Eight Number Ones and a Call to Dieter Bohlen
Capital Bra pulled off something in 2018 that doesn’t have a clean parallel anywhere: eight number-one singles in a single calendar year in Germany, which placed him ahead of every other artist of the twenty-first century in German chart history and in the all-time top three alongside Boney M. and The Sweet—behind only ABBA and the Beatles. That’s not a typo, and it doesn’t need a qualification. It’s just a number that sits there and dares you to make sense of it.
His real name is Vladislav Balovatsky; he was born in Siberia and grew up between Ukraine and Berlin, and his rap carries the particular energy of someone who genuinely cannot be bothered to perform cool. The lassitude is real. The hooks are real. The young German audience that adopted him found something his contemporaries weren’t providing—a kind of ease, not the studied kind someone practices in the mirror, but the actual article. From no-name SoundCloud rapper to the most-streamed artist in the country in under two years is a trajectory that still doesn’t add up when you look at it directly.
And then he called Dieter Bohlen. Or Bohlen called him. The exact origin of the collaboration on Cherry Lady—a rework of Modern Talking’s 1986 hit Cheri Cheri Lady—matters less than the fact that it happened at all. Bohlen is one half of Modern Talking, Germany’s most globally successful pop act of the eighties, the man responsible for You’re My Heart, You’re My Soul and Brother Louie and years of immaculate Euro-pop excess. He has also spent the last two decades as Germany’s most prominent TV talent-show judge, which has made him either more or less credible depending on your angle. Thomas Anders, the other half of Modern Talking, didn’t participate, which apparently made no difference.
The video hit three million clicks in hours. Which might prove something about Bohlen’s instincts—sensing an opportunity in a dispute with Capital Bra and turning it into a single—or might just prove that the internet is a reliable sucker for unlikely pairings. Probably both. The mental image of teenagers playing You’re My Heart, You’re My Soul through phone speakers on their way to school is too good to dismiss.