What Jan Delay Did Instead

Jan Delay walked into Wacken wearing a white suit. That’s the whole story, really, and it’s a good one. Wacken Open Air is the world’s largest heavy metal festival—85,000 people in a flat northern German field, all leather and denim and volume pushed well past reasonable—and into this arrived Hamburg’s resident soul-hip-hop hybrid looking like he’d just stepped off something with a deck and a captain. His entire persona is built around immaculate controlled cool, and he walked through the crowd with the attitude of a man who finds the situation entirely appropriate.

The video was made for his then-upcoming album Hammer und Michel, and it staged the best possible answer to what you do when life gets heavy: go somewhere even heavier, look great, and shrug. There’s a real philosophy in that—not the bumper-sticker kind, the kind that involves actually putting on the white suit and going. The album came out in April 2014. It was a good year for him. His year, even.