Thursday, December 23, 2010

ARTICLE: Waz-online.de - Bill Kaulitz on his way to become a serious pop artist



TRANSLATION

Bill Kaulitz is a border crosser. The 21-year-old is a singer, model, advertising character and voice actor – and on his way to become a serious pop artist – but not everyone has noticed it yet.

They searched but didn't recognize him, as he stood in front of them. In the year 2003 Sat 1 [German TV channel] searched for a star, and met Bill Kaulitz. "Star Search" was the name of the Casting show. The 13-year-old Bill, his twin brother Tom and two friends "are making Independent-music according to their own statements", Kai Pflaume [moderator] explained back then, before Bill had entered the first TV stage of his life.

Breathlessly, the little boy with the Little-Vampire-hairstyle and black eyeliner around his eyes, sang the Weather Girls song "It's raining men" and was fidgeting frenziedly with his arms. Afterwards he had to listen to amusements about his flamboyant outfit. He was doing it politely and charming and turned towards the jury with a gorgeous smile.



Hugo Egon Balder [jury member] advised him to follow the comedy direction, because he said his voice is so "funny". Only Jasmin Wagner [another jury member], formerly known as "Blümchen" [engl.: floret; her artist's name], saw his potential. "Congratulations to this performance", she said obviously impressed: "You spare a record company a lot of work." Image advisers, styling experts – with Bill there is no need for all that. "You already bring along all of these things." She topped off with the sentence: "And I think if you continue, it can just go to the top." Balder and the other jury members chose an 11-year-old rapper instead of Bill though.

The friends, with whom the Kaulitz-brothers had already made music back then, are called Georg and Gustav. Nowadays the band is known as Tokio Hotel among all girls in Germany, Spain, Mexico, France, Canada, Israel and soon also the USA. But Bill's exceptional talent is still being unrecognized in a way. Maybe because of exactly those thousands and thousands of screaming girls.

Bill Kaulitz is a border crosser. He is a singer, model, advertising character and voice actor. With plenty of make up in his inconceivably pretty face, he overcomes the border between man and woman, which has an reflexive effect on the rumor that he's homosexual. May he confess not being gay as often as he wants. The sexual ambiguity simply belongs to his image – what confuses much more is, that his identical twin Tom goes around dressed up as normal boy. But Bill Kaulitz reminds of David Bowie, who had established the game with the gender roles as Ziggy Stardust only in the early 70's in the mainstream.

Nothing gets more punished among children than otherness. Obviously Bill has not cared about that all the while. Of course, he hated the school days in the 670-inhabitant-hicksville Loitsche. The reasons are obvious. How are pubescent most likely to react when seeing a guy with black dyed hair, whose hairstyle is as asymmetric as the style of his self-tailored pants? A rhetorical question. He's still doing his own thing unwaveringly. At the age of 9, the twins sing at village fairs, at the age of 12 they get to know Georg and Gustav in a club in Magdeburg and found the band Devilish. One year later, after Bill's performance at "Star Search", the music producer Peter Hoffmann went to exactly this club to see the band perform.

"In microcosm there just happened exactly that thing, which is going on at today's big concerts.", he remembers: "Screaming girls in the front row, mashing boys behind." Hoffmann invites them to his studio in Vögelsen in Lower Saxony, in the Lüneburg Heath. The boys get music- and singing lessons. Devilish becomes Tokio Hotel. They signed a contract with Sony BMG, but after half a year the record company got cold feet. The responsible manager dismisses the band. Sony BMG let slip a multi-million dollar business, the manager lost his job. Instead of them, Universal, Sony BMG's strongest competitor, has one hit after another with the band. Three albums have been released so far. A few days ago, a Best-Of-double-album was released. A CD with the songs in German, a CD with the same songs in English. The big mistake that has settled in the heads of clueless adults is, that Tokio Hotel is a casted boygroup. They have never been. Well, Bill and Tom already wanted to become rockstars when they were in second grade. But so the Rolling Stones had wanted, long before they actually became [rockstars]. The today 21-year-old Tokio-Hotel-frontman is more than just the head of an ageing teenager band with some pop ditties, that makes the masses scream. Kaulitz is one of those humans with unique charisma: androgynous, dramatic, glamorous. His band is getting less and less Nena, but more and more Nirvana.

A few weeks ago, Arte [German TV channel] helped to make people as from 30, that have no daughter who's into Tokio Hotel, call attention to this young man. The culture channel showed an episode of its series "Durch die Nacht mit…" [Through the night with…]. In this episode Bill Kaulitz met Wolfgang Joop – and not only the fashion designer has been over the moon with Bill since then. But one could have already known this a long time before. But nobody, who's not in love with one of the Kaulitz-twins or Georg or Gustav, comes up with the idea to watch videos on their homepage or to attend a Tokio Hotel concert. Otherwise much more people would have already noticed that the girls, who had thrown "Diddle"-mice or bras on stage in the past, simply recognized who stands in front of them: an extraordinary young man, who has got what it takes to become a world star.


Translation credits: @TokioHotel_Info (Twitter)

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