Ich werde ein Berliner

Once you’ve settled down in Berlin, the single most exciting and nonconformist conglomeration of buildings, streets, people and dirt that ever graced the surface of this planet, you will automatically turn into a one man travel agency for your fellow Auslanders back home.

Prepare yourself to spend a few hours each day to answer the requests from your friends, distant acquaintances, and random substance abusers that some idiot passed your email address on to at a party, asking you for advice and information on the many different things that make Berlin so irresistible to them. Which are parties, clubs, drugs, parties, casual sex, and parties.

Despite their loudmouthed claims to be widely traveled cosmopolitans, you’ll be surprised to learn about your friends’ dire need to make perfectly sure they’ll enjoy their trip to Berlin before they even consider spending a single unit of their respective currency to go there. Which puts you in the unfortunate position to take most of the liability for their staycation to live up to the infamous Berlin hype, which you had no part in perpetuating but plenty of opportunity to grow unimpressed with.

So how do you protect yourself from your auslandish friend’s inevitable complaints that you misrepresented Berlin (which you didn’t) and haven’t warned them to not believe everything they’ve heard about it (which you did)? Despair not. Because, you know, there is a failsafe, fun method to safely guide any Berlin novice through their own decision process to find out if Berlin would be the right place for them: The Kanye West analogy.

It works like this: Because Kanye West is an uberfamous rapper with a Nobel-prize worthy ego and manic dedication to direct all attention to him, every single person in the world has a well-developed opinion about the guy. As will be demonstrated in a moment, through what can only be caused by a quirk in the space-time continuum, it just so happens that Kanye West and the part of Berlin “that matters” are so similar in the way they are endlessly impressive to imbeciles, that it is perfectly safe to assume anyone who likes, or even can be arsed to still pay attention to, Kanye West, will likely also have a heck of a time in Berlin.

Not sold on the idea yet? Consider this, Auslander:

• Kanye started out as a promising hip hop artist and talented producer who was able to land a few hit records in the musical genre called Hip-Hop. But after having barely survived a car accident, something in Kanye’s brain snapped, and since that day he opted to continue his career as the autotune-abusing cyberpop muppet we know him as today, or in his own words, “the voice of this generation.”

Get it? Berlin and its people had the reputation to be a promising, if a bit unambitious new player on the circuit of world capitals, until one day, by accident, the Berlin wall came down, and Berlin’s elite, in a lazy pose of self-grandeur, felt that their city could now be whatever it wants to be and decided that the result of this awkward, forced epiphany was to proclaim that Berlin is now the “new New York” and the best place for young people to follow their dreams at.

• Kanye West mainly made himself a name for having an ostentatious, if a bit predictable fashion sense, and signed responsible for so many mediocrity-ridden, auto-tuned cyberpop crapfests that you start to wonder how anyone could come to the conclusion that Kanye is still a hip-hop artist.

Like Berlin: Apparently, for a city widely claimed to be the “new New York”, Berlin has to work off quite a backlog of attributes that make a city big. Like, you know, tall buildings. Busy streets. Non-white people. A proper airport. A wide variety of scenes and cultures. 24/7 grocery shopping. Hell, 24/7 anything, for that matter. Somehow this new New York didn’t get old New York’s memo about it being “the city that never sleeps,” and not “the city that sleeps in until around noon, skips the shower, and wastes the day in a nearby cafe passing smug judgement on normal people.”

• Kanye is infamous for stating he “wants to win every award,” and is known to throw temper tantrums whenever someone else is awarded instead. From which can only be deducted that he a) is one of the few people left on this planet who still gives a damn about awards and b) he is such a deeply insecure person that he constantly needs affirmation from external entities in order to feel any self worth.

Enter Berlin: Once you mention even the slightest matter which you think isn’t absolutely perfect about it, or god forbid, some tiny thing that you liked better in another place, then be prepared for the conversation to rapidly turn into an awkward, passive-aggressive pissing contest during which the Berlin fiend will, without fail, launch into a pedantic diatribe to shoot down the unthinkable thought that any other place in the world could be in any way better than Berlin. Just like Kanye’s egomaniac approach to awards, anytime Berlin loses, it is never its own fault but always some hater holding Berlin down, probably because this hater is simply too mainstream to grasp Berlin’s paradigm-changing role in the world of clubs, amateur fashion design, or the invention of euphemisms for unemployment.

• Even if, after all of the above, you’re inclined to give Kanye the benefit of doubt, because, so you argue, it’s a thin line between genius and insanity, and the jury’s still out on which side of that line he’s on, then that sort of ill-fated genuflection must come to an abrupt halt once you have the misfortune to witness the utterly misguided, preposterously imbecile, and ludicrously idiotic way in which the guy deifies himself in, like, every single interview he gives. Still in doubt? Then watch this short press conference in which Kanye, during the course of a few minutes, manages to make a fool of himself by saying he is just like the “kid in front of the tank in Tianmen square“, that he’d like Michael Jackson to twitter his reasons for dangling a toddler out of a window, and what an utterly selfless thing it was when he took the mic from Taylor Swift to engage in some faux activism in favour of poor Beyoncé and her video director.

Likewise Berlin. Even in the most favourable, indulgent and tolerant people, contentment trades places with red-hot aggravation against elite Berliners once exposed to a tiny dose of the trademark self-congratulatory haranguing those hoards of daft, insecure, Berlin-as-an-ego-crutch using wannabe-artists-with-a-mortgage are busy secreting into every verbal exchange they succeed to get wind of, online or offline. If you like to think of yourself as a person who’s quite tolerant towards these rants, I challenge you to read this gem without gnashing your teeth to fine dust.

There you have it: The synchrony of Kanye and Berlin is such a peculiar gift to marketing, it’d be a shame if it couldn’t be used to either party’s financial gain. A total win-win situation: Every true rapper needs a city to represent. New York is repped by Nas, The Game represents LA, Too Short reps Oakland. Kanye has yet to name a city which is a match to his alleged creative genius and determination to annoy the hell out of mankind. Also, just look at him - he could instantly blend into any Neukölln flat share of wide-eyed Scandinavian fashion students. Everything about Kanye just screams Berlin.

So here’s some free advice for the Berlin tourism board: Hire Kanye West as your city’s new mascot. While you’re at it, why not update the Berlin coat of arms in the process? Sure, that body-popping bear was an incredibly forward thinking character in its day inasmuch it foreshadowed both the clientele which Berghain became famous for AND their favourite dance move, but you can’t live off that forever. So hurry up and replace the bear with a picture of Kanye West, and you’ve got the most perfect visual summarisation of what Berlin stands for today.