The Body Is Waxed
Born Barbara Davidavicius in Hamburg in 1995, she built her following as a beauty and lifestyle YouTuber—the kind of meticulously calibrated attractiveness that the platform rewards with millions of subscribers before any of them have done anything that would traditionally qualify as art. I’ll be upfront: the first time I saw her in a thumbnail I wasn’t immediately thinking about her career trajectory. YouTube fame of that variety has a ceiling anyway, and the ceiling tends to arrive around twenty-three. The standard exit is music.
Shirin David’s pivot landed harder than most. The Hamburg-born YouTuber, with Lithuanian and Persian roots and a self-promotional instinct that borders on the scientific, approached rap with the full conviction of someone who had already decided it would work. Her debut album, Supersize, opens the argument with the premise fully stated: Der Körper ist gewaxt, alles bei mir glatt
—the body is waxed, everything smooth—delivered with the energy of someone planting a flag and daring you to have a problem with it.
The music is mostly a delivery mechanism for the Shirin David persona rather than something that would survive the persona’s removal. Tracks like "Gib ihm" and "Brillis" aren’t asking for critical engagement. The lyrical highlight is probably Ich wollt’ in Unterwäsche kommen, fick’ deinen Dresscode
—I wanted to come in underwear, fuck your dress code—which, delivered with her particular brand of weaponized self-assurance, lands exactly the way it’s supposed to. The self-confidence she talks about in interviews is real, or convincingly real, which may be the same thing: she says she needs Selbstbewusstsein—ganz, ganz viel Selbstbewusstsein
from a man next to her. It reads as genuine conviction, the kind that doesn’t need a room to agree with it.
Whether Goethe would be proud is not the question. The question is whether Supersize delivers on its own terms, and the honest answer is that it does exactly that—because those terms were set by someone who knew precisely what she was building and for whom.