Some have it good: Tai Verdes, this 26-year-old guy, only has to cross his arms and wave at the audience to provoke the first freak. He stands there for less than 20 seconds on Tuesday evening at 8.30 p.m. on the mini stage in the private club and, with his braids falling back and his dazzling white teeth, he looks as if he were Snoop Dogg’s grandson in person. In any case, he could probably advertise toothpaste if singing wasn’t going to happen anymore. But that’s not what it looks like at the moment: more than 8.3 million people listen to Tai Verdes’ chilled, cuddly hip-hop tracks on Spotify every month. Almost as many as Rammstein. (Although the latter probably only secretly cuddle so chilled.)
Why does someone like that play in front of 200 people in a private club instead of in a hall? Here, where otherwise well-deserved indie ukulele songwriters and country troubadours find their fine niche audience? Consensus radio hitlanders and click wonders are rarely guests on this small stage in the private club. But the rise of Tai Verdes (who, by the way, can also pluck the ukulele, but doesn’t do it that evening) has been so rapid that his live audience has yet to grow.
The fact that the private club only sold out at the last minute is somewhat disproportionate to Tai Verdes’ enormous number of digital clicks. In addition to his entertainer skills, he also owes this to the algorithm of the Chinese social media video portal TikTok, which also allows artists with previously little digital following to suddenly go through the roof with a video (and the accompanying music). Tai Verdes succeeded in August 2020 with his song “Stuck In The Middle”, which essentially tells about the inner conflict of whether you are friends or can fuck after all.
Berliner Zeitung/Markus Wachter
Loves pearls and rhinestones: Tai Verdes in the Berlin private club.
The songs aren’t overly exciting. Reminiscent of the chill-and-surfer pop of Jason Mraz or Jack Johnson just after the turn of the millennium, but pimped with a few hip-hop toppings. Tai Verdes also likes to sing about smoking weed (“Drugs”), and in fact on Tuesday evenings at the private club he comes across as a great pal who you can hang out with in a hammock smoking weed somewhere in the imaginary “Lalala” beach land surrounded by coconut trees.
At the concert, Tai Verdes hurries from left to right along the stage ramp as often as if he wanted to cross the Beatles’ Abbey Road crosswalk at least a hundred times in his black muscle shirt and rhinestone necklace. Some fans (most likely in their early to mid-20s) have plugged micro fans or micro disco balls into their cell phones. It’s also pretty hot here, not just when Tai Verdes opened the moshpit. He encourages the crowd to dance gymnastics like an animator at the pool edge. Lifeguard of Coolness. A joke! The charming, screaming woman in the last row knows the lyrics better than Tai Verdes himself. The central message is something to do with “YOLO – you only live once”. Tai Verdes’ new, second album will be released on September 16th. And as small as this time in the private club, we will certainly not get together again.