Brutal street rap from Frankfurt about the interaction between violence and depression.
Right at the beginning of his new album WSSNMB, an acronym for “Why They Name Storms After People,” Frankfurt street rapper Vega dares to look back. The question arises as to why all the shit that he has been telling us about in his music for almost twenty years, the violence, the drugs, the crime, has attracted him so magnetically, or perhaps the other way around: he has attracted them. In the mode of absolute emphasis, he reports in a husky voice about his childhood between shortness of breath and transgenerational trauma: “Every line from that time is like a small death.”
But the view of the present is no more positive. Vega reports a “pressure in the chest and leaden[r] Fatigue” and associated suicidal thoughts. He only seems to find solace and healing in the arms of his hometown, to which he dedicates the last song of his record, “Part of Me,” and whose praise he never tires of proclaiming, regardless of whether he praises their anti-fascism (“My city fucks your fatherland “) or their fucked-up down-to-earthness (“In your town you pay five euros for a flat white, in my town you pay five euros for a crack stone”).
In the urgency of Vega on WSSNB, only his Offenbach gangstarap colleague has recently rapped about street violence and depression. It’s just a shame that Vega doesn’t maintain this brutal tonality for the entire length of the album and towards the end opens up to pathetic German pop hooks that really weren’t necessary.