2023-05-26 12:55:07
Ein man is much alone with himself. His own ghost stares back at him in the reflection, while outside the door the living dead storm the streets screaming. He watches them through the blinds and sings, “I know I’d have to hug her, otherwise I’ll soon become like her.” His song is called “Antidote,” one of eleven songs on his album Love Songs.
Peter Fox has risen again. It’s been 14 years since the Berlin singer Pierre Baigorry declared his character dead and buried her reincarnation as a “city monkey” with her. In just one year, this Peter Fox had become a monstrous star in the German pop music business with a single record about Berlin in the late noughties. When he sang about his city as a lovable rat hole and an attractive monkey cage, everyone felt like a Berliner. Natives, newcomers, occasional visitors.
He also sang about his “Haus am See”, a fiction of bourgeois life, Zehlendorf instead of Kreuzberg, which existed until the Heino’s repertoire managed – and which Peter Fox would rather undo in his second life: It’s not about where someone lives, but about their view from there of this world and of themselves.
So the Peter Fox is inevitably different with his album “Love Songs”, which celebrates love and singing songs to detoxify the zeitgeist. A 51-year-old man who needs painkillers in the morning and a splint to sleep in at night (in “Blue Eye”). And who no longer knows how his city lives in the song “Vergessen wie” because he has withdrawn into his solitude. In “Antidote” he entrenches himself: “And I’ll stay behind my barricades.” In front of them, everyone dumps their garbage, their anger.
the anger of others
The man Peter Fox has turned into sings of the mood of the 20’s of the 21st century and finds the sound against it. Reggae, Dancehall, Hip Hop, Afro Drill and Amapiano. He and his musicians play various updates of the hybrid pieces on his album “Stadtaffe”, which were already updates of the music by Seeed, the band around Pierre Baigorry. The West and East Berlin ska and reggae scene opened up and shaped the city in the 80s and 90s. Subcultures became lifestyles and songs like “Dickes B” by Seeed and “Schwarz zu blau” by Peter Fox became the soundtracks with their sounding clichés.
When Peter Fox returned last fall with Zukunft Pink, his first track for a forthcoming second album, for some his music was no longer a multicultural contribution to urban life. It’s the best example of outrageous cultural appropriation. The activist Malcolm Ohanwe had accused him: Peter Fox was enriching himself with music that belonged to a marginalized minority, the people of color, to whom it could happen that German clubs refused them access to their stolen music.
In “Future Pink” a digital slit drum from the audio software Fruity Loops can be heard, as in Amapiano, a current house variant from South Africa. He could understand the anger, said Peter Fox “Titles, Theses, Temperaments” in the ARD, but he was the wrong addressee: “Man, I’m an ally!”
The voice of Berlin’s everyday music found itself irritated in an inextricable debate that primarily revolved around dreadlocks on light-skinned heads. Peter Fox suddenly found himself between those he always thought he was singing for – and a faction with whom he had never had anything to do, which previously considered blonde dreadlocks to be alien to culture, which now resolutely defended Afro-German sounds and accused him of being a victim of a woken cancel culture helped. As if the music, with its complicated post-colonial and pop-cultural history of appropriation, couldn’t defend itself.
“Love Songs” is the album with which Peter Fox puts the one side in its place, which feels threatened by everything the other, the so-called woke side, says and does with eleven easy-going songs. “I wash off the war paint, the water turns red,” he sings in “White Flags,” right after “Antidote.” He begs the other side, the appropriation accuser, to be lenient. He, the older, red-haired man, continues to make African, Caribbean, global pop music in German and from Berlin, even though he might think about it more now.
He leaves the house again and dances through his town. In “Celebration” he states: “I’m as good on the inside as Winnetou.” His Winnetou is not the warlike Winnetou between the fronts in the Kulturkampf, he is simply a character like Peter Fox as a singer, one of the good guys: “Everyone paints black , I see the future in pink, if you ask me, everything will be fine, my child.”
According to Pierre Baigorry, it will also be his last album as Peter Fox.
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