Dagobert

In the organizer's words:

On his seventh album "Dagobert und die wahre Musik vom südlichen Blütenland", the charismatic crooner from the Swiss mountains completely reinvents himself. After a good decade of self-made indie gems about unrequited love, complex social issues are suddenly dealt with here and served up to us as high-end R'n'B productions in which a cozy and gentle danceability is never lost. Every single song is a venture and a direct hit at the same time.

Recorded on the Pacific coast of Panama, this delightful album opens with an inviting soundscape of friendly animals and beautiful waves and the words "I'm in paradise". In fact, this is exactly how you feel in the following 36 minutes, namely well protected in the most beautiful part of the Scrooge cosmos, in which even unusually socio-critical tones are embedded in pure love. In the opener "Meine Liebe für dich", Scrooge's usual field of tension between longing and loneliness is already redefined. "Here's my love for you / You can do anything and you don't have to / Please don't take me into consideration". The pain-distorted longing of days gone by has become selfless and omnipresent, pure love. In the following track "Stranger", the influences of the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi, whose main work "The True Book of the Southern Flower Land" gave this album its name and inspiration, can be clearly heard for the first time. The loss of authenticity and identity is discussed, as a result of which foreignness is recognized as something natural, unavoidable and rooted in human existence. "Im Menschenstall" is then a peaceful R'n'B hymn to a life beyond capitalism: "The world of things lies / Where I no longer exist" it says. A song about the ambivalent longing for connection and isolation, which leads to self-development in anonymity, Dagobert calls "Ich will allein sein oder mit Menschen die ich nicht kenne" (I want to be alone or with people I don't know) and should speak from the soul of anyone who has ever had enough of all people. All these universal and unexpectedly profound paradigms are presented to us to soft, danceable beats and with the ease of a Luther Vandross.

There is also no lack of illustrious guests on this album. A gospel-like piano ballad with the Swiss tenors "I Quattro" is followed by a four-part R'n'B epic with the profane title "Ich brauch ein Bier" in which even the German rap superstars from K.I.Z. get involved. Rarely has such a simple sentiment been captured so precisely in music, manifesting an entire attitude to life and revealing a complex non-conformist resistance to the outdated standardization of everyday life behind the hedonistic desire for a beer. It is also remarkable how Dagobert, in the song "Monosodium", on the one hand simply recites a rice recipe, while at the same time pointing to deep-rooted, unconscious prejudices against Asian cultures, which are responsible for the bad reputation of the flavour enhancer monosodium glutamate, which is wrongly stigmatized in Central Europe as harmful to health.

At the end of this refreshing and enlightening excursion through various social illustrations in R'n'B form, congenially produced by Konrad Betcher, we realize that Scrooge has delivered hits galore here and that there seem to be no limits for him musically. So we can be prepared for surprises in the future and look forward more than ever to everything that is yet to come.