HAIYTI - JUNKY Christmas Tour

22.12.2023 Haiyti @ Yuca, Cologne

Admission: 7 pm
Start: 8 pm

Haiyti has made a new album. There is a poem above "Junky". It's by Rainer Maria Rilke and goes like this:

The panther

His gaze has grown so weary from the passing of the bars
that he can no longer hold anything.
He feels as if there were a thousand bars
and behind a thousand bars there is no world.

The smooth gait of strong steps,
turning in the smallest of circles,
is like a dance of power around a center,
in which a great will stands stunned.

Only sometimes does the curtain of the pupil
slide open silently -. Then an image enters,
passes through the tense silence of the limbs -
and ceases to be in the heart.

The panther in this scenario - you can probably allow yourself that much spoiler - is Haiyti. Ever since she burst out of nowhere into a scene in upheaval almost ten years ago (and single-handedly accelerated this upheaval to supersonic speed), she has been right in the middle of it and yet never really part of it. She made music with the big names: Trettmann, Casper, Haftbefehl, Miksu/Macloud. And she has shaped German pop: its vocabulary, its cadence, its melodies, its whole speed. Nevertheless, she has always remained an outsider, a phenomenon that eludes her environment and her competitors anyway. People look at her. But you can't really touch her. And the world has always been too small for Haiyti anyway.

"Junky" is about this exceptional position: about the pain it brings and the opportunities that open up when everything is already over. Drugs only play a marginal role here. Although the longing for a different reality runs through almost all the songs, "Junky" knows that real junkies don't need drugs to stay addicted. The 19 songs are about the eternal escape and the feeling of remaining trapped anyway, about the fact that a hangover lurks behind every high and that every spark can not only bring hope, but unfortunately also burn everything down again. "Junky" sounds like what junkies are like: Locked up in their own lives. A bit broken inside. But full of hope that things will get better, because they can get better. Just the way we humans are.

As always in her career, Haiyti also refuses to follow a simple narrative on "Junky". There is no need to expect simple truths or even advice from her. Instead, she jumps from heartbreak to backyard stories, from deep insights to supposedly hollow materialism, from sky-high happy hardcore to sheer nihilism within a few lines.

"You know I'm doomed, because I only shine at night," raps Haiyti at one point on the album. And: "You pay with cash, I pay with pain". You have to have seen certain things to know what she means. But you immediately sense that she doesn't just say words like that, even if they sound like a dice at first.

With its coldness and broken-heartedness, "Junky" could be understood as a moment of hopelessness, perhaps even resignation - if it weren't for the blissfully naive, disarmingly beautiful love song "Sterne egal" with the covered Prinzen hook.

You could hear an answer to the current hype surrounding 90s trance - if it weren't for the humorless trap bangers "Dee" and "Up 2 date", on which Haiyti fillets all imaginary (and real) mortal enemies in the best Robbery manner, conjuring up the vibe of her legendary underground classics.

You could imagine a song like "Tonight" as a number one hit and dance to it - if it weren't for the lyrics about loneliness, betrayal and a constant battle against windmills (and of course the reference to "Gangsta Party", that this and that happens in the club, but there is certainly no dancing).

Some songs could be understood as a sober description of the rap business, which is just as rotten as all other businesses - if it weren't for the phases of intoxication.

You could also say that Haiyti is now making hyperpop - if this term hadn't long since been trashed to insignificance and "Junky" was really hyper: hyperactive, hyper-nervous, hyper-broken, hyper-human, hyper-beautiful.

At the end of the album there is another classic Haiyti ballad, called "Sag mir". The heart is broken into a thousand shards, and Haiyti crashes over these shards through the night in the pitch-black Diablo GT, addicted to longing, towards an unfulfilled love, or a utopia that never existed? It probably doesn't matter. Probably the question is simply whether the tires burst or the dream of a different reality remains alive, that it's better over there, on the other side of the city, on the other side of the night. It's better there, isn't it?