COPENHAGEN — Tobias Rahim, a 7-foot-tall Danish pop singer of Kurdish origin, strutted across the massive stage at Copenhagen’s Royal Arena one recent night in a tasselled gold jean outfit.
I was in the middle of “Stor Mand” (Big Man), a romantic duet performed with Andreas Odbjerg, another star in Denmark. But it seemed that he hardly even needed to sing: he pointed his microphone at the 16,000-strong crowd that filled the arena and sang all the lyrics for him.
Soon, the crowd became even more adoring, chanting, “girls want your body.” Rahim, who posed nude for a previous project, quickly moved on to the next hit.
In recent years, pop music in languages other than English has found a wider audience. K-pop groups and Hispanic artists like Bad Bunny have charted hits on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, and French-language singers have appeared at major festivals in the United States.
Danish, an often staccato-articulate language dominated by only about 6 million people, is perhaps an unusual choice to become the next lingua franca of pop. But Rahim, 33, said there was no reason Danish-language pop couldn’t be successful too.
Outside the country, Denmark has long been famous for its gastronomy and television dramas with noir elements. Rahim claimed that there was the same talent in the national pop arena. He said he heard criticism that Danish is an ugly language, but he did not agree with it: “any language turned into music can be super beautiful.”
A handful of Danish musicians, including the youthful-faced Lukas Graham and MØ, an artistically aspiring singer, have long made music in English to cultivate a following abroad.
As a half-Kurdish, half-Danish boy in the seaside city of Aarhus, Rahim expressed that he never felt like he belonged at all and that he felt “half”. The nude photos showed him as a proud and complete mixed-race “Neo-Scandinavian man,” he asserted.
Throughout his career, Rahim has tried to find success outside of Denmark. He lived for a while in Colombia, where he focused on reggaeton, and then in Ghana.
His career only took off in Denmark with the album “When the Soul Vomits”, from 2022, composed with producer Arto Eriksen and full of eighties-influenced pop songs and personal songs. He then worked on tracks about his Kurdish heritage and his father’s emotional estrangement from him.
To date, becoming a pop phenomenon has been an ambivalent experience. Rahim mentioned that last year, he often felt that he was on board a runaway train, and that he began to have delusions “that someone was going to kill me.”
In the fall, he suffered a panic attack. “It felt like my body was underwater,” she recalled. She retired from public life, only returning with this spring’s arena tour. She now feels better, she assured, and in recent weeks she has released two songs, “Toget” (“El Tren”) and “Orange”, about her challenges and a more hopeful future.
“I love the world, and I really feel the need to interact with the world, but I also love making music here,” he said.
By: Alex Marshall
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6693962, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-05-02 22:50:09
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