Album Review: Pink Guitars, Spaceships N Voodoo Dolls by JuJu Rogers
A rapper from a Bavarian Army town quotes Gramsci and shouts “fuck the state” with gold teeth. He calls it Afrophunk, spelled with an H.
Schweinfurt, in northern Bavaria, is the kind of small conservative German city where over 5,000 American troops were stationed for decades and nobody much talked about what happened to the families they left behind. Julian Rogers grew up there, his father a G.I. from New Orleans, his mother German with Austrian roots, bilingual from birth, raised on his dad’s records. B.B. King and the Chi-Lites and Kanye West, plus ten years of trumpet through formal music school. But it was the local punk and hardcore scene that caught him as a teenager, and hip-hop pulled him the rest of the way. He put out a solo debut on Jakarta Records in 2015, toured Europe opening for Oddisee, and released 40 Acres N Sum Mula in 2019, a title that nodded to the broken promise of Special Field Orders No. 15 with Farhot and Like on the boards and Sampa the Great on the guest list. Then five years of quiet. He started his own label, Counterkultur, in Berlin; dropped a six-track tape called Buffalo Soldier with Mick Jenkins and Jesse Royal on it; and picked up a Musicboard Berlin scholarship to work on something he’d been calling “Afrophunk.”
That word is doing real work on Pink Guitars, Spaceships N Voodoo Dolls, his third full-length. Rogers has described Afrophunk as “the deconstruction of Black stereotypes and the promotion of a decolonised self-understanding. It’s about embracing expressions of Blackness that are often overlooked; it’s a deeper, maybe even spiritual, understanding of DIY.” You could hear that and expect a manifesto record. And parts of Pink Guitars do flirt with manifesto, especially “Afrophunk Interlude,” where he defines the term and shouts out his label by name in what occasionally reads more like a spoken-word mission brief than a song. But the album is better than its most programmatic moments, and the best of it goes somewhere the manifesto can’t follow.
Take “West,” the album’s sharpest track. He opens on dopamine addiction and scrolling, watching the old world die in real time, having just posted a Rick Rubin quote. Then he paraphrases Gramsci: “The old world we know is dying/The new struggles to be born.”
From there the song turns into a feed you can’t close. A war scene, then a paradise selfie one swipe later. Militarized police versus “Negusat with attitude.” Five shots for Mouhamad and the cop still outside. He’s watching someone get lynched via livestream. And then “the burning house’s last party, pass the molly.” He stuffs Kanye’s “you ain’t got the answers, Sway” into the same verse as Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, and the closing repetition hammers it:
“It’s all quiet on the Western Front
Got buku crying on the Western Front
Still ain’t no riots on the Western Front
Nothing new from the West.”
The word “buku” is Louisiana Creole French, from beaucoup, and in Rogers’ mouth it’s his father’s language tying New Orleans to the dead zones of Europe.
On “Voodoo Chile,” he thanks Allah he isn’t average, identifies with Huey from The Boondocks, reads Lenin on a rooftop, smokes moon rocks, shouts “fuck the state” with golds in his mouth, and namechecks the energy of Kuwasi Balagoon, the Black Liberation Army member and anarchist. And then four bars that do more identity work than most rappers manage across a full career: “Phunk’s not dead/Cowboy boots and a turban with dreads/Bad brain but a good heart/Hood nigga but I’m book smart.”
None of that is a contradiction to him. On “Black Rose” he calls himself a “Black misfit building my quilombo” and a “German Panther Lord, what a fucking combo,” and the quilombo reference isn’t decoration. Quilombos were settlements of escaped and self-emancipated people in colonial Brazil, built entirely outside the available systems; the Maroons, whom he’s cited as a spiritual touchpoint, operated the same logic across the Caribbean. He doesn’t footnote any of this. You either know or you look it up.
On “Sadclown,” somebody just admits he’s not OK. Rogers fought himself out of hell and nobody showed up; gave other people strength while feeling hollowed out. A “good relationship with despair” is how he puts it, and that phrase is one of the more honest descriptions of functioning depression anyone has put in a rap song. No darkness flex, no twelve-step euphemism. Despair is a roommate he’s stopped trying to evict, and he says so plain.
“Peak performance, no rehearsing
But real life—dawg, I’m hurting.”
Then the Kurt Cobain line, but he doesn’t stay on it. “Only Jah knows.” And “Fallin’,” its companion, is about deciding to love himself again, wanting to “build that shit all from scratch,” crying and meaning it. Those songs need each other. One is the wound; the other is the first morning after deciding to live with it.
Pink Siifu on “Build N Destroy” is the album’s best collaborative moment, Siifu and Rogers trading off on Five Percenter theology and the idea of detachment as freedom, neither one grandstanding, both willing to let the song breathe. Jamila Woods on “Elohim” brings warmth that keeps the theology from tipping into lecture. And MONEYNICCA (Pierce Jordan, of Soul Glo) matches the punk-hardcore energy Rogers grew up on. The album could use more of that friction. The solo tracks where he’s talking only to himself occasionally tilt toward declaration when they’d gain from somebody talking back.
Rogers has said he doesn’t compare his old work to his new work. “I can only ask myself if the core is still the same. The intention, the love, the honesty.” The core on Pink Guitars is a Black man in Europe trying to build something out of a position nobody designed a category for. Not American enough for American rap, not German in any way the German music press knows how to discuss, rapping about quilombos and Maroons and Five Percenter math from a city most people have never heard of. On “No Sun” he says people want to put him in a box but don’t really know where to. He called his label Counterkultur. He put this album on it.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “No Sun,” “Sadclown,” “West”