Hip hop in Germany
December 16, 2007
“Bushido” comes from the Japanese and means “the way of the warrior”. Bushido is also the name of Germany’s most popular and yet most controversial rapper at the moment.
In recent years the hip hop scene in the country has been radically restructured under his leadership. Since the German Tunisian’s huge success, hip hop has become what it always was in the USA in the Federal Republic as well: a mouthpiece for the supposedly underprivileged, the voice of the lower classes.
Hip hop in Germany used to be primarily something for grammar school students from a good background, now the rules say that true hip hop warriors don’t need A Levels. Rappers of the “Neue Deutsche Härte” (i.e. New German Hardness) genre mostly come from the suburbs of Berlin and claim to speak “ghetto” language. Before these rappers however, people were sure that there were no ghettoes in Germany’s cities like the ones in the USA, there were just districts heavily populated with foreigners and with high unemployment. But in the world of new German hip hop, coming from the “ghetto” must serve as proof that they come from the very bottom, like their American confreres.
German hip hop aspires to be street music now as well. People style themselves as a sub-class and rap bluntly about life on the fringe of society. The lyrics are about drugs, petty crime, rape, police violence and raw sex, in some cases the texts are homophobic or sexist. The main thing is to cause a furore, the cruder the better. For Bushido alone the Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Medien (Federal Department for Censorship of Media Harmful to Young Persons) has classified several songs as harmful to young people. The macho behaviour of US rap is simply being adopted, as well as the glorification of violence. As a result, rap in Germany has arrived at the point at which it has been in the USA for about twenty years: a state of dominance of so-called Gangsta-Rap.
Fun rap and puns
‘Die Fantastischen Vier’
When German hip hop was booming in the nineties, when German Sprechgesang was becoming more and more successful commercially, this development could not have been predicted. The most successful hip hop group in the country – still – Die Fantastischen Vier from the city of Stuttgart, bagged the first big German rap hits with fun rap and songs such as Die da and Sie ist weg. The lyrics are about meeting girls and being dumped, about simple dramas of puberty. Fun rap with occasional playful hints of social criticism also remained the trademark of further successful hip hop bands such as Tobi & Das Bo or Fünf Sterne Deluxe. Both have now broken up. Explicit political rap, which was very active against xenophobia and racism and originated from groups such as Advanced Chemistry or Wahre Schule, always remained a fringe phenomenon in Germany – quite unlike France.
German rap of the nineties was trying to superimpose American hip hop on German circumstances and make something separate out of it, so-called Deutschrap. Linguistic humour was in demand, they played around with the German language. The successful Stuttgart group Freundeskreis even skilfully incorporated a poem by artist and lyricist Kurt Schwitters in their hit Anna. The clichés long established in the USA of wiggling ladies’ bums, champagne parties and weapons as status symbols were largely avoided. The epicentres of German hip hop at this time significantly were Stuttgart and Hamburg, tranquil and rich cities. German hip hop in comparison with today seemed downright innocent and naïve.
The cruder the better
‘Sido’
All that changed suddenly at the start of the new millennium. Since then, Berlin has been the definitive capital of German hip hop. It is no coincidence that during this time Berlin was increasingly coming under the public gaze as a social hotspot. The violence mentioned in the Berlin rap songs had arrived in the city’s playgrounds for real. Since then there has been a debate in Germany about the extent to which hip hop is the cause of socially unacceptable behaviour or whether it is just a reflection of it.
The most successful German hip hop label Aggro markets its rap stars with exceptionally clever methods. Bushido also became a star as an Aggro artist. The protagonists of the label are all given an aggressive image here, scandals are really planned. The stage management of individual rappers targets particular sensitive spots within German society. They play around with fears of racism, exaggerated nationalism or sexism, sometimes ambiguously.
For example there is Sido, who usually performs wearing a mask, and whose Arschficksong (i.e. Arse Fuck Song) was a big hit. Or B-Tight, who calls himself “Neger” (nigger), even though this term for blacks has racist connotations in Germany. Fler on the other hand is proud to be a German. He acts nationalistically and enjoys performing with a German flag, which people in the Federal Republic are normally much more careful about than in the patriotic USA for instance.
‘Fler’
In the name of scandal, rapper G-Hot is even comfortable with open hatred towards gays. In his song Keine Toleranz he appeared amazed that gays are allowed to live, which was not the case in the past. That was too much even for Aggro, for the sake of its media image the label parted company from the rapper. Aggro, according to Davide Bortot, chief editor of the specialist hip hop magazine Juice, is “the last real revolution that German rap has experienced.” Which in turn sheds a bad light on the rest of the German scene. Bortot feels that it lacks “creative characters” and originality.
Thanks to this Aggro revolution and Bushido warriors, women unfortunately have even less to say than ever before in German rap. Journalist Sonja Eismann, who has concerned herself in great depth with the role of women in hip hop, claims: “I don’t really see true resistance anywhere.” The only chance for female rappers to command as much attention as the boys seems to be by being similarly hard. For Catee from Berlin for instance, as she says herself, it is all about “boozing, mobbing, stuffing your face and stressing out.” Any woman in new German rap who wants to be worth something, it seems, should not attack its blokish mentality, but should be a bloke herself instead.
Andreas Hartmann
is a freelance author and music journalist in Berlin
Translation: Jo Beckett
Copyright: Goethe-Institut, Online-Redaktion
Any questions about this article? Please write to us!
online-redaktion@goethe.de
September 2007
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