How rapper Anoki unwittingly became a poster child

“Just don’t look,” musician Anoki tells himself when he finds his own massive face smiling at him from an even larger advertising poster on Rosenthaler Platz. Contrary to its name, Rosenthaler Platz is not a square, but a noisy intersection of Berlin that never sleeps, where kebabs are still on sale at 5 am.

For Anoki, Rosenthaler Platz is a stop on the way to the music studio. Near the train tracks, he passes huge billboards every day. The 29-year-old rapper has had more than enough of the boards that show him off. A student paper is to blame.

Anoki: From Bavaria to Berlin

Anoki’s real name is Florian Griessmann and he is the son of a German and an Indonesian father. He grew up in the southern German state of Bavaria – one of the few non-white people there.

As a child and teenager, Florian Griessmann had to endure everyday discrimination. On his way to parties, he is often stopped by the police.

“I was once told by a police officer, ‘If you look like a criminal, don’t be surprised,'” he told DW. At times, he says, he has filed charges against officers, which have always been met with counter-charges. “Everyone with an immigrant background knows this and has tried to act against it.”

Musician at any price

For Florian Griessmann, music is everything – although for many years it didn’t look like he would be able to make a living out of it. He first had to earn his money some other way.

“Say a job, I’ve probably done this before,” laughs Anoki, who, the son of a single mother, started working as a teenager. “I worked in a movie theater, planted plants in a wholesale nursery. Loaded trucks, polished shock absorbers on a factory line, pumped beer in a brewery. I worked in a registry office for three years, even hosted a radio show at one point and wrote a advertising copy.” The only constant: your music. He taught himself to play the guitar and writes his own songs.

“Like Anoki, I work with a lot of things that have been on my mind for a long time. My own history, where I come from. But also questions about what the future might look like, despite all the gloomy predictions,” says Florian Griessmann. “For me, music is not just entertainment, but it has the ambition to discuss things that are important to me.”

A fateful student job

It was his immigrant background that made Anoki a well-known publicity face. As a student, he participated in a photo shoot. For three hours of posing, he was paid €60 ($66).

“It was a lot of money for me at the time. And it all happened really, really fast.” It was, “Here you go, sign up, it’s going to be cool,” he said.

In the photo that has since made his face famous, Griessmann smiles at the camera. The dark-complexioned young man gives a hearty, genuine laugh. In the photo, he is wearing a bomber jacket and a wool hat.

The 20-something man didn’t read the fine print. Nor did he suspect that his portrait would end up in a stock of royalty-free stock images that companies can use for their own purposes. Florian Griessmann has ceded all image rights to his portrait.

Big companies advertise with the portrait of Griessmann

For a long time nothing happened. Then a friend got in touch: she had discovered him in an ad on social media.

“That was for dentures. I thought it was funny at the time because I have really crooked teeth – we couldn’t afford an orthodontist in my youth,” recalls Griessmann. But soon after, a major telecommunications company also advertised with the nice-looking young man. “And then it started: All of a sudden I was in big poster campaigns. For insurance companies, big car manufacturers and electronics groups.”

He thinks the photo itself is fine, he says. But the fact that he is not asked what his picture is for and that he does not receive any further payment for it makes the 29-year-old furious.

“A lot of friends have sent me pictures of commercials as well as bands I work with,” he says. Even one bank uses the image, which has been a pain in the ass for them. As a musician, his lyrics represent an alternative, non-capitalist view of things.

Filed under ‘urban man’

“It usually bothers me that they are big brands from billion dollar corporations. They advertise to further increase their sales. Why do they need to resort to stock photos?” Anoki has already tried to take legal action against this – so far to no avail.

Time and again he was assured that the photo would be removed. But if you plug the keywords “urban man” into an internationally used photo bank, Griessmann still comes up at number one out of some 500,000 search results.

Another click reveals that the customer pays €50 for a low-resolution photo and €475 for a large one. Therefore, unlike Anoki, the photo agency continues to earn money from her portrait. The term “urban man” also bothers him.

“I don’t feel like an ‘urban man’, I’m just me and I make my music – that’s what I stand for.” The term “urban” was once used by the US music industry to refer to “black music” such as R’n’B, rap and soul – an image with racist overtones: “Urban” means those who have a history of migration , for music by people of color.

great-grandson of a slave

Three years ago, Anoki decided to stop fighting his otherness and identify with it. “It just got easier,” he says.

The musician dives into his family history, exploring his roots. One of his great-grandmothers came from Ghana. During colonial times, she was sold into slavery in Indonesia, where she probably worked on tea plantations.

His father was born in Jakarta and emigrated with his parents to Holland, the former colonial power of Indonesia. Here his father met Griessmann’s mother, a German. But the relationship did not last and his mother moved to Germany with Florian, then three years old.

Now, at the age of 29, Florian Griessmann, who lives in Berlin, is doing what he loves: he is producing his first album and has signed a contract with the BMG label. He’s already accompanied bands like “OK KID” on tour — and next year, with their debut album, their own tour is coming.

This article was originally written in German.