Kollegah (album)
| Kollegah | ||||
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| Studio album from Kollegah | ||||
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Publication |
August 29, 2008 |
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| Label (s) | Self-made records | |||
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Format (s) |
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Title (number) |
17th |
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running time |
58:54 |
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Rizbo, Chrizmatic, Vizir et al. a. |
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Studio (s) |
Selfmade Studio (Düsseldorf) |
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Kollegah is the second solo album by the eponymous rapper Kollegah . It was released on August 29, 2008 on the independent label Selfmade Records . The album was largely produced by hip-hop musician Rizbo and does not contain any contributions from other rappers, although female singers appear in some hooks. In addition enclosed is a docu - DVD titled At night . Kollegah entered the album charts at number 17 in Germany.
Creation and concept
Felix Blume, the real name of Kollegah, began working on Kollegah immediately after the release of his first album Alphagene . He picked out beats and recorded about forty songs from December 2007 to July 2008. The hip-hop musician listened to these several times and continued to work on them, for example by changing the text. After completing the recording process, he selected what he saw as the “most durable” tracks for the album. According to the artist, there is no well thought-out concept behind the album. The focus of the work is only the claim to produce an entertaining, "easy" album. Kollegah was released less than a year after the publication of Alphagene , which Kollegah explains in an interview with the fact that he “didn't keep the fans waiting that long. For that, rapping is also [...] too much fun. "
Kollegah completely dispenses with guest contributions by other artists on his second solo album, which is unusual for a hip-hop album. In interviews he gives various reasons for this. The rapper told MZEE .com that it "happened that way" and that the collaboration with other artists did not materialize. Elsewhere he says that, apart from Azad , with whom Kollegah can envision joint pieces for the future, he could not think of any cooperation worth striving for. The 17-track album also doesn't include skits , as is the case with many other hip-hop albums. However, the two pieces Kokausik and Bad Boy each begin with a 45-second dialogue before the actual song begins.
At night
In addition to the Kollegah music CD , the album comes with a DVD entitled At Night and containing a documentary in which four men report on their experiences with crime, martial arts and their personal values, among other things. The four people involved are listed in the booklet under the names Jakob, Zaki, Pasa and Ivan. The interviews have a total length of 48 minutes and 40 seconds.
"The Streetdoku" is a production by Selfmade Records and Destroy Productions . Elvir Omerbegovic , the founder of Selfmade Records , was involved in the creation of the DVD as a director and producer. The camera work was done by Christian Kitscha and Philipp Schöttner and the subsequent editing was done by Christoph Dahlhausen. The DVD is backed with music by hip-hop musician Rizbo.
Kollegah himself was not involved in At Night . The rapper sees the documentary as a bonus and made sure that the price of the album did not increase as a result of this supplement. In his opinion, "the DVD also has an educational aspect, you get a blunt, realistic insight into the nightlife and its dangers from men in the field, without anything being glorified."
Track list
| # | title | producer | length |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Your Highness | SixJune & Yoshi | 1:58 |
| 2 | Kollegah | Rizbo | 3:57 |
| 3 | Big boss | Rizbo | 3:40 |
| 4th | Street pharmacist | Rizbo | 3:42 |
| 5 | In the hood | Mauvais Garcon | 3:11 |
| 6th | Coca music | Rizbo | 5:20 |
| 7th | Bad boy | Rizbo | 4:37 |
| 8th | Double time freestyle | Rizbo & Kollegah | 1:48 |
| 9 | 30.3 | Rizbo | 3:27 |
| 10 | 1001 night | Rizbo | 3:41 |
| 11 | Self-made hustler | Rizbo | 2:42 |
| 12 | Gangster arrogance | Chrizmatic | 3:32 |
| 13 | Halftime freestyle | Rizbo & Kollegah | 2:17 |
| 14th | autumn | Rizbo | 3:22 |
| 15th | Ghetto business | Rizbo | 2:59 |
| 16 | Until the day | SixJune & Yoshi | 3:31 |
| 17th | Outro | Vizir | 5:10 |
production
Rizbo acted, as with most of the albums released through Selfmade Records , as the main producer. He produced the titles Kollegah , Big Boss , Street Pharmacist , Koka Music , Bad Boy , Doubletime Freestyle , 30.3 , 1001 Nights , Self-Made Hustler , Halftime Freestyle , Autumn and Ghettobusiness . The song Halftime Freestyle was created in collaboration with Kollegah. SixJune and Yoshi also produced the pieces Your Highness and Until the Day together . Mauvaise Garcon, who had already produced a track for Favorites album Anarcho , was responsible for the background music for In der Hood . The song Gangsterarroganz was produced by Chrizmatic. In addition, Vizir, who was already represented with two tracks on the previous album Alphagene , produced the outro .
Texts
content
Kollegah's texts deal primarily with crime . Recurring themes are drug trafficking , physical violence and pimping . Furthermore, Kollegah presents itself as emphatically arrogant and ignorant. By content strategies presented Kollegah not humans Felix flower, but treated invented by flower art figure Kollegah. In an interview, he explained that although he had occasionally recorded personal pieces in the past, he had no ambitions to present his character traits or opinions to the listener.
The piece Kollegah deals with the career of the musician, who begins with the recording of the first tape with “cheap equipment”, which was re-released some time later as an X-Mas edition via Selfmade Records . The tape Boss der Bosse and the album Alphagene followed . Kollegah describes how he perceives the contrast between his life a few years before the publication of Kollegah and his status in 2008: “Less than two years ago, I was still ticking pep in the hood, today all of Germany was looking at the gold chain. I have achieved sales figures and, thanks to an outstanding performance in terms of rap technique, became an exception. "
At the end of the album, Kollegah presents two pieces that are personally shaped and thus take up aspects of Felix Blume's life such as love and religion. The title Herbst is the follow-up to the song Sommer , which can be heard on the mixtape Boss der Bosse , and deals with the subject of transience . In the text the rapper emphasizes that fame and material goods only exist for a limited time and that after death only the soul remains (“The splendor of this world passes, nothing remains for us when we die like leaves in autumn "). In interviews he states that he separates religion and music, but the song Herbst is religiously shaped: “Nothing in the world lasts forever, all that remains for us when we die is the soul; and we don't want any locks in life, we pray because we know that after death we will meet the Creator. "
The second song that falls outside the scope of the content of the album is Until the Day in which Kollegah addresses a closed love affair. He addresses himself directly to the woman who is not named and assures her that he missed the “earlier times”: “I knew there was no one who could hold us now; Bonnie and Clyde - it was the two of us against the rest of the world; you were my great love, I was your great love; Yeah, what could have happened to both of us? ”In an interview, he confirmed that the piece Bis Zum Tag had an authentic background and was his first piece about love.
style
The lyrics on Kollegah often include puns and allusions, known in hip-hop jargon as punchline . Kollegah's pun was already strongly represented on his previous publications and is praised by critics as a special trademark of the rapper. The “punchlines” often only get their meaning when they are set to music, since the rapper connects two terms that are pronounced the same but have different meanings. Some examples are the following verses:
"The boss hustles half the night, but it's like fans : if you get wind of it, you will be made cold."
"I take sluts into my house and the meeting is like volcanic lava: it comes down to hanging out after the bang."
"When you see roughly how much money belongs to me, then say" Hats off! ", Like hairdressers to rabbis after they briefly cut, like a Bundeswehr hairdresser."
"Whenever I take Havanas out of cigar cases, you hold out your hand and play the ashtray / usher like an R'n'B DJ."
Another characteristic of the texts are the complex double and multiple rhymes , which often extend over several verses. The following text excerpts can be named as examples:
“And your mum in the kitchen with silicone implants; Grinding chilli peppers, refining kidney bean salads, because she cooks something quite passable for the boss in an apron; spicy, extra hot princely festive meal. "
“Look, she come crawling with broken cheekbones; but at some point we are still through that for long weeks; subsequent healing of the molecular particles; over the mountain ... like the Hollywood landmark. "
illustration
The cover shows Kollegah as he dressed in a suit of a BMW of 7 series gets out. His right arm is on the open car door and he is holding a smoking cigar in his hand . The background shows a skyline created with computer graphics , which represents the Canadian city of Toronto . Kollegah alludes to its Canadian roots with it, as does its logo, which shows a maple leaf . The album's booklet consists of 20 pages, which are printed with some of the album's lyrics .
marketing
In July 2008, Kollegah recorded a song called Bodyguard , in which he announced his second album for the first time, and made it available to the hip-hop magazine Juice , whose editors call it Juice Exclusive! published on the magazine's 88th CD. The rapper used the Auto-Tune program for the chorus of the piece , which is used for automatic pitch correction in music and was particularly successful in 2008 thanks to its use in the single Lollipop by rapper Lil Wayne .
On July 31, the first video for a track on the album was released with Big Boss . The music video for the song, which was shot in a castle, reached number 3 in the TRL Most Wanted charts of the MTV show Urban TRL and in the following weeks also occupied position 1. The license plate labeled "Big Boss" in the clip After shooting, the Mercedes was auctioned on the internet auction house eBay .
At the beginning of August, Selfmade Records, in cooperation with the website Rappers-Guide.com, organized a competition called the “ Remix Contest”, in which the participants had to produce an alternative beat to the song Big Boss . The winner of the competition was a private producer who works under the pseudonym Courtmasta and received a meeting with Kollegah as the prize. On July 18, the approximately nine-minute snippet , a compilation of excerpts from the tracks on the album, was made available free of charge on the Internet.
Furthermore, Kollegah released another so-called Freetrack on August 23. The rapper had previously promised to release a song for free if the fans often vote for the video Big Boss on the MTV show Urban TRL , so that the clip would get the highest possible placement in the TRL Most Wanted . The song is titled Hero and is a reinterpretation of the piece Hero by the American rapper Nas . Kollegah used the original beat of hip-hop producer Polow da Don and wrote a new text about it. In the chorus of the title he adopts the word “Hero”, which in the version of Nas can be translated as “Held” in German, and uses it as an abbreviation for the opioid heroin . Furthermore, in the song Kollegah makes fun of the rapper Fler, who is under contract with Aggro Berlin (“The outstanding player stands in front of your house at night and collapses, like Fler's sales figures”). He had attacked Kollegah in an interview and threatened with violence after Kollegah announced that the commercial dominance of the Aggro Berlin label had ended and that he would sell more units of his new album than Fler and Godsilla with their album Südberlin , which was released on the same day Masculine . The two rappers from Berlin finally entered the German album charts five places behind Kollegah.
At the end of August, Kollegah completed a concert tour on which he presented his second solo album to the audience before it was released. The tour was called Kollegah - Pre-Listening -Tour and took place from August 27th to 30th, 2008. He presented his album at a total of four concerts in the cities of Berlin , Munich , Cologne and Hamburg and was supported by his label colleague Favorite and DJ Craft from the Berlin group KIZ .
The website Mzee.com combined the sale of the album with an offer whereby customers who pre-ordered the album in the site's shop also received a limited, exclusive Kollegah T-shirt and a hand-signed autograph card from the rapper. The fall music video was released on September 11, 2008 . The film production was taken over by Los Banditos Films and was shot in Stuttgart . In the case of the second video, too, fans should be rewarded with a free song when they vote on Urban TRL for fall . The highest position of the title in the TRL Most Wanted was number 3, so that Kollegah then published the title So my friends .
Self-awareness
In an interview with the hip-hop magazine Juice , Kollegah expresses that the transformation of an artist in the course of his career and the resulting critical examination of earlier works is a natural process that also affects him. However, the rapper does not see his first tapes, pimp tape and boss of the bosses , as bad records, but rather believes that "they were just different". The general quality of the pieces is still higher on Kollegah . He sees a positive development in the area of mixing and hooklines . Kollegah did not attach any importance to the development of the refrains on the first albums and only for Kollegah did the focus more on the development of catchy hooklines. As a result, from the rapper's point of view, “the songs have become even rounder”. Furthermore, he feels the album Alphagene as darker and more serious, whereas his second solo album is "looser, the punchlines [...] much better" and the pieces are "much more humorous".
reception
success
After Alphagene had already entered the German album charts at position 51, Kollegah's second album was also able to occupy a position. In the first week of sales, Kollegah entered the charts at number 17 and was able to reach another position the following week at number 99. In Austria, too, the sound carrier entered the album charts at position 48. Furthermore, the media coverage of Kollegah can be rated as a success. For example, when the album was released, Kollegah was featured on the cover of the 96th issue of the magazine by the editors of the German hip-hop magazine Backspin , which is the first “cover story” about the hip-hop musician.
criticism
The reviews of the album were positive. This can be proven by the reviews of the e-zine Laut.de , the German hip-hop magazine Juice and the website Rap.de. After Philipp Gässlein, editor of the Laut.de website , Kollegah goes down as a "solid second in the artist's history" and is awarded four out of a possible five evaluation points. From the point of view of the Rap.de editorial team, the album is an “absolute matter of taste” and thus indicates that the image of the arrogant pimp designed by Kollegah polarizes hip-hop listeners. In the Juice review , Kollegah's second album is described as "the best manifestation of his very own style so far". The editorial staff of the magazine rated Kollegah with 4.5 out of a possible 6 “crowns”.
The production of Kollegah , largely taken over by Rizbo, is rated as "mixed". From the point of view of the Laut.de editorial team, the beats are overloaded with artificial tones created by the synthesizer , but have a less unpleasant effect on the overall image of the sound carrier than the instrumentals on the Dusseldorf's first solo album. In contrast, Rap.de describes the production of Kollegah as "pretty colorless".
Philipp Gässlein criticizes pieces like Big Boss and Kollegah as too lacking in innovation, whereby both the beats and the text are rated negatively. On the other hand, Gässlein sees the title Bad Boy as a “highlight” and praises the pieces Your Highness , which is reminiscent of Veni Vidi Vici from Alphagene , as well as Doubletime Freestyle . In contrast to Laut.de, the Rap.de editorial team feels that Big Boss is a highlight of the album.
In addition, the titles Herbst and Bis zum Tag , which differ from the rest of the album in terms of content, are highlighted in the reviews. Rap.de praises the pieces because they make the album more varied, which is characterized by an otherwise narrow spectrum of content and can therefore "be strenuous for a long time and maybe even boring" ". Autumn also stands out in terms of content for Laut.de , although the quality of the title cannot match its predecessor, Sommer . Up to the day the content is also praised, on the other hand Gässlein uses the song to exemplify the fact that Kollegah, who sings the hook on various tracks on the album, is not a talented singer. The rapper's vocal contributions, which are often sung at an angle, are also negatively noted by the Juice editorial team.
In summary, from the perspective of Juice, the expectations of the listeners are fulfilled by “punchlines, double times and a detailed and eloquently formulated pimp image” and Kollegah offers “entertainment at the highest level”. Philipp Gässlein is of the same opinion, even if Kollegah actually only reports “nonsense” in his lecture. In addition, Rap.de expresses that the hip-hop musician is one of the most interesting rappers in Germany thanks to his presentation technique and word games.
Critique of the DVD
In addition to evaluating the album, the Juice editorial team also looked at the accompanying DVD At Night . The documentation is described as a "surprisingly successful low-budget work". The warnings given by the interviewees to go the route they are taking are given positive emphasis. The explicitly expressed rejection of the sale of drugs and pimping are also praised. The DVD dispenses with “Americanized gangster attitudes” and “macho behavior”. Nevertheless, at night must be rated as a bonus and is "not viable" as an independent product.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d Interview with MZEE.com magazine - issue 4/2008 - page 9
- ↑ a b Interview with rap4fame.de
- ↑ Interview with Kollegah on MZEE.com ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. dated August 21, 2008
- ↑ a b c d booklet of the album
- ↑ a b Juice , September 2008, p. 38
- ↑ a b c interview. MZEE.com, p. 2
- ↑ a b rating of the album. ( Memento of the original from September 27, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Rap.de
- ↑ 96th issue of the hip-hop magazine Backspin , p. 12
- ^ A b Philipp Gässlein: Album review on laut.de.
- ↑ Interview. MZEE.com, p. 1
- ↑ Laut.de: Evaluation of Alphagene (exemplary)
- ↑ August issue of Juice (2008) - page 34
- ↑ BadaBoomBadaBang: Kollegah - Bodyguard (Juice Exclusive) ( Memento of the original from September 30, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ - Juice , September 2008, p. 39
- ^ Urban TRL editions of August 5 and 26, 2008
- ↑ Photos from the video shoot ( Memento of the original from September 24, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Big Boss video . Mzee.com
- ↑ Auction on eBay
- ↑ Remix Contest: Kollegah - "Big Boss" ( Memento of the original from September 13, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Kollegah - Big Boss Remix by Courtmasta ( Memento of the original from September 13, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Snippet for the album. ( Memento of the original of July 7, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (13.4 MB)
- ↑ Freetrack Hero . ( Memento of the original from November 10, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (4.1 MB)
- ↑ Kollegah in megalomania . ( Memento of the original from October 9, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Rap.de
- ↑ Kollegah and Fler in the charts ( Memento of the original from September 18, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Kollegah Pre-Listening Tour 2008 ( Memento of the original from September 18, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ MTV.de: Video zu Herbst ( Memento of the original from September 13, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Urban TRL from September 23rd - MTV, 4:05 pm to 5:30 pm
- ↑ New Kollegah Freetrack “So my friends”. ( Memento of the original from October 25, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ - Juice , September 2008, p. 37
- ↑ Musicline.de: Chart tracking from Kollegah ( memento of the original from September 19, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Juice , October 2008, p. 108
- ^ Juice , October 2008, p. 118
