2024-08-29 15:02:17
Kollegah is ending his career after twenty years, 13 studio albums, five compilations and ten compilations. He left behind the most impressive thing. Nevertheless, his relationship with his ex was soon broken.
The worst thing about pop culture is that the most important things always come to an end. Just like Kollegah work. comrade? Is there anything? Seemingly unnoticed by the German feature pages, Kollegah ended his career of almost twenty years with the release of his last album “Still King” and, yes, you can hate Kollegah , you can love Kollegah, you can blame him for a little. thing, and then criticized for a lot of things criticizing injustice, but denying that he played an extraordinary, formative role in the German RAP and cultural landscape, well, that’s really impossible. Kollegah is not only one of the most successful rappers this country has ever produced, he also completely changed the German rap scene.
The fact that his silent loss is now ignored, and often ignored, outside of this event also speaks for how the relationship between Kollegah and the official he often despised has become. That is not always the case. At the peak of his career around 2014, Felix Antoine Blume, the real name of Kollegah, was hosted in all multimedia formats. The story of a German law student who hires a drug-dealing pimp rap personality is full of musical flair and unmatched technology. But to understand the importance of Kollegah for the whole field, you have to go back a step forward.
A new generation of gangster rap
Because Kollegah is a representative of the second generation of German gangsta rap. This is a product of the turn of the century. The first generation was created in Berlin at the beginning of the singles and developed a narrative to the middle-class feel-good court around formulas like Die Fantastischen Vier and Fettes Brot. Although there are always hints of the most difficult styles, for example in the social project Frankfurt Rödelheim Hartreim by Mose Pelham, the Berlin-style with its anger, the dissonant sound posted for the first time on the releases of the label Aggro Berlin, Germany’s new Hardness label also added a fishing detail. At the beginning of the noughties, there was a social debate in Germany about living conditions characterized by poverty, which had an impact with the reforms of social law and the introduction of Hartz IV. Suddenly social hot spots come into focus.
Musicians like Bushido, Sido and Fler became the voices and recognizable figures of the marginalized, declared underclass, and through their vicious verbal aggression they managed to create the kind of conflict that gangsta rap took into the mainstream for the first time. They change the existing characteristics and do not want to see themselves as victims of society, but rather style themselves as creators who create something from the dust that surrounds them. Through clever marketing, Aggro Berlin managed to bring the iconic ghetto into a pop culture destination and turn it into a place of romantic love. The lower class has nothing to do with dirty talk. It is a way of life.
Recently, imitators also developed outside of Berlin that, like the arrest warrant in the Frankfurt area or Xatar in Bonn, wanted to bring a new flower to the genre. The Kurdish woman Xatar took this to extremes when she stole a gold truck, stole a sum of millions, fled through various countries for months after being hunted by the authorities and Interpol, ended up in an Iraqi torture prison, brought out by German researchers. and finally took his album secretly with him to Germany and recorded it on a tape recorder in a prison cell. But the competition for authenticity also ensured that the genre eventually lost its creative power. That changed in the early 1900s, when the label Personal Records in Düsseldorf set out to further develop the Aggro Berlin concept.
While heavy Berlin is characterized by its complete lack of irony, artists like Kollegah break with common gangsta rap clichés by reducing them to such an extent that the question of authenticity no longer arises. Kollegah’s greatest achievement was to finally release the strict concept of authenticity and make art again. He cleverly plays with the meanings of words, and combines his comparisons with pieces of thought that are often metaphorical. “You hustler think you rap drugs, kick a few lines / But if they are bad for the king (love is not) like pool chalk,” he once rapped. Or something a little simpler, but no less original in the language game: “Son, and you have a Saxon dialect?
Kollegah tried real art experiments twice
A very similar revolution took place in the United States at the same time. Rick Ross is one of the most successful singles gangsta singers. He introduced himself as a drug lord. But then it turns out that he didn’t carry tons of cocaine in his past, but was a prison guard. Instead of the expected decline in performance, his records continued to sell extremely well. A new season begins. A time in which a fellow can play a pimp in his song even though he is a law student in real life. The fans don’t care anymore. They just want to see a well-made gangster movie. It’s not a documentary about real life on the road.
What you can accuse Kollegah of art is that he quickly found his own style, which he did not really abandon until the end. With two refreshing exceptions (“Bossaura” and “Monument”), his oeuvre at least changed the trend. But the same goes for many great artists who set one thing and then stay true to it. The falling out with the public arose when he was criticized for a supposed anti-Semitic line that was, First, more tasteless than anti-Semitic and, secondly, not rapped by him but by Farid Bang.
The actual accusation that could have been made against Kollegah, namely that he indulges in very strange conspiracy fantasies and is somehow unable to tell the difference between a private person and a fictional character – is dismissed. At the end of his career, with his 2023 album “La Deutsche Vita”, he seems to have caught himself again and paid tribute to art only in his art, but the damage was already negligible. This does not mean that Kollegah has to struggle. His albums, including his last one, his legacy, charted at number one. That is his farewell gift to the German rap scene: that Kollegah leaves as the singer with the most number one albums in his art, one more than Bushido, who has already announced the end of his career in 2026 ( and beyond which everyone reported immediately).
But, as anyone who knows anything about German rap knows this only too well: farewell is not always farewell, the end of your career may be announced, but that does not mean you have to do it. Until perhaps the resignation from resignation, it remains to say: Kollegah will – despite everything – miss.
Dennis Sand writes about the zeitgeist and pop culture. On Kollegah’s song “Continental” he called it a “media leak,” which took him into a deep existential crisis for a few minutes. His The text can be found here.
#Rapper #ends #career #Kollegah