Komet

About the song

«Komet» was released on 20 January 2023 by Warner Music, and within a year it had rewritten the record books of the German singles chart. It is a duet between two artists who, on paper, had nothing in common: Udo Lindenberg, born in 1946, the man who taught German rock to sing in German, and Apache 207, born in 1997, one of the biggest names in German rap. Lindenberg was seventy-six when the song came out. Apache 207 was twenty-five. The gap between them is longer than most pop careers, and that gap is the whole point of the record.

The two met the way musicians usually do. Lindenberg went to an Apache 207 concert in Mannheim, the rapper’s home city, and came away impressed; Apache 207 later turned up at one of Lindenberg’s own shows. They began visiting each other, and Lindenberg described what held the collaboration together in one phrase: the mutual respect each of them had for what the other does. The song that came out of it was written by a team that includes both of them, alongside Christopher Brenner, Marco Tscheschlok, Lennard Oestmann and Aris Pehlivanian, and produced by the last two, who work as Jumpa and Sira. It runs for two minutes and forty-seven seconds and became the first single from «Gartenstadt», Apache 207’s second studio album.

The song is about how to leave. The singer is sitting in a bar near the harbour at closing time, in thick smoke, listening to the gulls outside and to the last record of the night, the one that is played to get the guests out of the door. He stopped counting the years a long time ago. The bar is not even the bar it used to be, although the drink tastes exactly the same as it always did, and he admits that the only place that ever really felt like home was wherever there was applause. That is a very Lindenberg confession, and it is also the point at which a young rapper and an old rock singer turn out to be talking about the same fear.

Then comes the image that gives the song its title. If he has to go, he wants to go the way he arrived: like a comet, and specifically like a comet that strikes twice. A comet is bright, it is brief, and it leaves a trail that people remember long after it has gone; hitting twice is the part that is not astronomy but bravado. It may hurt, he says, but he would rather play it safe and make sure he lives forever, so let’s turn the music up one more time. The chorus repeats that thought without any attempt to soften it, and it is the reason the song works at weddings, in football stadiums and at funerals alike.