Steve 'Flash' JuonTo be perfectly clear at the outset I think this entire album is a marketing stunt. I’m reluctant to call anything an “album” when I’ve spent more time walking to and from the curb to get the garbage and recycling bins than it takes to play “FNFZHN” start to finish. Some songs like “Bad Bitch” can’t even be called original creations. They are clearly ripping off tracks by American artists and producers and just inserting German words into them.
So what is going on here? Apparently Mast-Jägermeister was desperate for some publicity, and accidentally that’s exactly what they’ve gotten from me, though it makes me no more interested in drinking their signature product. We had a saying when I was in college: “Yayyy-gur-my-stir, blows-yer-head-off!” You’d repeat it in a sing-song manner faster and faster, presumably reflecting how fast it would get you wasted by drinking it. That would be great if you could stand drinking it… but to me it always tasted like those nasty black jellybeans nobody wants. Who wants to get drunk off the taste of something you wouldn’t willingly eat for free? Not me!
According to a website that was surely designed by the liquor makers themselves, “legendary German rappers” KC Rebell and Summer Cem were hired to make an album “the world hasn’t seen before.” Much like a bottle of Jäger, it’s not something I needed to see, but they did it anyway. Their goal was to record an entire album in under three minutes, which means that “FNFZHN” consists of 13 tracks that are all 15 seconds long. Lacking fluency in German makes me grateful these songs are so short, though I’m amused to randomly hear American terms like “chicken wings” thrown into songs like “Maximum Fly.” Perhaps that’s a common bar food when drinking in Germany too.
When even the cover art shows the Jäger logo, it’s perfectly obvious that this is the modern day equivalent of Ice Cube shilling for St. Ides. I imagine the laws in Germany must be a bit more lax than they are here, because St. Ides (and their parent company Pabst Brewing) quickly found themselves the target of numerous lawsuits in the 1990’s that alleged they were targeting their products at kids. It probably didn’t help that they gave away free promotional mixtapes with songs extolling the virtues of malt liquor. These days going “viral” for such controversy might make their product that much bigger, but back then it almost got them banned from stores in many states. Eventually they wised up and kept the rappers in the ads but took the actual rap VERSES out.
So to be honest I can only assume that “FNFZHN” exists either because in Germany you can get away with it or because it’s so far beneath the radar that nobody actually cares. I’ve got to think it’s the latter, though for a pure marketing stunt, it has more polish than a lot of real albums I had the misfortune of listening to. It actually makes me more interested in hearing a KC Rebell and Summer Cem album where they aren’t being paid by a liquor company to shill their signature product. It’s a three minute long ad, but it sells me more on the music than the licorice flavored booze. I wish some of these songs were longer than 15 seconds just on the production alone.