Ebow - "K4L"
(Problembear Records / Rough Trade, since March 29th)
"You fetishize us, but you do not respect us," says German-Iranian journalist Hengameh Yaghoobifarah in a skit on the third album by German-Turkish rapper Ebow - bringing to the point what "K4L" is about: Kanak For Life, as the title says, is a survey of the relationships between the so-called Germans with a migration background and the so-called Biodeutschen. It's nice that the "Kanak" culture along with Ayran, Hummus and "Wallah" everyday language found their way into the hipster lifestyle, but what happened 20, 30, 40 years ago? What about the institutional "alien" suspicion and racism that last showed its hate-grimaces during the refugee panic spread by populist media and parties?
Especially the last three years have been a bitter lesson for many Germans with a migrant background: even if they are German in the third generation, if they, like the 29-year-old Ebow, have a university degree and are courted by the left-intellectual white milieu - they feel exoticized and treated like strangers. Or are set with clans and criminals in a cliché and threat context, which is then simultaneously exploited in series such as "4Blocks" as a thriller. "Inside me 1000 lives / hab halls cleaned, houses built / was exploited / was sucked out / you never believed in me / I was always what you need," she raps in the title track on the Gastarbeiter frustration of generations - "welcome in my Kanak World "
Andreas Borcholte's playlist KW 14
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Playlist on Spotify
1. Ebow: High
2. Connie Constance: Let Go
3. Marvin Gaye: Where Are We Going?
4. Mine: 90 degrees
5. Billie Eilish: Bury A Friend
6. Lizzo: Tempo feat. Missy Elliot
7. Jamila Woods: Eartha
8. Loyle Carner: Loose Ends feat. Jorja Smith
9. Show Me The Body: Now I Know
10. Priests: Good Time Charlie
With that, Ebow, who grew up in Munich and now commutes between Vienna and Berlin, joins earlier, provocative tracks like "Arms Hymn" (2012) or "Asylum" (2017). At the same time, with pop-musical force, she complements a discourse on critical homework confrontations of younger immigrant children, which is currently being published in books such as "Disintegrate!" or "your home is our nightmare" is led. As virtually the only German-speaking musician Ebow corresponds with the identity-political empowerment poetry of "K4L" but also with international rap and R & B stars like Solange or Dave, who defend their Afro-American or Afro-British culture against appropriations, the more promises of integration reveal themselves as illusions. She does not want to be "your fucking entertainment" - and opens her album with a traditional oriental, sung in Kurdish intro.
Who, for profit or for Instagram Fame, plays the cynical game of the "Kanak" mascot with gangsta pose and protz BMW, so many especially male genre colleagues from Ebow, who currently dominate the charts, gets in the battle Track "amk" a clear, feminist-based rebuff: "Go down, kiss the clitoris!" etches it against "too many white, rich boys in rap". She becomes even more explicit later in her vagina monologue "Taste my blood".
Not everything in a challenge on "K4L", many tracks also deal with more intimate relationships, quite sensual, for example, in "High", one of the best tracks on the album. "Butterflies", "neon light" or "blue" are about love, but also about doubts, traditional gender rules as well as friendship, solidarity and capitalistic fairy tales: "Do you still believe that everyone can be anything", she asks into a sky whose stars are not only out of reach for her, but overcast by toxic mists and cloud barriers.
Price query time:
02.04.2019, 07:20 clock
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K4L
label:
Problem Bear Records (Rough Trade)
Price:
EUR 16.99
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The usual cloud or trap rap is not so much Ebows stylistic device. It is more dominated by old-school hip-hop-trained beats and the ghostly lunatic noises with which producer walter p99 ark $ tra Ebows music is also musically different from the German rap mainstream. It's a nervous, self-consciously dissatisfied sound. Even if Ebow in "train" seems to jump on the notorious Tropical Vibe, the "Guantanamera", which has long been dissolved in protest song connotations, quickly becomes "Guantanamo" in the text - and the supposed (Germany) paradise is a prison. (8.7) Andreas Borcholte
Show Me The Body - "Dog Whistle"
(Concord Loma Vista / Caroline, since March 29th)
New York City, the upcoming war zone. As the rich in the Hudson Yards entrench themselves in luxury towers and shopping malls, resistance is forming in Brooklyn. Show Me The Body, three young, disillusioned men who can arouse a very impressive energy on stage, are arguably the most interesting hardcore rock band in North America at the moment. With their initiative Corpus they regularly gather diverse, queer and non-genre acts and artists for joint rave evenings.
Solidarity of the weak and marginalized in a city hostile to the creative and the poor is the subject of the show music of Punk, sludge metal, hip-hop influences and, er, banjo-generated rage music by Show Me The Body. "Dog Whistle", their second album after "Body War" of 2016, condenses the raw noise into a high frequency, 25 minutes long battle cry. Singer Julian Cashwan Pratt growls in the Nazi and Concert Allegory "Camp Orchestra", "Drought" beats the precarious arc from New York to LA ("Desert to desert") - and into "Forks And Knives" is incited to the coming rebellion: "Who's ready to come out to show 'em, man?"
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02.04.2019, 07:50 clock
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Show Me The Body - Dog Whistle
label:
Caroline
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10,99 Euro
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In the midst of this storm, it suddenly becomes menacingly silent: Distortion sounds fall like bombs into the already bloody streets. Singer Pratt is paranoid in post-traumatic stress: "Now I know this will be where I die". There is no hope in this already bombed and withered Wasteland, which Pratt summons in "USA Lullaby": "Bombs will probably break this hurt / Shake us from the earth". But something is still drumming in the bunker. (8.0) Andreas Borcholte
The Matthew Herbert Big Band - "The State Between Us"
(Caroline / Universal, since March 29th)
At the beginning of all albums of the British musician Matthew Herberts is always a more or less conceptual idea. How about making a record just out of noises that a pig produces in its short life? What can be composed of the ten-second recording of a bomb detonation? The monumental "The State Between Us" is said to have involved more than 1000 artists from each EU country. The idea of the album released on the original Brexit date: a music that creates new connections during its almost three years of production, while the political fabric of Europe is increasingly falling apart.
Right at the beginning, there is a fatal roar, a chorus announcing the approaching demise. The first solo song (by Rahel Debebe-Dessalegne) promises the refugees of the world a fervent haven: "If you've grown up together / But you're the only one left / You're welcome here". This is followed by field recordings: the dismantling of a British factory, a crossing of the English Channel and a full English breakfast, always mixed up with traditional big-band arrangements. The most conclusive is the music, if it simply continues jazz forms. For example with the beautiful, Miles-Davis-like trumpet in "Run It Down" or in the Glenn Miller cover "Moonlight Serenade" steeped in scary drones and news snippets. In "Reisezehrung", the work that Herbert made in 2010 with the recomposition of Mahler's last, unfinished symphony sounds out: a sound that is situated between the romantic and the modern, thus revealing its conceptual character so much that authenticity and deep feeling can not adjust.
Price query time:
02.04.2019, 07:40 clock
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The State Between Us (2cd)
label:
Caroline (Universal Music)
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EUR 10,23
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The recourse to the antiquated big-band sound makes it palpable that "The State Between Us" wants to be understood as a farewell record. The massiveness of the choir and the stubbornness of the whole make it clear again that the battle should not be over yet. The joy of playing and the fun of the ideas, even the crazy ones (in the piece "Fish and Chips" is a trumpet deep fried), fortunately saves over some length of this with two hours not too short Brexit soundtracks. (7.5) Benjamin Moldenhauer
Connie Constance - "English Rose"
(AMF Records / Caroline, since March 22)
And another album for the Brexit blues. The British singer Connie Constance spreads her love / hate relationship with her homeland on her debut album with Emphase. It begins with a cover of the beautiful, old jam ballad "English Rose", but the "soft voice" of the mythical Muse Albions, which Paul Weller sang 40 years ago, Constance rather does not want to be. "I'll Never Be Your Senorita", she sings in "Fast Cars" to potential lovers who love fast cars and "movie stars"; she is too colorful and down to earth for glamor and glitter. In the accompanying video clip, she also lets her dark-skinned girlfriends perform in Marie Antoinette robes. In 2019, the English rose no longer has a distinguished pale complexion.
Listened to on the radio
Wednesdays at 23 o'clock there is the Hamburger Web-Radio ByteFM a listening-mixtape with many songs from the discussed records and highlights from the personal playlist of Andreas Borcholte.
Constance can be quite sweet, but rather she puts a pub gurgling in her voice and wavers beery and provocative nasal through urban, reggae-infected clash homages like "I Want Out" - or counts in the laconic chant of "Bloody British Me "the gloomy downsides of their Englishness . At such moments, pop and R & B singer Constance is suddenly very close to modern storytellers like King Krule or Kate Tempest - with the solid humor of a Lily Allen.
Price query time:
02.04.2019, 07:40 clock
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English Rose
label:
Caroline (Universal Music)
Price:
EUR 10,83
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Musically, it's all over here, but in a very exciting way. Constance grew up as the only black child in a white family in London's suburb Watford, until late, she discovered her African roots. The mood here is therefore blue-eyed as in the exhilarating Northern Soul of "Give & Take". But also Nina Simone ("Gray Area"), the Talking-Lous-Jazz ("Let Go") and the Trip-Hop-Moods of the nineties ("Blooming In Solitude") and serve her as a foil for scenes from her always melancholic but never hopeless everyday life. "I'll get by and get along," she sings once. There is no doubt about this after this first blossoming. (7.7) Andreas Borcholte
Rating: From "0" (absolute disaster) to "10" (absolute classic)