No man’s years: how Nina Chuba saved the genre “summer hit” with her own hands

There is hardly anything that drives a certain blow of not quite young people up the wall as reliably as very young people who block highways on behalf of saving the world. Or sticking to paintings. They then call them extremists, including Greta Tuna in this specific case. One thing, however, makes these people even more mad: young people who want their piece of the pie despite working 30 hours a week. Those without years of apprenticeship, who under no circumstances may be master years, what demands from life.

Which brings us to Nina Chuba: The singer and actress, born in Wedel in 1998, is – as she explains in her song “Wildberry Lillet” – hungry, so she takes “everything from the buffet”. With a voice that manages to sound both disinterested and longing, Chuba crows to a summer-breezy dancehall beat what she would and would like to have: real estate, dollars, the ability to fly like Marvel, canapés for breakfast. And the eponymous Wildberry Lillet.

A revenge of the boys

In mid-September, the song reached number 1 in the German single charts. It could be described as the revenge of the young that a singer, who started her career as an actress on the high school series “Die Pfefferkörner” and on “Traumschiff”, shooed the Malle-Kloppsticks DJ Robin and Schürze off the top. Or you can simply be happy: about this seriously sympathetic singer who tries her hand at a contemporary and cliché-poor fusion of rap, pop and reggae.

She dreams and brags, as is customary in hip-hop, while sounding touchingly friendly: Chuba’s friends should only get the best in “Wildberry Lillet”, and a “house in Catania” is desired for mom. The brat would have saved money instead of drinking an aperitivo, the apprenticeship fetishists exclaim. Chuba, meanwhile, gets money from the fizzy drink manufacturer Schweppes because the “Wildberry Lillet” mixes particularly well with berry lemonade from their company. No, that’s certainly not how you save the world. But at least the genre “summer hit”.

This column first appeared in the Musikexpress issue 11/2022.

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