Verde, Motherfuckers
The title of Marsimoto’s fifth album is a piece of algebra disguised as a color. Verde: green in Spanish, sure, but also V as in the Roman numeral five, plus Erde—Earth, the planet where our alien protagonist is currently a guest. Once you’ve decoded that, Marsimoto told me, the game is already over. That’s where the rest of German music stops. I’ve already won.
He said this without a trace of irony. That’s the thing about the green alien—he’s always completely, terrifyingly serious about being a joke.
Marsimoto is the alter ego of rapper Marteria, who at this point is one of the bigger names in German hip-hop—in the same conversation as Jan Delay, Peter Fox, Campino. A green-painted cosmic outsider who hops around festival stages visibly stoned and seems constitutionally allergic to the mainstream. The character is a kid of the nineties in terms of reference points but the sound goes somewhere further than nostalgia. Part mystery, part provocation, and entirely committed to the bit.
We talked before the April release of Verde, and within the first few minutes it became clear that conducting a normal interview with Marsimoto is not really possible. He interrupted his own answers to explain that beats are, quote, basically irrelevant
—what matters is his lyrics—and then immediately described an extremely precise methodology for selecting them: roughly 70% Indica, 30% Sativa, something kicking in the bass. And if there’s no snare, I’ve never picked a beat. I have to say that honestly.
He said "honestly" a lot. Each time it preceded something absolutely unverifiable.
The album came together fast. He started writing in December, finished in January. The music, he said, is the easy part. The visual dimension is what takes time—and that’s where photographer and filmmaker Paul Ripke enters, as he always does with Marsimoto. Ripke shot everything. Ripke invented the aesthetic. Ripke is, according to Marsimoto, also the world’s best surfer, a conclusion Kelly Slater personally reached while watching Ripke ride big waves in Portugal. Motherfucker, yeah—the best surfer in the world. If you would ever compete you would be world champion for years.
To which Ripke apparently replied: No, you know, I’m the best in so many things—I don’t need another thing.
Whether any of this actually happened is left as an exercise for the listener.
The Paul Ripke mythology is its own extended bit inside the Marsimoto universe, and it runs deep. According to Marsimoto, Ripke is essentially superhuman—best photographer, best filmmaker, best social media strategist, best surfer, physically shredded but disguised by a prosthetics team each morning to appear heavier, because if the world knew how good-looking he also was, the envy would be unbridable. Without Paul Ripke there is no Marsimoto. But Paul Ripke without Marsimoto is also not complete.
I didn’t push back. You don’t push back on a cosmology.
The single Chicken Terror required some explanation. Marsimoto has always positioned himself as the voice of outsiders—his words—and apparently that mandate extends to poultry. Chickens don’t have a good mouthpiece, because chickens can’t talk.
He speaks fluent chicken, he clarified, so he translated their interior experience into human language for the song. I asked a follow-up and he told me to just listen to the track. Fair enough.
Hollyweed is about buying a house in Newport Beach and getting Supreme gloves and Yeezys—Marsimoto’s version of gentrifying ahead of the curve, moving somewhere before everyone else realizes it’s the place to be. Then in ten years they’ll all want to move to Newport Beach. Too late. I’m already there.
The Zlatan comparison came up here too, though he’d already made it once. The Zlatan comparison is available for most situations.
I asked about the features—a roster of names so obscure they sound invented: The Friendly Ghost, Salsa359, Walking Trett, Menschenfreund88, Virusboy, Jadula Rasa. All newcomers, he said. All applied to work with him. All, in three or four years, going to be stars. This was stated as prophecy rather than opinion.
When I asked if he was satisfied with Verde, I got a short lecture about stupid questions. Would I be releasing it if I weren’t satisfied with the music? That’s exactly as stupid as when all those music journalists ask: What’s your favorite song on the album?
He then confirmed that yes, he was satisfied, and attributed this partly to his historical pattern of making music that only gets understood three years after release. He has named all seven of his children Paul Ripke, first name, as the minimum he can do.
What makes Marsimoto work—and it does work, the album is genuinely good—is that the grandiosity never fully breaks character, even when it becomes obviously absurd. The green alien is a bit, but it’s a bit with actual craft underneath it. The wordplay is real. The beats, selected via precise cannabis calibration, land. The outsider posture has been consistent across five albums now, which is itself a kind of argument against the mainstream it pretends to oppose. At some point the alien becomes the establishment, and I think Marsimoto knows this, and I think that’s probably fine with him.
Verde
he said when I circled back to the title. Do you ever listen to the answers I give?
He was right. He’d already answered it. It means green. It means five. It means Earth. It means he was here, briefly, and left something shining on it. You’re welcome for the album.