Panda Mask, Oil Paint, and a Thirteen-Room Villa

Cro, the German rapper who built his persona around a panda mask, released Tru. in September 2017 and it debuted exactly where everyone expected—at the top. There’s a kind of artistic gravitational field that forms around certain people, where the outcome stops being in question and the only interesting thing left is to watch the shape of the success. Cro had that, fully, by this point.

The night before the album dropped he threw a release party at the Ipse in Berlin—Chelo from Thatboii, Schowi from 0711, DJ Mighty Monch from 187 Strassenbande, Ninetoes, Psaiko Dino, Ymos & Pipistrello all on the bill. Ten euros at the door. The kind of lineup that turns a release into an event, even if the record would have sold just as well without the party.

What I keep coming back to is the parallel visual art practice. Around the same time, Cro had paintings on show at the Circle Culture Gallery in Berlin—actual canvases, not merch prints. He lived in a thirteen-room villa overlooking Stuttgart, which presumably gave him the kind of quiet afternoon hours where painting becomes possible. The mask always suggested someone with a visual instinct that predated the music. The canvases just made it legible.

I think about artists who need to work in more than one register simultaneously—who aren’t satisfied making things in only one form even when that form is clearly working. The thirteen-room villa helps, obviously. But I suspect the need was there before the villa.