thought that no rules would apply to them and who grew up in such a sheltered and elite environment that they had no sense of risk. An insightful look into a world full of megalomania, where billions are moved around like chips at the roulette table. The only thing is: Although there are always short explanatory episodes between the main episodes, this podcast also fails to explain in an understandable way what a cryptocurrency and a blockchain actually are. Nicola’s friend
The Riddler: Secrets in the Dark
So it’s come to this: The Riddler, one of Batman’s notorious opponents, has to work together with him. In the English-language fiction podcast, he always aimed to get one over on Batman and ask him riddles that he couldn’t crack. In short: to prove his intellectual superiority (which, of course, he always fails at, Batman isn’t a fool either). But now a previously unidentified avenger is marauding through Gotham City, clearly intent on killing some of the city’s worst villains. He has already committed his first murder. And the Riddler and Batman have to assume that they, too, are considered super villains according to the definition of this vigilante tendency. The Riddler: Secrets in the Dark is the second superhero podcast in the partnership between Spotify and Warner Bros. and DC Batman Unburied. And as always, with a lot of smugness, it’s about everything. Stefan Fischer
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