Neighth come the thoughts that one suppressed during the day. At night things suddenly appear crystal clear that were previously a single ball of thought that simply could not be unraveled. At night creativity creeps out of the shadows that only dreams in daylight. The intoxication comes at night. The next day: the disillusionment.
When Alina Striedl calls up her TikTok profile the day after the artistic intoxication, the hangover does not follow – no disillusionment with what she fantasized about during the night. Instead: the next high. Alina Striedl’s work went viral overnight. Thousands of hearts and comments have flown in, and these are not just clicks, there are people behind it who share the song, again and again, send it to friends, share it via Whatsapp, push it up in the TikTok cosmos so that it ends up being more than two million times. Striedl, who calls herself Luna, has become a star – and although she sings about the moon, not the stars.
Luna is called that because she writes her songs at night. She is 17 years old when she sits in her room, late at night, and writes the song “Loser”. It’s about lovesickness, about that one person who screwed you – and you end up alone. “I would have thought that you loved me, yes / I would have thought that I deserved luck too / But now I know that it was just a game for you / I am the loser, I am the loser”, so goes the chorus. Luna accompanies herself on the piano in the TikTok video – that’s it. No great beat, no autotune, just Luna, her voice, this rhythm in which she almost seems to rap at times, and of course the night that she holds tightly so that at the end her love song can be heard. She sits there in an Adidas sweater, with her cap on, and sings in her dark voice, that voice that is quickly recognized. She sits in a small village in Bavaria where everyone knows her and her story. And that night the rest of the world gets to know her.
The countermovement to German rap
Today Luna is 18 years old, she now lives in Berlin. A good nine months has passed since she uploaded the first snippets of “Loser” in October 2020, and so much has happened in this short time as it can only happen in the life of a 17-year-old. “I went to school in the morning and in the afternoons I spoke to record companies on the phone,” says Luna. “And then of course I also graduated from high school.” On a warm autumn day, she is sitting on a bench at Holzmarkt 25, Berlin. The Holzmarkt 25 is a typical Berlin cultural institution, there are rhubarb spritzer and vegan cakes, homemade wooden animals and fuss are standing and hanging around everywhere, the club cat Blau is right next door.
On that day, Luna has big cookies with chocolate chips (which she fortunately shares) while she talks about the negotiations with the record companies. Didn’t your parents have a say in that? “No, my parents don’t know that much about it and they trusted me anyway. They knew: I already know exactly what I was doing. ”At that time she came home from school every day,“ My mom cooked something for me, I ate, and then I had telephone appointments with record companies until late at night ”.
She immediately had a good feeling about her current label. The artist Lea, another young singer who sings about the feelings of Generation Z in German, became aware of Luna and signed her label “staircase records”, which is closely connected to Sony Music. Just recently they released another song together, “Kisses like poison”. Luna and Lea stand for a new generation of musicians, a kind of female counter-movement to the tough German rap, which is still very masculine. Which is often about expensive cars and drug use, or about having made it from the bottom to the top. Singers like Luna and Lea or Elif also sing in German, but their songs are about love, about the feeling lost of toxic relationships, jealousy, and knowing each other the next day even when hungover.
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