Icon: enlarge
Rapper Loredana (at the Swiss Music Awards in February)
Photo: ALEXANDRA WEY / KEYSTONE / picture alliance
December is traditionally the month in which Günther Jauch moderates the RTL annual review and music journalists dutifully hit the night with lists of the best.
Balance sheet month.
Traditionally the month in which - apart from the usual Christmas platitude records - only a few new albums are released.
Only, in this year that is not lacking in otherness, it is naturally different.
Loredana's second album "Medusa" has now been released, a few weeks after a documentary in which the rapper took stock: 2020 was "the best and worst year" for her.
You could say so.
2020 is the year in which the 25-year-old Swiss Loredana Zefi, whose parents come from Kosovo, became the most streamed musician in Germany on Spotify.
The year in which the public prosecutor's office in Lucerne closed the investigation into fraud against them.
But it is also the year in which the fraud case once again became more public and the hashtag #BoycottLoredana trended on Twitter.
What does "Medusa" sound like?
Split album after split year
It starts torn apart.
In the »Intro« Loredana raps to hesitant synthesizers about the fact that not everything has gone well in the last few days.
That the nightmares would take her breath away.
That the whole world is against them.
Cut.
»Medusa«, it is suddenly distorted, and Loredana is now rapping over a bass that quickly marks its territory: »Since my birth I knew: I am the boss."
Medusa, this figure from Greek mythology who was burdened with ugliness and to whom Loredana from her point of view, one reads it, has no clear role on the album of the same name.
In the first part of the intro it seems as if Loredana is fighting Medusa's peculiarity: "Too many snakes, but have the antidote." In the second part, however, she seems to use Medusa's effect on others: "I'm coming to your party, and all are petrified «.
The intro to a split album after a split year.
Or?
display
Title: Medusa (Premium Box) (Ltd Thai Box Short l / Xl)
approx € 54.99
Price query time
11.12.2020 7 p.m.
No guarantee
Icon: Info
Order at AmazonIcon: amazon
Product reviews are purely editorial and independent.
Via the so-called affiliate links above, we usually receive a commission from the dealer when making a purchase.
More information here
Yes and no.
In one of the album's single, Loredana appeals to a »gangster« to stop the stabbing, »what all that shit, shit, shit for?" during the manhunt “and only wear handcuffs from the luxury brand Ferragamo.
If a love song is about getting closer, it is soon followed by the anti-love song, which says that getting closer is not an option.
If she raps in the penultimate track "I'm sorry" that it's too late, she has "no time for you", the last song on the album is logically called: "I'm not sorry".
The two sides of the gold medal
There are cracks between the tracks, matching the hybrid sound (Poppiger Trap? Trappiger Pop?), But Loredana only briefly points at them with her mobile phone flashlight instead of illuminating the cracks.
In the end, »Medusa« is dominated by a classic rap narrative: self-assertion.
Loredana is the "chief boss", a "self-made millionaire", in any case you are "a victim".
On the one hand, it's a shame if, after the promising »intro«, a deeper examination of the ambiguity of the pop star existence would have been conceivable, with the two sides of the gold medal: here the fame, there the trap doors in the marble floor.
Here the hard but fair hustle about money, there the fraud, of which there is no talk on "Medusa".
On the other hand, it's nice that on »Medusa« it is not the umpteenth rapper suffering from excess testosterone who declines the self-assertion, but Loredana, who is not only the chief boss and self-made millionaire, but also a single mother: she raps that she is Strollers drive through the park and hope not to be arrested.
Or that she could buy a child seat for her Porsche Boxster.
Loredana, 2.8 million subscribers on Instagram, do everything just for her daughter Hana, 364,000 subscribers.
To take stock: German rap lines like this have been heard far too rarely in 2020.
Icon: The mirror