When Aggro Berlin came out with Rap from the Berlin projects, everybody got all uppity about the types of lyrics they couldn't really understand, when listening to PE, NWA, Snoop Dogg or Eminem. Performed in blunt German that ghetto realism sounded all a bit too real. Well, for every Ice Cube there was always a Puff Daddy, so now there's Aggro Gruenwald named after the millionaires' suburb in Munich's South. Their group's called "Stehkrägen", which is the word for polo shirt collars turned up. Their first single is "Eure Armut kotzt uns an" (Your poverty grosses us out), with a hookline going "Don't you have a father or mother who achieved smoething?". Might be just sarcasm and political incorrectnes, but they sure give a quite acurate picture of Munich, the town of young heirs with Porsches, international boarding school educations, golf handicaps and unlimited trust funds. Funny enough, German Vanity Fair presented them as a refreshing antidote to the social realness of Berlin gangstas without a hint of irony. Well, that magazine is run by a rabid neoliberal hardliner, so he probably found some ideological brethren in the cartoon characters of Aggro Gruenwald.
6/23/07
Munich Vibe
5 comments:
Vanilla Ice finally found a successor . This really has to be ironic, it's just too stupid to be taken seriously. Otherwise I hope that some of those bores crash daddy's porsche against one of those lovely bavarian trees. That's now on my List of Demands / Written on the palm of my hands
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1llNYAlYrc)
I agree. How could this possibly not be ironic. The anti-immigration posse is rarely this amusing. More Benzos and bottles of Mumm than a Jay Z video. Hilarious, but soon rather tedious. And I don't even speak German. Maybe we should do a ten second long remix. Still, whoever thought up the idea of matching video of a black platinum credit card going through a magnetic stripe reader with wikki wikki record scratch sounds is demonstrating a certain kind of genius.
Irony and awkward staging or not, those guys do have the town down to a tee. As Chris from Haus der Kunst said, Munich might feel similar to Berlinl, if you hit the coffee house scene mid-day, it's just that all those slackers spend their lifes burning their dad's money. Which was the reason why Andrew Carnegy perfected philantropy in the later years of his life. He was disgusted by all those fatcat families letting their offspring waste away the family fortunes. So why not give it to culture and the poor.
I strongly believe that those slackers still get "Faserland" completely wrong and read it as some kind of rich-kid-handbook, trying to distinguish themselves in some kind of world that's long gone
I watch that video and it makes me want to go out and play a round of golf with my solid gold clubs, with some girl who used to work at Hooter's working as my caddy, and carrying a big bag of cocaine on her other shoulder.
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