Even today, people I don’t really know still ask me—by email, by letter, by shouting through open windows—what actually happened to AMY&PINK. The portal of good cheer. The party ship of Berlin’s newcomers. The voice of a generation that never wanted to grow up, partied for three days straight at Berghain, and woke up one morning in the ruins of its own denial of reality.
The reflexive answer to the very personal question of why AMY&PINK no longer exists is: No idea. And that wouldn’t even be a lie. I genuinely don’t know. Maybe it just happened. Maybe there was no longer a place for it in the contemporary media landscape. Maybe some things simply have to end before they’re kept alive artificially for reasons no one can really explain.
AMY&PINK was born in 2007 as the successor to my private blog, Tokyopunk—right when I moved to Berlin to train as a designer at a new media agency. Everything was new. Everything was exciting. My life suddenly revolved around the city and the colorful people swarming through it. I filled the site with personal stories, internet finds, and the occasional music video, and soon found passionate writers who pushed the project far beyond what I had imagined.
AMY&PINK grew from a small blog into one of Germany’s most-read online magazines. In the early 2010s, it became the digital go-to for young rebels, hipsters, and avant-gardists—and for everyone who wanted to be one, or at least observe them from a safe distance.
Brands like Mercedes, Microsoft, and Deutsche Telekom invited us around the world: New York, Toronto, London, Rome, Shenzhen, Los Angeles, Lisbon, Monaco, Las Vegas. We got drunk with Kendrick Lamar, Tokio Hotel, Frank Ocean. All because we wrote strange things on the internet, swore constantly, and there were people who wanted to read exactly that.
Sometimes there were bare breasts. Sometimes girls throwing up. Sometimes swastikas made of cocaine. The more provocative, the better. The press loved and hated us in equal measure—just like our readers.
The problem was that I kept steering AMY&PINK deeper into a spiral of what the fuck that I eventually couldn’t escape. What started as irony and excess slowly turned into a grotesque form of professionalization. We had to be more outrageous than everyone else to keep attention, while advertisers demanded fewer exposed genitals on the homepage.
At the same time, the Wild West days of the internet were over. By the mid-2010s, anything not approved by copyright holders, rights managers, and several lawyers was untouchable. The visuals lost their punch, replaced by sterile press photos. The writing became louder, emptier, more absurd. AMY&PINK transformed from a radiant rock star into a washed-up madman drunkenly insisting he was still relevant.
When key authors left, the balance disappeared with them. Once, every obscene photo series was paired with a tender heartbreak story; every LSD-soaked music video with a playful travelogue; every bizarre triviality with reflections on small and big lives. People could have published elsewhere but they chose AMY&PINK as their medium. Eventually, only hollow shock pieces remained. Attention at any cost, long after no one was really paying attention anymore.
I tried to save it. Really. God may not be my witness, but my best friend is—without her, I might have drowned in my own madness years earlier. I obsessed, doubted, experimented. New concepts. New languages. Endless loops of hope and frustration. If I were even half as cool as I pretended to be online, I would have burned AMY&PINK to the ground years ago and walked away in slow motion, smiling. But I’m not cool. And I don’t let go easily.
The numbers were still good. The archive was still performing. Any SEO expert would have applauded. But I spent far too much time trying to rescue something that no longer belonged in my life—time I should have spent finding a real job, starting a family, planting trees, building something new. Eventually I had to admit the truth: AMY&PINK wasn’t failing. I had simply outgrown it. It wasn’t fun anymore. And no number of clicks could change that.
So one morning, with a hot coffee, I backed up the site and deleted it from the server. And I felt nothing. No sadness. No relief. Just completion. I finished my coffee, got up, and went for a walk. AMY&PINK was dead. And I didn’t care.
Even now, people still ask what happened to AMY&PINK—the portal of good cheer, the party ship of Berlin’s newcomers, the voice of a generation that refused to grow up. The honest answer is simple: I stopped enjoying it. It took me a long time to accept that this reason alone was enough.
Today, I have a small blog again—this one. I write about what actually interests me. It doesn’t matter if I’m the only reader. I can post about a Japanese band, publish a short story about a city at the end of the world, or rescue an old AMY&PINK article if it feels right. I can do what I want again.
AMY&PINK taught me a lot, as did everyone involved. But it’s time to let it rest and move on. The world is vast. The possibilities for happiness are endless. You just need the courage to let go, reach into the unknown, and allow it to pull you somewhere new—before it’s too late.
When I finally got my driver’s license in my early twenties and tore through the streets of my uptight hometown in my mother’s bright red Seat Ibiza, zigzagging like a lunatic, there was no hip-hop, no techno, and no Britney Spears blasting from the speakers. No. What filled the car was a then-new single by a Japanese pop singer. Her name was Kumi Koda. The song was Butterfly.
My girlfriend at the time sat huddled in the passenger seat, visibly dying of shame, as we sped past the ice-cream parlor, the school, and the outdoor pool—with Butterfly at full volume. The fact that she ever let me back into her life afterward remains one of the great unsolved mysteries of human history.
Of course, it makes absolutely no sense for me to listen to Japanese music. I’m not Japanese. I don’t speak Japanese. No matter how often I wish I did—and no matter how many Japanese classes I’ve endured. And believe me, there have been many. My teachers are desperate cases now. Greetings go out to Mr. Hasegawa, Ms. Takeda, and Mr. Sugimoto. To Ms. Ikeda, Ms. Takahashi, and Ms. Watanabe. To Mr. Fujiwara, Mr. Noguchi, and Ms. Yokoyama. To Ms. Ota, Ms. Sato, and Mr. Suzuki. And, of course, to Ms. Weatherby-Harrington.
After roughly twenty years and countless lessons, on a good day I can count to seven, distinguish between こころ meaning heart and こども meaning children, and shout はじめまして、わたしはマセルです！ which means Hello, my name is Marcel! That’s it. Really.
You’d think that after all the anime, comics, films, concerts, books, dramas, video games, and what feels like hundreds of thousands of songs, I’d be able to do a bit more. But no. Even for my great love—Japanese pop culture—I’m too lazy to seriously learn the language. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing. I’ve met enough Japanese-studies students who turned their hobby into a career and, word by word, lost all interest in consuming anything Japanese. Perhaps because that’s when you realize Japan is just a normal country, full of problems, boredom, and a fairly average entertainment industry. Like Germany. Or America. Or Romania.
Hundreds of Japanese people wouldn’t jump off strategically placed bridges, skyscrapers, and train platforms every year if the nation in the Far East were as perfect as it appears in K-On!—despite the fact that the show is, obviously, a rigorously accurate documentary of everyday Japanese school life.
Because of my mental block, I can’t grasp meaning in Japanese at all. To me, everything sounds fantastic. Everything feels magical. If you get wet when Jacques from a Paris suburb asks for directions in his worst possible French accent, Japanese has the same effect on me. What are you saying, little Japanese girl? Your dog has warts on its balls? Kawaii!
I am that stereotypical, overweight nerd—one step away from his first heart attack—who treats Japan as the Mecca of evolutionary creativity and celebrates anything with even a single Japanese character on it, despite not being able to distinguish it from Chinese. I’m dangerously close to buying body pillows with half-clothed waifus who are, of course, actually thousand-year-old vampire queens. I’ll live exclusively on rice and sake. I’ll change my name to Marcel-san.
When musical gods pound keys, strings, and microphones—screaming, roaring, and strumming—I don’t hear tired lyrics about love, pain, and freedom. I hear Tokyo’s pulse. Osaka’s vibration. Kyoto’s voice. And occasionally the fart of Los Angeles. Songs become blank canvases. I build my own stories. My own end credits. Fantasies of another life on the other side of the world.
J-pop has the same magic English songs had when you were a kid—before you understood the nonsense being sung. Can you blow my whistle, baby? No thanks. I could look up translations. But that would be stupid. Then I’d know my creative heroes sing the same pop-rock brain mush as everyone else—just in Japanese. And then I might as well hang myself.
I maintain that J-pop is the greatest music genre humanity has produced. Jazz is dead. Hip-hop is murky. K-pop is colorful, at best. J-pop is melodic, emotional, overwhelming—possessing a power you normally only experience at an anime convention surrounded by sweaty weebs with DSLR cameras and a sixteen-year-old dressed as Rem from Re:Zero.
When lyrics don’t matter, I hear everything else: craftsmanship, complexity, excess. Genre switches every thirty seconds. Three orchestras. A singer screaming as if God is dying while a school choir cries in the background. Epic dialed to eleven. The universe implodes in four minutes. J-pop broke me.
The Japanese music industry doesn’t care whether I exist. I’m not marketed to. I don’t know scandals or gossip. I don’t matter. Which makes it perfect. The music belongs entirely to me. Everyone else thinks it’s garbage.
It has something for every moment: dancing, crying, heartbreak, anime trauma, video-game nostalgia, or my first minutes at Narita Airport—walking under the Welcome to Japan banner into a world of cultural and human wonder. J-pop fills the wanderlust void in my small, perpetually irritated heart.
J-pop isn’t cool. Even Japanese people don’t think it’s cool. When I once admitted in Yoyogi Park that I liked AKB48, I spent the rest of my trip alone. Presumably, hourly warnings were broadcast on state television. A gaijin who likes AKB48? Drop everything. Run!
Cool Japanese people like Swedish indie bands, American rappers, and British DJs. Not manufactured idol groups assembled by sleazy managers and consumed by overweight middle-aged office workers. This is, admittedly, true everywhere.
And yet, when you watch interviews with Japanese musicians, there’s no pride. No arrogance. Only apologies—for existing. As if following their dreams were a crime. As if they should have taken over their fathers’ cement factories instead. They brought shame upon Otōsan!
Maybe it’s just reserve. Maybe I’m just weird. Not cool-weird. More Should we institutionalize him now or wait two weeks? weird. Play me one Ed Sheeran song and I become homicidal. Put me in front of a ten-hour YouTube compilation of anime themes and I will starve to death smiling. A Cruel Angel’s Thesis is a banger.
I know this confession annihilates my chances of future sex. But I can’t pretend anymore. These songs mean nothing to me. Nothing at all. Instead, I close my eyes and listen. To songs about せかい, ドキドキ, and はなび. And I’m happy. Even—no, especially—because I don’t understand a single word.
This website has changed many times over the years. It began as a small blog by a Bavarian media designer and became a collection of stories by creative minds from across Germany. It was the bible of Berlin nightlife, then a gonzo magazine for hipsters, then a digital news site, then a never-sleeping ticker of viral events.
At some point, it turned into a monster—bloated with false expectations and empty prospects. The blog wanted to be everything and, as a result, became nothing. I had lost sight of what it was actually about and chased relevance at any cost in a fast, unforgiving media world.
With my eyes fixed on the future, there seemed to be only one option: keep up. Keep up with the news. With trends. With the loud, shiny, flashy things. I tried to be more extreme than everyone else. I churned out news, lookbooks, gossip, YouTube videos, shitstorms, and tits—an irrelevant mix whose only purpose was movement. It didn’t matter whether I liked any of it. Standing out mattered. Fake it till you make it. Surely the future would get better. It didn’t.
I collapsed in a battle I couldn’t win and didn’t even want to win. The site was stuffed with nonsense. I refused to admit it while everyone else had already moved on. Every year brought a new relaunch, the same pseudo-epic promise that now everything would be different, that I finally understood what readers wanted, that the blog would be good again. Each promise failed. The world grew louder and brighter, and I couldn’t step off the carousel. My metaphors exploded, and the site buckled under the weight of its own words and images.
Eventually, I just wanted it to end. I considered deleting everything—the site, the archives, all of it. I had dreamed of world domination and instead found emptiness. The fun, the hope, the excitement were gone. One night, soaked in wine and nostalgia, I dug through old texts. Pieces written when blogging was new. When life felt like a game. When the world still made sense. They had been buried under years of digital noise. I read them. And they were good.
Ten-year-old texts about love, dreams, and generational expectations—simply good. Better than most of what had appeared on this site in recent years. All the fast-paced dramas, rumors, manufactured outrage, and attention-deficit content were obsolete the moment they were published. Words without weight. Without resonance.
That’s when I understood there was only one way forward: to do the opposite of everything I’d been doing. To step off the carousel, watch it spin from a distance, and define my own sense of time.
From now on, I want the texts on this website to matter not just for ten minutes, but for ten years. Someone in a distant future, when hoverboards actually hover and we fly to Mars for a weekend, should read them and feel something. Recognition. Inspiration. A quiet urge to share the words with someone they love.
You shouldn’t be able to tell how old a text is, because it doesn’t matter. Writing from the heart is always a snapshot of its time, but some things age differently. We’re too young for true love has a longer half-life than Miley Cyrus peed on the floor again. Even if the latter has its audience.
So what does that mean for this blog? It should become a colorful grab bag again. A place for surprises. A thoughtful film review. Notes from traveling through Japan. The introduction of a new band. Stories about growing up, heartbreak, obsession, beauty. Digital treasures. Long nights in Berlin, Tokyo, and in cities still unknown that might one day feel like home.
The goal is simple: publish texts so strong, so honest, so worth reading that they remain relevant in one, five, maybe ten years—without sanding down the rough edges that make them alive. Cowboy Bebop will still matter in a decade. Haruki Murakami will still matter. Texts about heartbreak will still help people feel less alone.
In practice, this means the design is minimal—spartan, even brutal—so nothing distracts from the words. To make a clean break, I archived everything, wiped the server, and started again from scratch. Slowly, I’ll revisit old texts, revise and polish them, and publish them anew. New pieces will appear alongside them. Day by day, this digital diary will grow—quietly, deliberately, and with joy.
Yes, there’s irony here. This is yet another resurrection text, solemnly promising that everything will finally be different. And it criticizes the fleeting nature of words while being destined to fade itself.
Still, I want this blog to become a peaceful garden in the middle of a noisy digital jungle. A place to linger. To think. To feel. Where everyone is welcome, whether they’re searching for meaning or just a few chaotic thoughts. Take what resonates. Leave the rest. I’m glad if I can keep accompanying, entertaining, or inspiring you on your journey through life—on my own terms, and in my own time.
