Three observations:
1. What was that / is it real
Our perception of what is “real” and what is possible is challenged almost every day. Very simple things that we took for granted are not: a designated chancellor does not have to be chosen in the first ballot, the average ticket price for a Lady Gaga concert can be over $ 600. Everything impossible is possible today. Yes, Julia Engelmann can debut with Diogenes. Yes, the AfD can be classified as secure right -wing extremist by the AfD – and people still ask themselves: Is that real? Jia Tolentino writes in the “New Yorker”, “as if reality became illegible, as if the language were a vessel with holes in the ground and the meaning expires on the ground”. The news feed of her cell phone gives her the feeling of “being strapped flat on the board of an unreal presence”.
Recommendations of the editorial team
2. The Jan-Böhmermann-and-Lorde aesthetics
Actually, of course, that under these circumstances an aesthetics becomes interesting that does not seem modified. The VLOG style, the apparently casual film of everyday life, shapes Lordes Musikvideo on “What what that?” – In German: what was that?
You can see them on the way in New York, running and bike to their guerrilla concert in the Washington Square Park. It is a video without a blur and artificial light and both stand out. There is Lordes real skin. There are colors that look cold, barren, real and therefore strangely soothing. Even if your journey itself, including the throwing away of Apple Airpod Max Kophörer in a trash can by chance next to a bicycle that is not chained, is of course fictitious.
The music video is reminiscent of a video that is only a few days older, an edition of the “Neo Magazins”, in which Jan Böhmermann drives with an e-scooter from Cologne to Chemnitz. Here, too, the VLOG style tells.
He takes this tour “because you only sit in front of the computer at home”. He wanted to “work on” against his virtual assumption of reality. 30 minutes you can follow this unspectacular and multi-day trip with the e-scooter. Both he and Lorde end their “Real Life” videos with their audience. Böhmermann meets his fans at the Chemnitz Karl Marx Monument, Lorde in the Washington Square Park.
3. To Skim: Skin, fly over, treat superficially
The writer Ulrike Schrimpf writes in “Friday” that reading with reading skills would no longer be the default mode of the present, since the digital oversupply is more of a “skim”-so overwhelming. Skimming is probably also if you listen to a voice message at double speed. And a voice message is again the new podcast by Sophie Passmann, who-like all podcasts that are currently being created with a budget-has a studio set to be consumable as a video.
“The Sophie Passmann Podcast” is reminiscent of “Sarah Kuttner-The Show”, who reflected the zeitgeist from 2004 to 2006 with the band appearances and star tattoos. Kuttner was like Passmann at a late night desk. The male genre was broken by female, associative talk about pop culture. Unlike Kuttner, Passmann does not talk about her guests today. They simply don’t exist anymore. Passmann’s sidekick doesn’t mean Sven Schuhmacher either, but chat.
So if we skimming again for 20 years, what will this format look like from a desk and female pop culture personality? What else can be rationalized? The desk seems set. Will the moderator be a AI? And the audience? Will it be less in the sense than that every: r will prompt their own personality program? Is this future really twenty years away? Of course not.
This column first appeared in the music express edition 7/2025.