Heaux Confessionals: The SINtroduction | Chapter 7 - Berlin: Then & Now

Berlin has changed alot in the nearly ten years that I have known it. Before I moved there, I lived in west Germany, in Duesseldorf. When I would ask west Germans about Berlin and the east, I would hear things like...

“Don’t go there. They’re all on drugs!”

“It’s dirty! They’re all on welfare!”

“They’re backwards!”

Et cetera, and so on.

So of course for me, that meant only one thing...

I had to see this shit!

Armed with my now fluent German and only a backpack, I got there and quickly saw what they meant about Berlin. But they’d also forgot some details. Berlin is still, by and large, two cities. The wall coming down unified Berlin in name only. West Berlin and East Berlin were – and still are – two very distinct experiences. For me, being in West Berlin was like being in any city in West Germany, so of course my immediate thought?

Next!

East Berlin was where everything was happening. I instantly settled near the epicenter of where artistic innovation was bursting at the seams: Prenzlauerberg. To describe it to outsiders I would simply say it was like New York in the 70s and early 80s before commercialism reared its ugly head.

I remember every night there were at least five or six great parties. It was actually better to go out during the week because on the weekends there were too many happening parties to choose from. Not that this stopped us from trying to get to them all! On Mondays, the best underground party was in Friedrichshain at Black Girls Coalition, hosted by Paisley Dalton. No one had any money back then but that was the beauty of it. You didn’t need much back then. Alot of times, you didn’t need any. For only two euros, Paisley and her disciples would feed everyone that ventured into the converted apartment for dinner. And then later, after midnight, the entire place would convert into a party that would last in earnest until about six in the morning. Many a night I fell asleep on the couch on the dancefloor after lapsing into a coma. I remember many a night taking the dreaded walk of shame back home. At Black Girls Coalition, you had a mix of everything Berlin had to offer: goths dancing next to vampires, trannies, punks, drag queens, club kids, black people, white people, Asian people, and anyone and everything in between. There was never any animosity, only love. No one stole and no one in the neighborhood called the police if it got too loud. In fact, the police would often just stop by to say hello and check out what was going on. Of course, they were also curious as to what so many people could be doing in such a small, dimly lit apartment. Everyone was. This feeling could be felt over Berlin during the early 2000s.

East Berlin at this time was devoid of color. Most of the buildings were a drab gray or brown, remnants remaining from before the wall came down. Alot of Berliners lived in abandoned buildings (called squats) during this time. I remember hearing them called squats and refusing to even consider living in one. The name alone had me on edge. In my ignorance, I discovered later that some of the squats were nicer than the flats I ended up renting. Oh, the money I could have saved!

We would occupy some of these abandoned buildings on any given weekend and they would be promoted in renegade, word-of-mouth style with a different genre of music being played by a DJ on every floor. When they were done right, you could make enough money to live on for months.

As soon as I decided to live in Berlin, it was basically hitting the pavements to get booked. No one really had an agent. Everything was do it yourself. The spirit of indie cred was strong. Everyone was their own booker/manager/promoter. Most artists then could not afford a manager. Besides, what’s ten percent of nothing? In Berlin, I learned how to organize a party from the bottom up very quickly. It was a necessity for survival.

The electro scene reigned supreme and thus I adapted my sound. I remember seeing my first live show at the venue Maria when Miss Kittin and Ellen Allien were on the decks. They were already mini-legends in Berlin and once I caught wind of their energy, I knew I was in it for the long haul.

I’d started my own indie label in Duesseldorf but for the first few years in Berlin, I was known as a dancer. Some of my earliest shows were performing at the Kit Kat Klub with Baby D and Bomb Boutique. We also performed alot at Sage Club. It was there that I met Fay and, some months later, Rowan.

I was performing at least three shows a week, and I had no choice because half the time we were not paid much or next to nothing, no matter if the club was packed. The good thing about the spirit of Berlin at this time was that I was able to experiment alot with my shows and audiences were more accommodating and accepting to individuality. But on the flip side, I remember many a night Fay and I would be backstage openly praying we were paid that night so we could eat tomorrow. To this day, I do not eat Turkish döners, because they remind me of that period of my life when I was so broke it was all I could eat and I vowed never to eat them again once I got even a little money.

At the time, Baby D was the most commercial of us all. She’d been in German Vogue and her star was on the rise. Baby D began organizing parties in Berlin and around Europe. She booked us and we became a small entertainment posse. With Bomb Boutique on the decks, Dahlia hosting and me and Fay dancing in varying states of undress across the club on and off the stage, we were becoming indie underground royalty.

But in Berlin, that was about as far as you wanted to go without blowing your cover. For Baby D and all of us, our theory was that if you were in Vogue magazine one of two things were happening: either you were already rich and famous or it was right around the corner.

Berlin is often called “poor but sexy”. Baby D called Berlin for what it was: cheap. Refusing to settle for mediocre pay, she returned to America, destination Los Angeles.

In the spring of 2006, two things happened that changed Berlin irreversibly. First, after five years of weekly parties, where some of Berlin’s most noted artists performed (including yours truly), Black Girls Coalition closed its doors and its organizer, Paisley Dalton, left for NYC and greener pastures. Again, it was the same situation for an accomplished artist in Berlin: once you reach the pinnacle of indie success in Berlin you had two options: remain in Berlin and settle for sub-par money or change locales, go commercial, and try to cash in.

BGC was one of the epicenters of Berlin’s underground movements. Any artist that wanted street cred and respect in the city wanted to perform there – for free. It was for bragging rights. When it closed and Paisley left, not only did the area change, but so did the aura. Never again in Berlin has a place consistently assembled such an exotic cast of revelers. In its absence, Berlin experienced a slow, gradual death.

In the summer of 2006, Berlin hosted the World Cup, which effectively stifled the already declining underground scene. I distinctly remember that summer because to this day it is still the last really good summer Berlin has had. It was almost like Mother Nature was trying to tell everyone...

“Muthafuckas, this is it!”

The World Cup invigorated the city, certainly. Berlin desperately needed the infusion of money as it was and has always been an extremely poor city and a cheap one to live in. What happened, however, is that alot of the foreigners there for the World Cup discovered how cheap it was and just never went home.

Then they told all their friends.

The people that move to Berlin now know exactly where to go, as they have googled everything and researched anything possible online. When I moved there, if you wanted to know where the happening party was, you had to do it the old fashioned way: walk the streets. Ask any Berliner that lived in Berlin before 2006 and that lived in it afterwards and you will almost assuredly hear how quickly it became gentrified, especially in certain districts. Friedrichshain, formerly the home of the underground and the underdog, quickly became hipster central, full of trust fund kids in skinny jeans who haven’t worked a day in their lives and don’t have to, especially in a city like Berlin, where it’s par for the course.

Not only have they raised the prices of everything, and killed the vibe in the city, they’ve also pissed off some of the natives who’ve been forced to move out of their rent-free (courtesy of welfare) homes to new locales further from the center of the city.

Since 2007 to present-day, Berlin has changed tremendously. The skyline is more colorful, Germans are starting to move to Neukölln, which was an absolute no-no only a few years before, and even more English is heard on the streets. One thing that has remained constant?

Artist wages.

At the end of 2009, I was booked in Istanbul for six weeks and I decided to stay. Being poor in Berlin may have been cool and acceptable at twenty-something, but was becoming unacceptable as I got older.

So even though alot of the big clubs have moved to bigger locations, with bigger crowd capacity and bigger door charges, artists are still paid the same, inflation by and large ignored.

Five years later, Holly and Fay do the same as I did when I lived there. They perform half of the month or more away from Berlin and bring the money back to make ends meet.

Do I miss Berlin now?

Berlin is a city that refuses to completely grow up and if you are serious about your craft, sooner or later you have to question if it is the best place to be the most productive. For me, the answer is no. I have met some of the most amazing artists of my life, seen some of the most amazing shows ever, in Berlin. But on the other end of the spectrum, I have seen some of the most immature and laziest people of my life there.

I miss not being able to see my closest friends as much but even when I lived there we rarely saw one another. It is a rare occurrence to have Holly, Fay, Rowan and I all in the same room. Besides, the Berlin that exists now is still exciting. It’s still happening. It’s still one of the places to be if you’re an artist. But there are only fragments, remnants remaining whereas before you had it all. No matter which direction Berlin goes in the future, however, I will always love it because it holds a special place in my heart and in my life.

I’d never waste precious H20 to speak your name

yet every time the camera clicks

you’re jostling to get up in my frame

you jockey for my credit

in hopes that I self-edit

and don’t read you

or right you

and please don’t make me have to fight you

I’ll devour you whole

you’re a snack without soul

“Dear trust funds kids, 25-hour party people, those that blame the recession on jobs they never had, and other forms of tired ass fuckery: We work hard...so you don’t have to.”

(Heaux Confessionals, verbal #12)