The New York Times - USA (2020-11-09)

THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2020 N C5

LONDON — Taco Hemingway is a household

name in Poland. One of the country’s big-

gest rappers, he has songs that get millions

of views, and before the coronavirus hit, he

filled arenas with bouncing fans, extrava-

gant light displays dancing around him on-

stage.

But on a recent Friday, his demeanor was

a far cry from the bravado typical of a

hugely successful rapper. Sitting outside a

cheap cafe in West London, Hemingway,

whose real name is Filip Szczesniak,

seemed nervous and avoided eye contact.

“I’ve always been an extremely anxious

person,” he said, by way of explanation. He

rarely posts on social media or gives inter-

views, afraid his every word will be dis-

sected by the Polish media and fans. This is

his first for a printed newspaper or maga-

zine since 2015, and his first in English. He

only agreed to it, he said, because his par-

ents “wouldn’t forgive me if I said no” to The

New York Times.

There were other reasons for Szczesni-

ak’s anxiety to be flaring up. Over the sum-

mer, he released a track, “Polskie Tango”

(“Polish Tango”), which many saw as a di-

rect criticism of Poland’s right-wing gov-

ernment and the culture of fear it’s often

seen to have created in the country through

its attacks on gay and women’s rights.

“Our national colors are just like Santa

Claus,” he rapped in the chorus, referring to

the country’s red and white flag, “which

makes sense since I stopped believing in

Poland a long time ago.”

He soon found himself under attack on so-

cial media and becoming a target for con-

servative journalists, he said. “I got myself

tangled up in politics,” Szczesniak added.

“That was just not pleasant.”

This interview was only likely to reignite

that and cause him to be labeled “anti-Pol-

ish and a tattletale,” he added. He didn’t

sound like he was looking forward to it. He

also knew just how tense feelings are in Po-

land at the moment. The day before the in-

terview, a court ruling had severely re-

stricted abortion rights in the country and

people were already on the streets pro-

testing.

When asked about this, Szczesniak got

visibly upset. “It’s awful,” he said. “It’s an-

other step in the wrong direction for Po-

land.”

“I don’t think it’s unpatriotic to raise con-

cerns,” he said, later. “It’s patriotic to point

out all the wrongdoings of the ruling party,

and to hope for a better future. It’s actually

unpatriotic to just accept everything and

take a beating.”

It took Szczesniak, 30, a long time to get

tangled up in politics. He started rapping at

age 17, recording some songs in his mom’s

basement in English. No one listened to

them, he said, with a laugh. For the next

eight years, he rapped in his spare time,

while taking an anthropology degree and

working as a copywriter.

In 2015, he started gaining recognition in

Poland after the release of an album in Pol-

ish called “Warsaw Triangle,” about three

lovers unhappily chasing each other around

the Polish capital. It became a sleeper hit,

and soon Szczesniak was releasing an al-

bum every summer, happily jumping be-

tween styles from trap to dance beats to

dreamy Drake-like numbers.

But recently, Szczesniak said, he started

feeling stuck in a rut. “I was either making

albums about partying, or I was making

them about how fed up I was with partying

and wanted my old life back,” he said. “I

thought, ‘I probably should switch it up.’ ”

In January, he decided, for the first time,

“to write an album that’s about Poland,” he

said. The decision was partly because of Po-

land’s worsening political and social situa-

tion, he said. The country has for years been

in the grip of a culture war, with liberals on

one side and the governing populist Law

and Justice Party, and its conservative sup-

porters, on the other.

“Polish Tango,” Szczesniak’s first single

from that album, made his new musical di-

rection clear. Its impact came partly from

timing, he said: It was released two days

before Poland’s presidential election in July.

The song does not actually mention the Law

and Justice Party but its video has a clear

reference. At the end eight stars appear, an

internet meme meant to be a censored ver-

sion of a sexual expletive, and then the gov-

erning party’s initials.

“I just wanted to vent for a second,”

Szczesniak said. “And I wanted my friends

to vent as well.”

The song got over five million views on

YouTube in its first weekend. “It was quite a

shock because it was Taco,” said Cyryl

Rozwadowski, a music journalist for the

Poptown.Eu website, in a telephone inter-

view. “His music had been becoming more

and more egocentric, and just marketed to

young girls.”

Initial praise was soon followed by criti-

cism on social media and in Poland’s con-

servative press. “Taco, you freak!” read a

headline for an article on Niezalezna, a con-

servative news site, accusing the rapper of

“boorish mocking of national symbols.”

Szczesniak said he got threats via social

media because of the track and found him-

self embroiled in numerous conspiracy the-

ories. Many claimed his girlfriend’s father, a

journalist and famous critic of the govern-

ment, was behind the song. “The backlash

was too big — I couldn’t ignore it even if I

tried,” Szczesniak said.

“Polish Tango” was followed by a double

album, the first half of which (“Jarmark”) is

political, with the second half (“Europa”)

arriving a week later, and designed to be all

fun. Together, the albums spell the name of

a former market in Warsaw. The narrative

heart of “Jarmark” is three songs called

“The Chain,” which describe anger passing

from person to person in a Polish city, from a

newspaper seller to a student to an immi-

grant Uber driver to a businessman, in a

never-ending cycle.

Many fans had expected the album’s po-

litical side to be one long attack on Poland’s

government, said Rozwadowski, and for

them, the result was disappointing. There

were songs that criticized the government

and the church, he said, but it avoided topics

like the Polish government’s use of homo-

phobic rhetoric.

The album is filled with “bitter pills to

swallow, both for those who think every-

thing is fine in Poland today and those who

are inclined to blame the government for all

failures,” wrote Jarek Szubrycht in a review

for Wyborcza, Poland’s main liberal news-

paper.

There were rumors in Poland’s music in-

dustry that Szczesniak had toned down the

album’s content because of the backlash to

“Polskie Tango,” Rozwadowski said. Sitting

in the cafe after it started to rain, Szczesniak

admitted he’d changed two lines to remove

the names of politicians because he didn’t

want the album to be dismissed as partisan

or to undermine its wider messages about

issues throughout Polish society.

Despite his anxiety, Szczesniak was di-

rect about his political opinions during the

interview. But he still seemed torn between

expressing his views and risking being mis-

understood and avoiding more trouble alto-

gether. He was unlikely to make another po-

litical record, he said. But then moments lat-

er he seemed to change his mind. “I’m still

very exhausted by ‘Polskie Tango,’ ” he said.

“I might be in the phase of a hung over per-

son saying, ‘Never again.’ I might go back to

it.”

Three days after the interview, on Mon-

day, Szczesniak seemed to be closer to a de-

cision on what his political engagement

would look like from now on. He made a rare

post to his Instagram Stories about the pro-

tests around the new abortion law in Po-

land, which had become increasingly tense

with governing-party politicians calling the

tens of thousands of protesters “criminals.”

“I am so proud of what’s happening in Po-

land,” Szczesniak wrote. “Keep eyes in the

back of your head, scream, march, sing,

chant — remind the government that we

are watching them,” he added.

He signed it Filip, rather than Taco Hem-

ingway, and he seemed to have again de-

cided it was worth sticking his head above

the cultural parapet — although this time,

his message automatically disappeared af-

ter 24 hours.

Taco Hemingway faced threats on social media after venting about tensions in Poland.

TOM JAMIESON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

A Nerve-Racking Switch

To Poland’s Culture Wars

When a rapper’s focus shifted

from partying, the kind of

attention he drew changed.

By ALEX MARSHALL

‘I got myself tangled up

in politics. That was just

not pleasant.’

FILIP SZCZESNIAK

THE RAPPER KNOWN AS TACO

HEMINGWAY

Monika Pronczuk contributed reporting from

Brussels and Anna Bialas from Warsaw.

MICHAL MURAWSKI

The “Fantastic Beasts” movies will have to

find a new Gellert Grindelwald.

“I wish to let you know that I have been

asked to resign by Warner Bros. from my

role as Grindelwald in Fantastic Beasts and

I have respected and agreed to that re-

quest,” the actor Johnny Depp wrote on In-

stagram on Friday.

A spokeswoman for the studio behind the

popular spinoff films, based on J.K. Row-

ling’s Harry Potter series, confirmed on Fri-

day that Mr. Depp would leave the fran-

chise. Mr. Depp played the role of the dark

wizard who was the main antagonist of the

“Fantastic Beasts” franchise, the events of

which occurred before the Harry Potter

films. She said his role would be recast be-

fore the third film, which is now scheduled

to be released in the summer of 2022.

Mr. Depp’s exit comes days after he lost a

libel case against the publisher of The Sun, a

British tabloid newspaper that published a

2018 article calling him a “wife beater,” and

the paper’s executive editor, Dan Wootton.

The story had also claimed that there was

“overwhelming evidence” that Mr. Depp

had assaulted the actress Amber Heard on

multiple occasions while they were mar-

ried.

“I accept that Mr. Depp put her in fear of

her life,” a British judge wrote in a state-

ment dismissing the case on Monday. He

said the paper had shown that the claims it

published were “substantially true.”

Women’s rights groups in Britain praised

the ruling. Lisa King, a spokeswoman for

Refuge, a British charity for survivors of do-

mestic violence, said in a statement on

Monday that the decision sent the message

that “every single survivor of domestic

abuse should be listened to and should be

heard.”

Mr. Depp’s legal team had argued during

the hearings that Ms. Heard was the abuser.

In his Instagram post, Mr. Depp wrote

that he planned to appeal the ruling and

thanked fans for their support, adding that

he had “been humbled and moved by your

many messages of love and concern, partic-

ularly over the last few days.”

“My resolve remains strong and I intend

to prove that the allegations against me are

false,” he wrote. “My life and career will not

be defined by this moment in time.”

Depp Leaves ‘Fantastic Beasts’ Franchise at Studio’s Request

By SARAH BAHR

Johnny Depp’s exit comes
after he lost a libel case.