Heintje Was Always Harder Than Your Rap
People used to fuck to Kuschelrock. Barry White. Bravo Hits compilations. Now they’re doing it to German rappers screaming degrading shit at them—Sybille from the parallel class getting penetrated while Kollegah and Frauenarzt provide the ambience. Progress, maybe. A kind of honesty, at least.
The obvious reading is that contemporary rap is harsher than the pop of thirty years ago, and on a surface level that’s correct. German rap in particular reached a point where, if five different mothers aren’t consecutively fucked in a single track, the label considers it a children’s record and racks it next to Benjamin Blümchen. The genre has a loudness problem that has nothing to do with volume.
But this reading ignores the Berliner Plattenkiste thesis, which is that the Schlager stars of previous decades were already harder than all your homies combined—they were just hiding it in different packaging. Schlager, for context: the relentlessly cheerful German-language pop tradition that dominated radio from the fifties through the eighties, apparently composed entirely of wholesome sentiment and accordion. Heintje was a child star of this genre in the late sixties, beloved by grandmothers across Germany and the Netherlands. Nicole won Eurovision in 1982 with a peace ballad so sincerely innocent it almost loops back around to being subversive. Michael Holm wrote ballads that men cried to at garden parties without understanding why.
The Berliner Plattenkiste project takes these records—the actual vinyl, the original sleeve photography—and retitles them. Heintje’s Christmas classic: "Dicke Eier, Weihnachtsfeier." Michael Holm’s ballad: "Dein Spitt ist zu weak." Nicole’s peace anthem: "Total geflasht von deinem Swag." The images are impeccably assembled. The tonal dissonance is so precise it becomes its own kind of argument: that the line between sweet and raunchy was always thinner than genre conventions pretend, that "family-friendly" was a production decision rather than a fundamental difference in what humans actually want from music. Heintje just had better PR.