(Part I)
1995–2000
This was also a time that a lot of immigrants were moving to Germany and they all came with their own culture which contrasted with that of Germany.
The years from 1995 to 2000 were a golden age for German hip hop, as the demand surged, and the market was flooded with new records, with scenes forming in larger German cities, most notably Hamburg, Stuttgart, and Frankfurt.
Among the bevy of new releases, new styles emerged that were not easily classifiable as Alte Schule (“oldschool”) or Neue Schule (“newschool”). These included Kopfnicker by Massive Töne (1996), Bambule by Absolute Beginner (1998), Fenster zum Hof by the Stieber Twins (1997), Quadratur des Kreises by Freundeskreis (1997), and later Deluxe Soundsystem by Dynamite Deluxe (2000).
Battle Rap and Battlefreestylen emerged as a popular genre. These were based on the freestyle battles that had long been popular in the United States, in which rappers competed in self-aggrandizement and hyperbolic mockery. Though battle rap was at first strictly a performance art, German hip hop CDs soon included battle rap tracks, many of them directed at unspecified or imaginary foes.
Karakan also emerged in the German hip-hop scene. In 1991, Alper Aga & Kabus Kerim formed the group in Nuremberg, Germany. This year, they released the first ever Turkish language rap track in, named “Bir Yabancinin Hayati” (Life of a foreigner). Two years later, they released classic tracks like “Cehenneme Hosgeldin” (Welcome to Hell) and the controversial “Defol Dazlak”, which was released as a Maxi Single. “Big Porno Ahmet” joined the group as a producer / beatmaker. Shortly, the success of Karakan spread beyond the borders of Germany and the group started to get well-known within the European Hip-Hop scene. During jams, they met Cinai Sebeke (Da Crime Posse) and Erci-E. Together, they established the legendary group CARTEL and released a compilation album in 1995.In 1997, KARAKAN finally released his first official album “Al Sana Karakan” and shot 2 videos, which marked a high point in Turkish hip hop.
The only Single from this album, “CARTEL”, composed by Big Porno Ahmet, reached platinum status and sold more than 2,250,000 copies…
Another genre of hip hop was Polit Rap, which sought to expose social problems both in and outside of Germany, especially in the larger cities like Hamburg, Berlin and Frankfurt. This often blended with U.S. style Gangsta rap.
The multilingual and multinational group TCA- The Microphone Mafia is an example of ‘Oriental Hip Hop in the German Diaspora’. They combine Spanish, Italian, Turkish and German raps with live music and samples of traditional music from all the previously named countries.One of their hits was ‘No! Wanna be’ released in 1997.
2000 to present
Despite a dramatic increase in both rappers and fans in the late 1990s, there was little innovation in the music of that period. The boom ended around 2001, as the rate of new releases sank. The underground scene once again became the dominant force in German hip hop culture, as in the 1980s. Young aspiring rappers compose beats and texts in their homes, often sharing them over the Internet.
Battle rap has become more popular, made popular by groups like M.O.R. and led by rappers like Kool Savas, Taktloss, Azad and Dan F.. Rap on political and social themes has continued with groups like Freundeskreis, Advanced Chemistry, Samy Deluxe, 5 Sterne Deluxe and Curse.
Several bands have emerged under the label Aggro Berlin . The new “Berlin scene” has a harder, more serious sound than the more established “Hamburg scene.” Sido’s debut album in 2001 was hailed by many critics as the first real German hip hop album, as it seriously addressed social problems in the violent, anti-authoritarian, and often sexist style that has typified US Hip Hop.
The Frankfurt-based rapper Azad has ascended into the top 10 with his album Der Bozz.
The “beef,” a form of highly publicized, extended rivalry between rappers, has become a prominent feature of German hip hop, as it was several years earlier in the United States. Azad, for example, once accused Sido of insulting his mother, for which, after considerable media fanfare, Sido apologized on TV.
The idea of “beef” is not the only convention adapted to the German hip-hop scene. Azad’s video for “Ich Glaub An Dich” , the theme of the German version of the television show Prison Break, boasts much of the hip-hop aesthetic and production value seen in today’s U.S. releases. While there were no sampled voices or syncopated loops there was a smooth interpolation of piano, voiceover and guitar riffs comparable to some G-Unit cuts. Scenery also mirrored much of what might even be seen today in the next Fabolous or Cassidy music video. The gritty prison scenes from the show were contrasted to the dramatic, pictruesque background of a beach or a lighthouse from which an R&B artist melodiously sung the song’s chorus. There is also, of course, the pimped out ride, a factor which is probably more related to Germany than to the U.S. as it is where many “rapper cars” are engineered. The rapper-R&B singer dichotomy seen in the video, accompanied by other subtle elements attributed heavily to more commercial U.S. hip-hop videos is demonstrative of the fact that not only the hostile legacy of rap beef but also the some of the prettier aspects of how rap should feel and look were culturally diffused into German Hip-Hop culture.
Today, the German hip hop scene is a reflection of the many dimensions that Germany has come to represent in a unified image of Europe. Everything from “migrant hip hop,” which is known as hip hop from the large Turkish immigrant population that is mostly centered in Kreuzberg, to the more humour-based groups, such as the wildly popular Berlin based group Puppetmastaz, paint a portrait of a vibrant and diverse hip hop community in Germany.
Today immigrants make up almost 10% of the population in Germany, notable rappers with immigrant background are Fard, Farid Bang, Bushido, Azad, Summer Cem, Haftbefehl, Bero Bass, Kollegah & Massiv. Their songs mostly copy the American punchline style, they use puns and metaphors in order to humiliate an imaginary person (sometimes other rappers, known as “Disstracks”). Apart from these crude and meaningless lyrics, some rappers attract attention with intelligent songs about the problems that immigrants in Germany are confronted with. Especially Fard, a German rapper from Gladbeck of Iranian descent, often mentions issues like poverty, xenophobia, cultural differences in a credible and honest way without copying US rapscene clichés that couldn’t be transformed to the German environment.
German hip hop at this moment is undergoing a huge transformation. From the beginning the music genre in Eastern Europe was heavily influenced by the American hip hop culture but in Germany hip hop and rap was never quite the same because it came from somewhere else. The German hip hop artists of the 1980s and 1990s were white middle class men. The songs were about love, loss and parties. They had titles like “Sie ist weg” (“She’s gone”) or “Ein Tag am Meer” (“A day at the sea”) both by Die Fantastischen Vier. Now a little bit of the “gangster” and “ghetto” touch is being added. Previously, according to German hip hop group, The Joy of Zoo Sound, “They [German youth] felt almost exactly like the people portrayed in Beat Street. The artists leading this music revolution are artists and groups like Haftbefehl, Azad, Kool Savas, Bushido and Nate57 who rap about crime, police brutality, drug abuse and violence. Their lyrics are often a crude mixture of German and English slang. Their backgrounds in the ghettos of Germany can compete with life in the bad neighborhoods of New York or Los Angeles.
Despite common notions of the Old School German hip hop’s emulation of US hip hop styles and the New School’s attempt to rap about crime and violence, some “Old Schoolers ” feel that the New School has, in fact, forgotten about its roots. Old School supporters and Scholars disagree on the nature of the recent transformation in German hip hop. Scholars have argued that the Old School German hip hop “scene was musically and vocally oriented to American role models. Rhymes were written in English; funk and soul samples dominated musical structures”.However, Old Schoolers themselves contend that it is the New School German rap artists who have been “Americanized,” and therefore lack the authenticity of the struggle of the ghetto in West Germany. The German old school acknowledged that there were many the differences between the situation in the United States and the situation in Germany, and aimed at expressing the concept of “realness,” meaning to “be true to oneself”. Different from the US hip hop’s equating “realness” with “street credibility,” many raps that came out of the old school German hip hop “address this issue and reject unreflected imitation of US hip hop as clichés and as the betrayal of the concept of realness”.Furthermore, the Old School of German hip hop may have been seen as representing “a critique of White America” because of its modeling after US hip hop; however, Old schoolers dispute that hip hop in Germany was about the oppression of people in Germany. One Old School artist, DJ Cutfaster lamented that, “Most people have forgotten that hip hop functions as a mouthpiece against violence and oppression and ultimately against the ghetto, which has become the metaphor for the deplorable state of our world”. Contrary to the New School hip hop’s attempts to crossover into the mainstream popular culture, the Old School “envisioned and propagated hip hop as an underground community that needed to keep its distance from and to create resistance to mainstream culture in order to avoid co-optation”.
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