The Last Party

Blumentopf played their final show on November 22 at the Zenith in Munich, a sold-out room for a band that spent three decades throwing parties better than most people’s careers. PULS documented the whole thing, which feels right for an ending like this.

They started in 1992 as four rappers and a DJ: Cajus Heinzmann, Bernhard Wunderlich, Florian Schuster, Roger Manglus, and Sebastian Weiss. The first EP hit in 1996, the album in ’97, and after that it was just the work of staying alive. The music videos cycled through MTV and VIVA like clockwork, but the singles never climbed the way labels wanted them to. Roger explained it plainly once: We’re an album band. We never sold singles well. Not a complaint. Just the reality of being made for rooms full of people who actually wanted to hear the whole thing.

German hip-hop in the nineties had its own gravity—weirder and less concerned with American approval than what was happening elsewhere. Blumentopf felt like guys who just wanted to make music for their friends, and for twenty-four years the friends never stopped showing up.

Now it’s archived, documented, closed. There’s always something that ends and doesn’t come back, and the good ones always leave a particular kind of hole.