Konstantin Gropper alias Get Well Soon is one of the very few German musicians whose elegiac electro (indie) pop can compete with the fragile power of the British and American role models. In the best moments of his new album “Amen” (Virgin) you end up with Gropper somewhere between the two Pet Shop Boys and Arcade Fire. Well done. Just listen to “This Is Your Life” or “One For The Workout”. At some point you even believe the silly head voice noise. The soundtrack for the hopes whose disappointment one is at least willing to accept not just business-wise, i.e. without any pathos.
The rapper Ebru Düzgün, aka Ebru Düzgün, who was born in Munich in 1990, works undeterred Ebow – which, by the way, is not pronounced “Ibo” in English, but rather “Äbo” – has been working on a German version of conscious rap for years, i.e. a more casual, smarter, more political hip-hop without absurd consumerism and large-scale violent fantasies. However, a lot of it sounded badly well-intentioned and rapped too badly. On their new album Canê (Alvozay/Virgin) all that has almost disappeared and it’s crowned with the song “Prada Bag”. The most casual and smartest lesson in hip hop’s ideological critique of endemic classism and racism in the country in a long time. Because good political rap doesn’t want to be as far removed from bad swanky rap as the brave (white) German conscious rap fan would like it to be.
Why not? In this spoken-word part, Ebow explains it: “Look / People always ask / Why does rap have to be about who makes how much cash, what brands you wear, what car you drive, etc? / But if you grow up in a society that always sees you as a second class person, always looking down on you / then your only way to be on an equal footing is to impress them / And of course one way would be to have a good job to have studied / then they might take you seriously / but if you can’t go down this path / then you just don’t have much left / and you acquire what they would like / you wear the brands that they would like to have / You drive the car they want / That’s the only moment you get their attention / When you take something they don’t think is yours / (…) / I, in the Prada- Outfit, in the Benzer in your white neighborhood, / that scares you more than any clans on RTL / Why? Because I become an image that you cannot place. / (…) And no matter how often you tell yourself that this is money laundering, that the bags are from Turkey / maybe they are / but you just don’t treat yourself / And you can’t do anything about it / (… ) / You just can’t take my flex from me. / (…) / The sad thing is that you have more respect for capitalism in me / than in myself / But that’s why I flex with every cent / Not for you / For myself / I treat myself to what nobody in this country would ever treat me / My Prada bag, my Louis bag, my Fendi bag, my Hermès bag, my Gucci bag / Because, fuck it, if we’re honest: you even look shit rich !”
From the rolling warmth of dancehall to 21-year-old Jamaican singer-rapper Mikayla Simpson aka coffee emanates something that, appropriately contradictory, can only be described as profound lightness. You can hear “Pull Up”, “West Indies” or “Lockdown” from their debut album “Gifted” (Rough Trade). The great heritage of reggae is, after all, to bring the circumstances to dance without having to naively betray oneself to escapism. For a long time nobody was as good at it as coffee. If everything goes right, she will soon be a big star.
Eric Clapton is known to consider the Covid vaccination campaign to be “propaganda” and fights against “discrimination” against the unvaccinated. In the podcast of the American Rolling Stone has now Keith Richards commented on his old pal’s statements, inimitably keith-like of course, in that meandering, slurred sanity that the world needs just so much more of: he’s known and loved Eric for ages, but, well, the man seems a bit old-fashioned on the vaccination thing . This Covid thing has divided us all and made some “quite weird”: “Anyway, I just want to get rid of this damn thing, and for me the only way to do that is for everyone to do what the doctor says.”