Shirin David - "Supersize" (Vertigo Berlin (Universal Music), since 20 September)
On the weekend was once again state of emergency here in Berlin. No, not because of the climate change demo, that was Friday. Just a day later, the consumer world was in order again. The autograph session of Shirin David in the shopping center Alexa on Alexanderplatz had to be stopped due to overcrowding. "People started to squeeze, girls did not breathe, people were down, their safety is just what they're doing," the 24-year-old artist wrote in apology, releasing her debut album "Supersize" the previous day.
Survival-sized, that goes well with David, who according to a survey is one of the five most popular personalities for the youth - alongside Heidi Klum, Pietro Lombardi, Cristiano Ronaldo and Greta Thunberg (a crazy list full of contradictions). Over two million YouTube followers have the recently rapping influencer, on Instagram it's almost twice as many. 43 million copies of her first single "Give Him" has been called since February. You do not have to go as far as the "FAZ", which David recently proclaimed as the new leading culture, but the fact is: the currently biggest idol of the German kids is a 24-year-old woman from Hamburg, who has numerous talents, including face painting, Rappen and singing. However, her greatest gift seems to be self-marketing - and thus she is the perfect embodiment of the neo-liberal zeitgeist, which declares the economic self-optimization to the highest virtue.
This is very nice in the unboxing video, which David has released for her 50 Euro Deluxe Box. She is rightly criticized by environmentally-conscious fans for the fact that the whole supposedly high-quality stuff in it is simply a pile of plastic and paper refuse - from the thin transparent cover for the incidentally even thrown CD over two plastic bags for shopping up to the glossy calendar with revealing pictures of the artist for each month. There is also a test of her new, own fragrance. It is a celebration of commodity and surface, as it could not be shameless, but also not honest. Subversive here is nothing, the slogan "Give him" is program: Everything must go. You could have called the record "Supersale".
The beats, which were stapled by chart-proven producer teams like the Berlin collective FNSHRS as unobtrusively as agreeable under David's mostly hedonistic motivated emo and self-empowerment lyrics (Her with the coal, the cars, the fame and the love!), Seem in this production actually just to be an accessory. Five tracks were already released as a single, a sixth, "Only with you", was released on the weekend including video. He has with Xavier Naidoo the most prominent feature guest of the album, which raises the question of whether not the discredited because of Reich citizens nonsense Mannheimer meanwhile much more of this guest appearance benefits than the popular newcomer. Of the six new songs, unfortunately, none of the slick En-Vogue elegance of "Give him" zoom, except perhaps based on R & B role models like Aaliyah Hater mockery "Biggest fan". Towards the end, "Supersize" with generic autotune ballads runs out of air, but the relatively unadulterated sung G-Funk number "melodies" convinced.
But is this really still important in this game with exploitation contexts, is this about music? Shirin David could be mythologized as a self-determined rapper and musician and welcomed into a male-dominated genre. But with more or less authentic-looking colleagues like Juju or Ebow she seems to have little in common. The whole package looks like a brand-clip-on, a media vehicle that can be replaced by make-up tutorials, comedy, a fashion line or reality TV in case of failure or boredom, model of Kardashian.
In this respect, the basal incentive to acquire "Supersize" is probably just the cover motif, where David can be seen naked. But not in the sense of being exposed or natural, for David also considers her body as a work of art and has it modeled in shapes and curves that suit her (and the market). Her promise "Only you can see me the way I am," which she puts into "Invisible," is thus an empty one: her body is a symbolic model of sexiness modeled on traditional norms. To portray it without a clue, it propagates statements and interviews as a feminist act - but only after prior error correction on the computer, so that the projection surfaces are beautifully smooth and flawless: their bodies, their goods, their rules of artificiality. With Barthes thought: a really big moment of pop art. (without rating) Andreas Borcholte
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23.09.2019, 15:53 clock
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Shirin David
Supersize
label:
Vertigo Berlin (Universal Music)
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EUR 13,98
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John Coltrane - "Blue World" (Impulse (Universal Music), from 27th September)
Scarcely 37 minutes of new music have emerged from John Coltrane, the saxophone master with his classical quartet, so McCoy Tyner on the piano, Elvin Jones on drums and Jimmy Garrison on bass, played. The recording dates from June 1964. It was a session with Rudy van Gelder in New Jersey, intended as a soundtrack for a film by a young French Canadian, "Le chat dans le sac" by Gilles Groulx, who adapted the Nouvelle Vague in Montreal.
The film is forgotten: young women complain about bourgeois parents, young men hold the political books they read, it's cold in Montreal, they split up, it's still cold, but now Vivaldi is running. Half a year later, Coltrane records "A Love Supreme" and rises to new heights just before the sudden end of his life, far from the concerns of young white Canadians who would rather be in Paris.
Is the first time publication of this session as important as the discovery of "Both Directions at Once" in summer a year ago? For one thing: no. Well-known Coltrane pieces: "Naima" in two and "Village Blues" even in three versions, "Blue World" is a chord-reduced version of Harold Arlen's "Out Of This World", followed by the short latin number "Like Sonny" and the blues "Traneing In", which Jimmy Garrison opens alone. After two minutes piano and drums get in, the boss even after five. But of course: It is still a sound document of one of the best bands of high modernism in jazz.
However, Coltrane plays material that does not fit in with his 1964 development. He plays it to get in trouble with the record company. Foreign material would be legally too complicated and too expensive, he can not burn new. But that's what makes it so special: We hear a band looking back and already in the over-ripe state - as if they're a bit bored playing those numbers again.
"Naima", the over-ballad, opens the movie after a few minutes and is also at the beginning of the album. The piano turns neatly around with quarter-triplets in the accompaniment, but Trane only plays the theme several times. The real Naima he has long since left and lives with a new one, Alice McLeod, later Coltrane. At the end of the album is the second take of "Naima". McCoy Tyner now swings in his solo, the boss is still playing none. And as much as one hears a younger Coltrane here, the spiritual sound of "A Love Supreme" already announces itself in the evocative tone of the pure theme.
"Blue World" is in the title of the proximity to the popular "Blue Train" album of 1958, musically not much and the band has nothing to do with 1964. The album trailer even colors the Canadian black and white film in the colors of the "Blue Train" -covers. It's about money, of course. However, the album gets big just when it suddenly gives a shit on the coal: Coltrane plays at first very restrained and zero "difficult", knowing that it is a background soundtrack. At some point, it does not seem to matter, a session is a session - and off you go. (without rating) Tobi Müller
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23.09.2019, 15:45 clock
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John Coltrane
Blue World
label:
Impulse (Universal Music)
Price:
EUR 17,19
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Shari Vari - "Now" (Malka Tuti (Rough Trade), since September 13th)
We are all so fucked up. I just thought back last night, when Wilkesdorff's jenked-down Jenke exposed himself to a self-experiment on RTL and only ate four weeks in plenty of plastic-packed food. For him an exception, for me everyday life. For decades. Sorry, but it is. Who has time and nerves for a plastic-free diet? In the end, he had so many toxic plasticizers in his blood and urine that it made you sick to look at. After all, there is a poetic justice in it: We not only destroy the planet and climate with our revolting dirt, but also ourselves.
But hope does not do all that. You would have to change something, right now, but what? And how? And if in the end it does not work, why start? Dance the damnation!
Andreas Borcholte's playlist KW 39
MIRROR ONLINE
Playlist on Spotify
1. Children: hype
2nd Hunney Pimp feat. Melonoid: Britney
3. Shirin David: Biggest fan
4. Deichkind: things
5. Shari Vari: Overdose
6. OTTO: car disco
7. Tove Lo feat. Jax Jones: Jacques
8. Automatic: signal
9. Wilco: Everyone Hides
10. Bonnie "Prince" Billy: At The Back Of The Pit
That would be a nice motto for the debut album of Shari Vari, which has finally been released after a long hobby and delays. It's bleak and nervous, it hits an irritatingly soothing tone between depression and euphoria - bringing the abysmal zeitgeist so perfectly to an electronic sound unlike any other pop album this year. Sophia Kennedy sings in the first track "Out Of Order" with a scratchy voice "This is what I mean / When I say that I'm lost / when everything I once knew / Is out of order". In addition a dry minimal beat in the ping-pong rhythm clicks on itself: "Everybody's working, nobody's sleeping," she exclaims when a house piano suddenly brings warmth into the cold mechanics. Associations explode in those first three minutes: Psychobilly, Suicide, Art of Noise, Anne Clark, Gun Club, "Metropolis", "Moka Efti" - the Berlin of the Twenties, New York in the late '70s, catapulted into an experimental tech club opium swaths. "Dance Alone" raises the tempo with an eighties R & B scaffold by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, between whose rickety struggles Kennedy grunts in ecstasy with a hoarse alto voice, howling and squealing, "Are we alone out here?"
Afterwards, she celebrates herself as a siren-like queen of the big city "Jungle", gives herself an "overdose" of tribal beats and in the title track whispers the sirens to ominous, tumbling drums: "she has to go on somehow" she sings exalted, " there's no place to return to ". The whole thing culminates in the Lou Reed tribute "Not A Perfect Day," in which Kennedy indulges as art-song-like Knef incarnation to Pupsgeräuschen from the brass band generator the sweetest fatalism: "You're so selfish / You're so "This whole world does not give / give you a fuck about you," says Kennedy. "But that's the only way of life". Hach yes.
Shari Vari is the joint project of the Hamburg-born singer from the USA, whose solo debut in 2017 was one of the best international records of the year, and filmmaker and musician Helena Ratka. Together they inspire with their gothic gospel already at the Berlin Pop Culture Festival. "Now" now delivers an intoxicating soundtrack to the dysfunctionality of our present. If plasticizer, then please this. (9.0) Andreas Borcholte
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23.09.2019, 16:01 clock
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Shari Vari
Now (Lp / 180g) [Vinyl LP]
label:
Malka Tuti (Rough Trade)
Price:
EUR 21.51
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Trettmann - "Trettmann" (Soulforce / Bmg (Warner), since 13th September)
For a short time, literary criticism waited for the turn of the novel par excellence. Then in 2017, a former reggae clown came around the corner and told him in less than four minutes. To skeletonized 808 beats, with auto-tune harmonics and lines like this: "Freedom won, melted again." Trettmann was the Newcomer of the Year - at over 40. He came from the Dancehall and brought with the album "#DIY" a sound in the German rap, which worked outrageously: the sound of history. Trettmann did not glorify his story for first person shooter mythology. He told of destroyed illusions. The title of the decisive song is as dazzlingly monochrome as the time must have felt in his hometown of Chemnitz, which was just Karl-Marx-Stadt: "gray concrete".
Here, a storytelling had redefined. And it was predestined to appeal to people who imagine hip-hop as a gangster kindergarten, only without educators. Trettmann was almost single-handedly responsible for the fact that these people now call German rappers "songwriters".
Listened to on the radio
Wednesdays at 23 o'clock there is the Hamburger Web-Radio ByteFM an intercepted mixtape with many songs from the discussed records and highlights from the personal playlist of Andreas Borcholte.
The self-selected role as a German rap chronicler could take Trettmann on his new album not serious. And hardly redeem any better. The self-confidently titled "Trettmann" is a conceptual work of art on the topic of time. The one that stops (because of euphoria) that goes by in flight (because of substances) that you share together (until the end is over). And time, which is repeated in menacing cycles.
"Loops are knotted again / Knife knotted again / No, not elsewhere / Here and now", Trettmann sings in "stumbling blocks", his voice like sandpaper, never scratchy and yet rough. The flow is pointillist, casually dabbed, but of existential force. Trettmann quotes in the play Bertolt Brecht: "The womb still fertile / from which crept." He lives in Leipzig for a long time and his music is created in the Berlin studio of the production trio Kitschkrieg. He reacts with a glance down to what Chemnitz was recently in the news. On the memorial stones, which are embedded in the ground as a souvenir of victims of National Socialism in many German cities.
The trick is simple, almost trivial: The first-person narrator, as so often with Trettmann, staggers through the end of a night and does not know where it all leads. A stumbling block connects the raver and his flight from reality with the burden of the past, which suddenly becomes quite present. In fact: great songwriting.
At the beginning of "#DIY" there was a near-death experience. This time: the fight David against Goliath. "Everyone begrudge me that I've won," Trettmann raps in the first song "Intro", and you treat him that again. For the time being he has lost the fight against stinky folk-mongering. In the album charts "Trettmann" landed in second place, behind a best-of full home hit Schlager by Andreas Gabalier. Also a fact for the chroniclers of this country. (8.3) Arno Raffeiner
Price query time:
23.09.2019, 15:58 clock
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Trettmann
Trettmann
label:
Soulforce / Bmg (Warner)
Price:
EUR 14,71
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Rating: From "0" (absolute disaster) to "10" (absolute classic)
