On “Music”

There is music. And there is rap. And in one of the circles of hell, there is German rap in an endless loop.
I am prejudiced, of course. Rap, in German Sprechgesang, surely has a tradition etc., it has a political message, perhaps, it is an expression of something – yo, all granted. All this does not change that I “do not get it” & that the texts I heard were outrageous and – what is more important –  dumb. At some point some moons ago, I simply gave up on this “form of art”, and chose to ignore it. All this personal nonsense does of course not mean that there is no intelligent, witty, even likable, rap somewhere out there ; I simply did not find it, and I did not search for it.
This is connected with my advancing age. From one point onwards one has to make decisions about what to explore and what to follow, (what to read !), forms and artists, like e.g. opera and single artists, music of a certain epoch, guitarreros … There is so much to discover, but time runs out, and if I do not like what I hear, I skip it – there is simply no need to take the effort to work one into something one does not like at all.
Then there is German rap.
Over the last years, while driving my kids around, I was exposed to regular radio programs of different stations around here. I noticed that more German-speaking music is broadcasted than I was expecting. Of course, it is ages ago that I was a regular listener to radio programs, and the only one I still listen regularly to today is the classic station of the Bavarian Rundfunk, channel 4.
What I heard can be divided into two sections. On one side are juvenile singers who wail about something they do not understand or lost, or whatever. It is disgusting larmoyant crap. One of the worst troubadours sung about how it was to be with “you” here on “cloud four” – it was enough for him, good enough, he had no implications to go to the proverbial “cloud seven” citing the fear of emotional hurt. When I heard this for the first time I thought it was satire. But no, it counts as actual “love song”.
Another disgusting example is the whiney litany of a young lady who says that “all my friends” think that she’d be “leiser”, more quiet, than usual since she is in a relation with “you”. Because of the inarticulate way she “sings” it always comes out as “Alle meine Freunde finden, daß ich Scheiße bin” (“All my friends think I’m shit”) – and this is exactly how my boys in the vehicle sing along this song happily.
And then there is the second section, the oh so real-tough rappers. These “lyrics” are usually subterranean, belted out in a (fake ?) accent that shall imply that the “artist” is of a some kind migrant origin. In fact it is Kauderwelsch (Ger., Eng.) of the worst kind.
And of course they all are tough macho men : Xenophobic, homophobic and mysogyn, lousy petty bourgeois gone wild.
This may all be as it is, or as I do picture it here, or not.
But there is a border, and this border was crossed when the German Echo-award was given to two of these “artists”. Who sung about their bodies being “more defined than those of Auschwitz inmates”. It escaped my attention that Auschwitz was a fitness camp.
Let me be clear here. German rappers of a certain ilk (in my humble opinion, all of these arseholes) are retarded idiots who happily celebrate the fact that they carry a prick in their trousers & celebrate a worldview that is basically rooted in stone age. Sadly enough there is a market for their products, and enough adolescents of a certain background choose these troglodytes as role models. This is bad. It is a development in this society that not only needs to be observed & watched, but in a way tackled. In the end it is a subject of family, school and society as a whole.
BUT : It is not in order to give these antisemites a prize for their harassment. It is not okay to decorate arseholes, who’s merit is that on German school yards “Jude” is a swear word again.
Interestingly the only one who took the mic and thundered against these pricks was Campino, an old punk rocker. The rest of the assembled media personalities sat in silence. (More or less ; some booed a little, some clapped their hands.)
As rappers would put it : One man, athousand pussies. And to put the crown on this disgusting crap, these antisemites were decorated on jom ha shoa (Ger., Eng.).
It can’t be more disgraceful.