In 2023, German rap will still write the best stories, but German rap then also writes history, well, that has become rather rare in the meantime. But this week it happened again. Apache 207 broke a record with their hit single “Roller.” The 2019 song, which has been streamed over 344 million times on Spotify, has been on the chart for 161 weeks – a week longer than Wham’s previous chart-topping ‘Last Christmas’! But the new record raises a whole series of questions.
The first question is the question that many cultural pessimists like to raise rhetorically, namely the question of what value a song actually has that is only streamed instead of actually being physically bought. So a song that people were willing to spend money on, i.e. money that goes beyond the monthly rate of the domestic Spotify flat rate. Anyone who asks the question about the value of streaming records will usually answer it themselves. But it’s not that simple.
So a few thoughts on the value thing: First, logically, a stream doesn’t equate to buying a physical unit. A purchased single (the digital price is around 79 cents) corresponds to 100 streams and if you don’t just talk about the monetary dimension, but about a real value, then you have to say that this calculation is halfway fair. After all, hearing a song a hundred times is equivalent to downloading it for 79 cents on iTunes or buying it as a maxi CD for 4.99 at a time when there were no other playback options. Because even the maxi CD, hand on heart, has rarely been heard more than a hundred times. On the other hand, and that also has to be taken into account, a song like “Last Christmas” can still be streamed today. It is therefore in direct competition with Apache’s “Roller”.
The second questionthat arises is the question of why. Why Apache? Why a rapper, from Ludwigsburg of all places, a rapper who comes from nowhere, so to speak, who didn’t have a single song on the market six years ago? What makes Apache so different that it is able to break the Wham! record that has grown over generations? His merit in pop history was to dissolve modern German rap into mainstream pop. Apache 207 is a child of the younger gangsta rap era, which was largely influenced by the sound of the KMN gang. The artists around Azet, Zuna and Miami Yacine used the relics of old, hard street rap and enriched them with sugary melodies and lots and lots of autotune. Apache took up this sound, used the codices practiced in the youth generation, but liberated the lyrics from the typically inherent street iconography – in doing so he opened the sound for a broad mass.
Apache counters the omnipresent symbol of promotion of the caliber of a Mercedes AMG in German rap with a scooter. “They talk to me about coke and stabbings/ But they have to go when our scooters start screaming again‘ it says, and in ‘Tunfisch & Weinbrand’ he even goes a step further when his lyrical self in the back seat of his Maybach argues about which car he should buy next and then comes to the conclusion that he should buy this one Game has already played through, and therefore the decision falls on a bike. A bicycle, exactly, that’s what the average German radio listener can identify with, it’s only somehow subversive at second or third pop-trained glance.
The third and last questionthat arises is the question of permanence. Sure, you can hate “Last Christmas”, but the song will always have a place in the collective, pop-cultural memory. It is questionable whether people will still be talking about “scooters” in 25 years. But that has less to do with the song itself than with our digital age, in which the fundamental value of music has changed. To accommodate the cultural pessimists who, thankfully, haven’t dropped out after the first paragraph: Of course, music today has a different social function than it did 25 years ago. This is also due to the fact that it is universally available, that the bond that one builds up with a physical disk is inevitably different from the bond that one has with a digital data package.
Basically, the connection to the music is different if its availability is not just a swipe away. Discovering music and listening to music in 2023 is simply a different cultural technique than it was 25 years ago and that means that in most cases a song is no longer an independent art product for many people, but just a part an ever-updating playlist that forms the soundtrack of a summer, or maybe just a vacation. “Roller” is a synonym of this time. Maybe the track will be remembered for exactly that.