“Being sexualised is not a bad thing”: Danish-Kurdish pop sensation Tobias Rahim is about to go global

Raw, romance-heavy lyrics, ab-baring stage looks and one purposefully released nude have turned Danish-Kurdish pop star Tobias Rahim into something of a sex symbol. At his shows, fans exhibit a level of unabashed horniness previously reserved for rock bands, boy bands and Harry Styles. There’s swooning, screaming, even the odd flashed boob. “I just did a lot of things that female artists have done for a long time,” he says. “For me, being sexualised is not a bad thing. Sexual energy is a strong energy. Sexuality is f***ing dope.”

Some days, however, Rahim doesn’t feel like being a pop star. One such day was during our Vogue Scandinavia photoshoot at Frederiksborgs slott in Hillerød, a 17th century castle originally built as the residence of King Christian IV of Denmark-Norway. “Some days, I love the camera,” he says. “Other days, I really don’t f*** with the camera.” The previous evening, he tells me, he had been a guest on Bianca Ingrosso’s talk show in Stockholm. “Maybe I became a little drunk or something,” he says of his Swedish escapades the night before the shoot. “The day that we were going to do the Vogue shoot, I just felt like eating junk food and watching stupid television.” To complicate matters, he was a couple of hours late and more than one tourist visiting the castle stopped to fan out on him. One even had a Tobias Rahim tattoo.

Then there was the location itself. “This is quite important for me, actually,” he says. “I had some difficult feelings about the location.” The location? But who wouldn’t want to be photographed in what’s arguably one of the grandest and most beautiful buildings in Copenhagen, not to mention a place that’s more than a little challenging to secure for a shoot. “I just feel like this place – this castle – doesn’t represent anything that’s me. I grew up very poor. Without money,” says Rahim. “And that whole ultra elitist thing that this castle symbolises... I don’t f*** with that. In some ways, it’s a dark place. The people in power were building that castle and the people outside were really struggling.” Still, even Rahim can admit that the photos turned out pretty damn good.

You have to forgive him. After all, Rahim hasn’t been a pop star for very long. The 33-year-old entered Covid lockdown a gigging reggae musician, performing at small venues across Copenhagen. He emerged stopped-on-the-street famous, with a Sony record deal and legions of devoted fans singing along to his songs on the radio. “Before the pandemic, I was not famous, I was just a normal person. My face was just another face on the street,” he says. “After Covid, it was different. A lot of people know my face now. I went from being in my own world, observing people, observing the street to other people observing me. I can’t even explain how different that feels.”

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Rahim is FaceTiming me from bed, his face – that recognised face – framed by a pink velvet pillow. Pillow talk, literally. Even if he wasn’t famous, he’s got a look that sticks with you – one of sharp, masculine features and charming crooked teeth. Plus, he’s two metres tall. It’s pretty hard to miss him.

One thing that certainly didn’t diminish the level of attention placed on Rahim: the naked picture. “That was not planned – it was something that happened in the moment,” he says. He was on set shooting images for his debut record, National Romantik 2021, on Sony’s dime with photographer Petra Kleis – the same woman who shot our story at the castle. “She’s really magical with the camera,” says Rahim. He was in the wake of a lot of rejection from various record labels, an experience that harkened to his adolescence. “I felt the way I felt as a child – not having siblings in school. Being bullied a bit, being beaten up. Feeling small,” he says. “But one day I was standing in front of the mirror, just out of the shower, and I was like, ‘F***, man, I’m not a little boy no more. I’m tall, I’m masculine, I have a penis. Why am I inside my head?’ My perception of me was not real – the mirror is real.” He looked good. He felt good. Hell, why not? Let’s shoot a nude.

As the record shoot was winding down, Rahim asked Kleis if she would take the full-frontal photograph and she agreed without hesitation. Though Kleis had previously shot a whole book of female nudes, this was her first time photographing a nude man. “For me there isn’t really any difference,” says Kleis. “It is just a ‘naked body’ – I feel completely comfortable with ‘skin’.” She describes the experience as “open and free” – no second-guessing, no awkward moments. “I don’t think either of us were shy in any way,” she says, adding that Rahim is someone who is “comfortable in his own skin”. “It was a professional thing, with love and respect.”

There were a couple people on set who were a bit taken aback, however. “The people from the record label just slowly walked away and felt awkward,” says Rahim. He dubbed the resulting image, which finds him bathed in natural light, a flower clenched in his teeth, ‘The Neo-Scandinavian Man’. Rahim sees himself as a representative of a modern Scandinavian – one who isn’t defined as being half this or half that. The sold-out book of poems containing the print version of the image has become a collectible. For those curious, the image is quite easily findable online.

In contrast to his surging popularity, growing up the only child of a single mother in Aarhus, Tobias Rahim Secilmis Hasling never quite felt like he belonged. “Sometimes I feel like an alien, or that this is an alien world and there’s a home somewhere that is not here,” he says. “It’s a feeling I’ve had my whole life – maybe this wasn’t home.” This uncanny feeling of displacement brought Rahim to far flung locales. He spent a couple years in a slum in Cali, Colombia, immersing himself in the local reggae scene. He headed to Ghana, where he released Afropop music under the moniker Toby Tabu. Landing back in Denmark, he was one-half of reggae duo Camilo & Grande.

For Rahim, every move is made by instinct – whether it’s literally moving across the globe or a turn of phrase in a song. “I believe in just following the river,” he says, noting that he has a tattoo on his arm that says just that. “I think it’s from Taoism. When I heard it, I understood that there’s a river inside all of us. You can just do what everyone expects of you, and not follow the river or you can pay attention to the river inside of you and go with the stream. I tend to go with the stream, every time.”

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River or not, there are certain non-negotiable realities at play, like money. To make ends meet back home, Rahim picked up shifts at his uncle’s low-key bodega, Mucki Bar, now immortalised in his catchy song of the same name off his explosive second album, Når sjælen kaster op (When the soul vomits). The album charted in Denmark for 40 weeks. Was he a good employee? “I was really trying because I wanted to impress my uncle,” he says. “But immigrants have this thing where their childhood was so rough, even if you carry one hundred kilos and do everything right, you’re still just a spoiled child of the west.”

He worked shifts at the bar right up until the success of his solo debut – “when fame hit”, as he puts it. The stage may just be the closest thing to that alien homeland Rahim dreamed of. While some artists see their stage personas as a sort of character, for Rahim, it’s the other way around. “I actually think that the private Tobias Rahim is more like a character,” he says. “As a private person, you’re meant to fit in, in a society. We dress in these kinds of colours, we say these kinds of things. ‘Hello, nice to meet you’. On stage, I’m free from all of that. I’m free to be more nice, more good, more evil. A little bit more of everything.”

These days, Rahim is finding fame beyond his native Denmark. In April this year, the New York Times posited that Rahim could be the man to bring Danish-language pop global. Closer to home, his song ‘STOR MAN (Midnatt i Skåne)’ with Swedish pop star Victor Leksell is building his audience in Sweden. “My first impression of Tobias in person was pure affection,” says Leksell, who notes that he and Rahim have experienced similar explosive breakthroughs in their respective countries. “He was warm and super nice as a person and easy to work with in the studio. A creative and beautiful soul.”

Fame is a funny beast, one best captured by the opening lyrics of Rahim’s song ‘Feber drømmer Xx Dubai’, which he recites for me in its original Danish: “Det' næsten ironisk, Som jeg jagter berømmelsen nu, Snart jagter den mig.” It's almost ironic, How I chase fame these days, Soon it'll chase me. Other songs lay bare his struggles with anxiety – a feeling only amplified by the pressures of being in the public eye, constantly observed. But he wouldn’t put the toothpaste back in the tube, even if he could. “Sometimes it’s supposed to be a struggle. Maybe just to feel it – to experience it all,” he says. “Maybe I was just curious how it was to be a pop star. I already knew what it was like working at a bar.”

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