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MUSIC

Anger as ‘anti-Semitic’ German rappers set for Swiss concert

Controversial German rappers Farid Bang and Kollegah are set to appear at a festival in Switzerland in May but a group of protesters have demanded the event be cancelled.

Published: 17 April 2018 13:52 CEST
Anger as 'anti-Semitic' German rappers set for Swiss concert
German rappers Kollegah and Farid Bang (L) at the 2018 Echo Music Awards in Berlin. Photo: AFP

Last week, at Germany’s annual Echo Awards, the two rappers took home the best album award for their “Jung, brutal und gutaussehend 3” long player, which sold over 200.000 copies.

But the giving of the gong to the two rappers has caused huge controversy in Germany with fellow Echo prize winners now threatening to hand back their awards.

The album sees Farid Bang rapping about his gym regime, boasting that “my body is more ripped than an Auschwitz prisoner’s.”

Kollegah, meanwhile, was targeted with claims he was anti-Semitic after a 2016 music video which appears to show a Jewish man at the head of a secretive global banking conspiracy.

Open letter to promotors

Now the controversy has spread to Switzerland with an open brief signed by an alliance of local politicians, queer groups, and women’s rights organisations calling for their appearance at the upcoming Albanian Festival in the city of Schaffhausen to be called off.

Addressing the concert’s promoters, the letter’s signees argue the rappers “glamorize violence” and “damage the dignity” of groups including refugees, homosexuals and women.

Among the supporters of the move is local Socialist Party politician and rapper Patrick Portmann, who says he has received verbal threats because of his stance.

“Obviously they have interpreted our protest against the rappers’ text as [a protest] against the fans too,” said the politician and rapper who now wants to retreat from the front line of the confrontation, according to Swiss daily Tages Anzeiger.

As a rapper himself – he goes by the name of Sympaddyc – Portmann believes fans think he has betrayed their idols. He says the fans believe that what their fans to is art, and that means anything goes.

“These kids don’t challenge anything, no matter how bad the texts are,” Portmann said.

The German rappers themselves have denied claims they are anti-Semitic.

On Monday, the operators of the BBC Arena concert venue addressed in the letter said responsibility for the concert lay with the Alba-Kulturverein cultural organisation and that they saw no indications the event could contravene local laws.

 

CULTURE

New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday’s death

Fans of the late Johnny Hallyday, "the French Elvis Presley", will be able to commemorate the sixth anniversary of his death with two songs never released before.

Published: 17 November 2023 09:05 CET
New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday's death

Hallyday, blessed with a powerful husky voice and seemingly boundless energy, died in December 2017, aged 74, of lung cancer after a long music and acting career.

After an estimated 110 million records sold during his lifetime – making him one of the world’s best-selling singers -Hallyday’s success has continued unabated beyond his death.

Almost half of his current listeners on Spotify are under the age of 35, according to the streaming service, and a posthumous greatest hits collection of “France’s favourite rock’n’roller”, whose real name was Jean-Philippe Leo
Smet, sold more than half a million copies.

The two new songs, Un cri (A cry) and Grave-moi le coeur (Engrave my heart), are featured on two albums published by different labels which also contain already-known hits in remastered or symphonic versions.

Un cri was written in 2017 by guitarist and producer Maxim Nucci – better known as Yodelice – who worked with Hallyday during the singer’s final years.

At the time Hallyday had just learned that his cancer had returned, and he “felt the need to make music outside the framework of an album,” Yodelice told reporters this week.

Hallyday recorded a demo version of the song, accompanied only by an acoustic blues guitar, but never brought it to full production.

Sensing the fans’ unbroken love for Hallyday, Yodelice decided to finish the job.

He separated the voice track from the guitar which he felt was too tame, and arranged a rockier, full-band accompaniment.

“It felt like I was playing with my buddy,” he said.

The second song, Grave-moi le coeur, is to be published in December under the artistic responsibility of another of the singer’s close collaborators, the arranger Yvan Cassar.

Hallyday recorded the song – a French version of Elvis’s Love Me Tender – with a view to performing it at a 1996 show in Las Vegas.

But in the end he did not play it live, opting instead for the original English-language version, and did not include it in any album.

“This may sound crazy, but the song was on a rehearsal tape that had never been digitalised,” Cassar told AFP.

The new songs are unlikely to be the last of new Hallyday tunes to delight fans, a source with knowledge of his work said. “There’s still a huge mass of recordings out there spanning his whole career,” the source said.

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