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Rap MusiK: Made in Germany

Rap songs performance in the German language has overcome shifts and resistance from the native population of Germany before coming in the form we know it today from MTV and radio. Even though there is a connection between the rap in US and rap in Germany, the way hip-hop music found its paths to this European country remains much more complicated, and hip-hop suddenly looked much bigger than youth centers and graffiti gangs. Germans performed rap in a similar way the Americans did during first days of a new genre in Germany. The question of how this genre got over overseas and came to a European country is being viewed as complicated and interesting. The answer reveals to the reader how a simple amusement of spare time of middle-class Germans has gradually turned into much bigger thing – a phenomenon within subculture Germans have not faced before. How people of the country reacted to and adopted music genre for their own comfort, has resulted in the attention to the new movement.

According to the study about similarities of subculture between US and Germany, conducted by Susanne Kristen and Mark Shevy, it was hypothesized that rap would show evidence of glocalization in ethnicity, causing a genre by culture interaction (2012, para 10). Theorists in communication research and cross-cultural psychology proposed that “the degree of similarity between two countries can determine the means of communication or exchange across their cultures” (Kristen, Shevy, 2012). In the research paper conducted by the communications scholars, Gudykunst, Kogut et al, it was asserted that when comparing Southern Germany and the Midwestern USA, there was expected high levels of “cross-cultural similarities regarding cognitive associations with popular music genres” (Kristen, Shevy, 2012). Therefore, examining the similarities between two countries would allow tracing more evidence about the reasons of rap success in Germany.

Studies on local audience reception (Lee, 2006) inform that users can transform content as a function of cultural peculiarities, social norms, and aesthetic judgments. The resistance to viewing multiculturalism in terms of national identity, and the lack of a resident ethnic group having the right to claim the genre as its own, allows mainstream German rap to consist of a diverse group of ethnicities (para 5). This raises the question of whether the ethnic associations in German listeners’ hip-hop schemas will reflect the non-specific ethnic composition of their own country, or whether the minority-ethnicity association with the genre’s roots will remain intact. The authenticity of rap lies in the exposure of the answer to this question.

Rap in Germany has resulted in not only the appearance of a new genre of music, but also raised interesting notations about the response of the audiences, and how people were affected by the new genre. Certain behaviors, alongside with historical events, have resulted in the emergence of completely new classes of audiences, who are still contributing to the world of music nowadays. Rapping in Germany has a unique distinctiveness that has changed the meaning of the rap in other countries.

How people responded to the first waves of American rap, and what language barriers it has overcome, has affected the new genre of German rap music heard nowadays.

Birth of rap in Germany, starting from the mid 1980’, can indicate the first traces of a new movement in popular cultures, which not only formed the new classes and sub-classes of listeners. These were the middle-class people, who made rap as their leisure activities, and working classes, who used rapping as the defense tool against problems (Hodges, 2014). The new genre in the very beginning did not raise big expectations, and such a fact also implies on the question of the study, of why did the new genre really affected the masses.

The first rappers in Germany in the early 80’s began rapping in English, mimicking the style and even partly-whole songs from the States’ MCs and Europe as well, particularly England. As for the people in Germany, both West, and East, they were more familiar with the other forms of American cultures – breakdancing and graffiti art, for example (Schant, 2015). Street hip-hop dancers attended to their dance moves with the rhythmic music, that was the first hint of rap emergence in Germany. Therefore, elements of American hip-hop culture – such as graffiti and breakdancing – has diffused into Western Europe in the early 1980s, and became the ways of introducing the people of Germany to a new genre of music – rap. It would be revealed further in the essay that even though the rap was a leisure time for middle-class people, after the second wave of its arrival to Germany, every second could start rhyming the words and create a rap him or herself. The reason for such popularity was the second big emigration in the 1990s, when immigrants and refugees were repressed in lower classes and started vocalizing and expressing the problems in the rap songs (Schant, 2015).

The audience and its influence on the new genre – as well as the other way around – will lead us to the analysis of the real nature of the outcomes that resulted from the interaction of the audience with music genre. As the result, we will be getting a real sense of the outcomes of the audience reception in the specific country, which have raised questions about the authenticity of German rap in this country, as well as the deep insights into the thin relationship between the audience and the medium.

Birth of rap in Germany, which happened in the early 1980’s, was quickly caught up by the first rappers and rap groups. These were the Die Fantastischen Vier – which means “The Fantastic Four” –, and the Rödelheim Hartreim Projekt – translating as “Rödelheim Hard-Rhyme Project” (Brown, 2014). The bands bear a significant importance to the matter of audience reception due to the authenticity of rap performance and the rising popularity of the genre back in the year, which came along with these bands. Only because of few interested parties did the rap in Germany had its start, and not faded away after first being introduced. The importance of these first bands are still being praised by Germans as something very authentic, and the natives dedicate a lot of importance and value to these groups (Hodges, 2014). 

(“The Fantastic Four” - the band bear a significant role in the process of rap adaptation in Germany in its early ears. Germans still refer to them as the important figures in shaping of rap genre in the country).

Authentic rap took place, and the first audiences – and the reception correspondingly – have resulted into the interpretation of a phenomenon, called “cultural imperialism”.

Rappers were making this decision, to use rap as a way to honestly represent their identities. That became the central narrative of early German rap. For Die Fantastischen Vier this meant “abandoning the aspiration to emulate Americal rappers” (Hodges, 2014). To emulate the subjects and attitudes of gangster rap would just come across as insincere, and the band decided that they had to represent their own lives and their German identities as just like American rappers used rap to represent their lives. That indicated the authenticity in German rap, which only took place after the new genre was born, and the other way around.

Initially, most German rappers relied on English-language lyrics ( Mitchell, 2011). This fact has led some academics and groups of the German public to interpret the emergence of rap in German pop culture as ‘cultural imperialism’: in other words, as a movement that emulated the culture of the United States at the expense of their native German cultural traditions ( Fischer, 2011). The influence of American hip-hop artists was clearly observed in the German hip-hop scene in its stages of emergence: concert themes and music videos carried similar symbols of power and luxury, such as cars and jewelry. Though the styles found in US rap nowadays still have an enormous influence on German rap, the stories that are told, mainly about embracing identities, are authentically German and don’t imitate American culture like they did in the 80s and 90s (video below). The authenticity lies in the form the video content is presented to the audience. To come to such an evaluation, questions asked should seek an in-depth understanding of how people make sense of lived reality in their social worlds, in the case of the topics – how people express their opinions in the songs.

Die Fantastischen Vier - Sie Ist Weg Die Fantastischen Vier

(The reason I chose the video is the rap is performed in German. Even though  Die Fantastischen Vier is performing both in English and in German, the German are only widely known in the country of its origin.)

German rap did just this as it took U.S. rap and gave it a new meaning and identity in German culture, that started from the middle-class kids, who were trying something appealingly foreign and new from the overseas countries. Black American gangsta rap, however, was not the only type of rap that has developed in Germany, according to Schacht (2015). Issues, addressed by the first rappers –who mainly emerged from the working classes of the main cities of Germany – were caught up by the immigrants and refugees, who were the major component of rappers and who are the leading rappers in Germany nowadays. Rap made by Germans or by underground crews dedicated to rap for both political and artistic reasons, both affected by the events in the country and people within it as a whole. Rap has been able to succeed in Germany not just due to a different national culture of the U.S., but also because people were responding to other racial and ethnic cultures. Especially during the massive waves of immigrants to Germany during 80s and 90s (Elflein, 1998). 

(On the picture, there are the German rappers who are also recognized around the world: Bushido, Sido and others. All coming from immigrant families).

Even though the very first rap music was not as praised by the audience as its English-spoken-mimicked versions, very soon listeners spanned from the local bands and districts in Germany to the international rap lovers, who found this unique appeal in the rap, produced in Germany. The positive reception of micro-audiences, which started from middle classes, has set the pace of a rapid growth of popularity of rapping, not only in a case of the listeners but also the MCs (Kuehnen, 2005).

The topics and themes that were covered, and that even drove the rap in Germany and German language. Those topics were mainly tied to reality, which, in media, “can also create a “suggestion of, resemblance to, what is real,” which is yet another definition of reality”(Kroiz, 2002). To closer explore the themes that go deeper than the cars and jewelry, we will be examining the change in the audiences and, therefore, reception, which affected the rap genre in both ways mutually. When hip-hop music is read, we can trace a throwback to some main events that happened in Germany during the period of the 80s to 90s. The events court a particular affective response from the listeners, according to the article Theories of Media: Performance (Ahern, 2003), and thus, certain events not only represented political influences or, in a bigger global scale influences, but also represented that fluid interaction between performers and the audience using which the former intend to reflect the latter’s re-discovery of his/her humanity (Ahern, 2003).

(On the video, a German rapper Bushido, whose father was Tunisian, feat Shindy. The rap theme clearly indicates luxury, cars, and girls.)

When not rapping in English, many German rappers employed a dialect of German, developed in particular communities – working classes, specifically –, and which was, therefore, associated with immigrants and the German “ghetto.” According to one of the scholars, Loentz, the choice of performing the rhymes in the German language in their music enabled MCs to levy criticism and protest aspects of society and politics that they perceived as having disadvantaged them and their communities (Loentz, 2006). During the 1980s, Germany also first saw a wave of second generation immigrants coming into the country. Immigration spread over the rap albums at that point. 

The author of the book, Yiddish, Kanak Sprak, Klezmer, and HipHop: Ethnolect, Minority Culture, Multiculturalism, and Stereotype in Germany, states that the German synonym for an immigrant is Gastarbeiter, which means 'guest worker,’ and those ‘guest workers’ were rapped about often (Loentz, 2006). But not only the immigrants were rapped about; the immigrants themselves acquired rapping as the way of performing. Immigrant teenagers commonly used rap as a way to defend themselves in a new country. Racism, amongst other topic addressed in rapping, was bursting the rates of active audience reception. Rap, by that time, gained more popularity, and as a result, issues were clearly visible to the people. 

In Germany, gangsta rap – which is a subgenre of rap, emphasizing on gangster lifestyle – has become popular among youths who sympathized the violent and aggressive lyrics. Some German rappers openly or comically flirted with Nazism. One of the MCs at that time, named Fler, “had a hit with the name Neue Deutsche Welle – meaning "New German Wave” – completed with the title written in Third Reich style Gothic print and advertised with an Adolf Hitler quote" (Kuehnen, 2005).

Completing various observations about the inner life of people in the country during the rap emergence help to better understand the deeper influences on the music genre development. Therefore, rather than studying people from the outside, you learn from people from the inside.

It is an interesting moment that during the inception of rap into Germany, most famous hip-hop artists have come from West Germany. This could be because of the large immigrant population there at the time. For example, the community with the most significant number of immigrants was the Turkish community. Within the Turkish community, only 5% of its population were of age 60 or older. Such statistics give justification for why hip-hop may have flourished in Germany; many of the people were young. Furthermore, German rap, much like many other countries, was heavily influenced by the western world.

In the mid-1990s German hip-hop was growing. Falk Schacht, the author of the article How German Rap Found its ‘Flow,’ uses the term 'recontextualization’ to describe the process of “borrowing cultural ideas and integrating them into a new society” (Schacht, 2015). The German rappers of the 80s did not make a solid effort to give rap music a German identity, authenticity, in other words. Rather, the distance the genre provided by their language and their culture was the glue that bound the rappers of the first waves together. Their goal was to be as “gangsta” as possible and to stay as far away as they could from anything that could be considered commercial (Schacht, 2015).

The way the rap found its way in Germany had a critical moment, which played a great deal in composing German hip-hop music that became so popular nowadays – the language itself. 

According to the author, he states that Germans underestimated this shallow moment in the early waves of rapping in the European country, and rapping in mother-language was only addressed almost fifteen years later. From that shift, it became to gain this “personality,” which makes it unique and different (Schacht, 2015).  That is why rap in its early years in America was popular amongst ghetto and working classes, as well as immigrants, whose English sounded “broken.” Music videos, mentioned throughout the essay, stand for an acoustic example. The first rap artists who started trying rapping in German took careful, but steady steps.

Therefore, it was over the course of the 90s that German artists first started making a serious effort to emancipate themselves from Anglophone countries – such as US and England –, and English rap as well as from their German predecessors, The Magnificent Four.

“To be successful in Germany, you have to rap in German. But to be successful internationally, you have to rap in English. It’s a Catch-22” (Szillus).

Moreover, as an increasing number of cultures produce music and other media content for international distribution, it is increasingly important to study how biases and perceptions in the country of origin shape the globally disseminated schema. German listeners’ ratings of German folksy were strongly consistent with a stereotypical representation of the genre.

The rapping in Germany has undergone changes since it has first entered the country at the beginning of the 80s, and according to some of the studies, the reception it got from the native German audience was not smooth at the start. The shaping of a new genre of rap music in this particular European country is strengthened with the help of audience reception observations, which shed light onto the routine and reactions of both performers and listeners of rap. Their influence on the topics and range of growing popularity of rapping in Germany stands for a critical point of the new genre emergence in the country. Both historical events and language barriers have eventually shaped the genre with its unique style and sounding as we hear today on radio and MTV. Mainly, the past events concerning immigration and more visible division between classes, affected the process of development of rap’s “personality,” though, how hip-hopping in the mother language of Germans shifted at some point during the 90s is still an arguable topic. In some sense, it is absorbing that the change occurred after the massive waves of immigrants into the country, and most of the popularity of rapping lived within the lower classes of immigrants. That means, in a logical manner, that rapping should have been performed in other languages, but German, for the immigrants came from different countries, and mainly from Turkey. But on the contrary, the hip hop music in Germany sparked a new direction, being vocalized in the German language instead. This adjustment of immigrants to a new country is for sure the main setting point.

The audience reception analysis helped to understand, first of all, how the language, being the primary mode of communication such as expression of thoughts, feelings, and ideas, stood as the most important argument for the success of rapping in Germany.

 Brown, T. (2014). Keeping it Real’ in a Different ‘Hood: (African-) Americanization and Hip-hop in Germany. Vinyl Ain’t Final: Hip-Hop And The Globalization Of Black Popular Culture, 139

Elflein, D. (1998). From Krauts with Attitudes to Turks with Attitudes: Some Aspects of Hip-Hop History in Germany. Popular Music, 17(3), 255-265. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/stable/852956

Fischer, J. (2011). Hip Hop and Soul in Germany. @GI_weltweit. Retrieved 1 March 2017, from https://www.goethe.de/en/kul/mus/gen/pop/hip/8573855.html

Gudykunst W. B. (1997). Cultural variability in communication. Communication Research, 24(4), 327–348. Google Scholar Abstract

Kristen S, Shevy M (2013). A comparison of German and American listeners’ extra musical associations with popular music genres. Psychology of Music;41(6):764-778. doi:10.1177/0305735612451785

Kroiz, L. (2002). reality. Csmt.uchicago.edu. Retrieved 4 March 2017, from http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/performance.htm  

Hodges T. DJBROADCAST IS OFFLINE. Djbroadcastnet. 2014. Available at: https://www.djbroadcast.net/article/98876/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-german-rap. Accessed April 14, 2017.

Kuehnen, E. (2005). Rap music and the far right: Germany goes gangsta - Independent Online Edition > Europe. Web.archive.org. Retrieved 4 March 2017, from https://web.archive.org/web/20080113092627/http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article306413.ece

Lee F. L. F. (2006). Cultural discount and cross-culture predictability: Examining the box office performance of American movies in Hong Kong. Journal of Media Economics, 19(4), 259–278. Google Scholar

Loentz, E. (2006). Yiddish, Kanak Sprak, Klezmer, and HipHop: Ethnolect, Minority Culture, Multiculturalism, and Stereotype in Germany. Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal Of Jewish Studies, 25(1), 33-62. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/sho.2006.0134 

Mitchell, T. S. (2001). Global noise (1st ed.). Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Univ. Pr.

Michael T. Putnam & John T. Littlejohn (2007) National Socialism withFler? German Hip Hop from the Right, Popular Music and Society, 30:4, 453-468, DOI:10.1080/03007760701546323

Shevy M., Kristen S. (2009). German listeners’ music-genre schemas for international and domestic popular music: Differences in cognitive meanings associated with exposure to country, hip-hop, punk, and German folksy music. Paper presented at the International Communication Association, Chicago

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Rap Musik: Made in Germany

Rapping in the German language has overcome shifts and resistance from the native population of Germany before coming in the form we know it today from MTV and radio. Even though there is a connection between the rap in US and rap in Germany, the way hip-hop music found its paths to this European country remains much more complicated and interesting, and hip-hop suddenly looked much bigger than youth centers and graffiti gangs. Through the examination of certain events, as well as German people's response to rapping in English from Anglophone countries, we will determine how these criteria have shaped an American newcomer to Germany’s new music genre – rap, which has gained "personality." To what extend both massive immigrations to Germany after the World War II, and peculiarity of a mother language can be examined through the new media reception by the audience, the analysis will shed light onto the distinctiveness of the late rap emergence in Germany, if to compare to other countries, such as the United States and England. How people responded to the first waves of American rap, and what language barriers it has overcome, has affected the new genre of German rap music heard nowadays.

Hip-hop music is a music genre that was formed in New York, United States in the 1970s which consist of a rhymed rhythmic music that is commonly known as rapping. Rhythmic speech in most of the performances accompanies the boom box or some music. The first rappers in Germany in the early 80's began rapping in English, mimicking the style and even partly-whole songs from the States' MCs and Europe as well, particularly England. As for the people in Germany, both West, and East, they were more familiar with the other forms of American cultures – breakdancing and graffiti art, for example. Street hip-hop dancers attended to their dance moves with the rhythmic music, that was the first hint of rap emergence in Germany. Therefore, elements of American hip-hop culture – such as graffiti and breakdancing – has diffused into Western Europe in the early 1980s, and became the ways of introducing the people of Germany to a new genre of music – rap. It would be revealed further in the essay that even though the rap was a leisure time for middle-class people, in a sense, after the second wave of its arrival to Germany, every second could start rhyming the words and create a rap him or herself. The reason for such popularity was the second big emigration in the 1990s, when immigrants and refugees were repressed in lower classes and started vocalizing and "visualizing" the problems in the hip-hop songs.

We will be examining the reception of the new media – in the case of the study, specifically rap as a music genre – by the audience, bringing up specific examples of the rappers and addressing certain topics about reality in the hip hop.

It was not until the early 1990s that German hip hop entered the mainstream, as groups like Die Fantastischen Vier – which means "The Fantastic Four" –, and the Rödelheim Hartreim Projekt – translating as "Rödelheim Hard-Rhyme Project" – gained popularity (Brown, 2014).

Die Fantastischen Vier

Rödelheim Hartreim Projekt

Until the 90s the rap in Germany was performed in English, and the rappers took the safe position of covering popular English-language songs "to ride their wave of success" (Schacht, 2015). Initially, most German rappers relied on English-language lyrics. This fact has led some academics and groups of the German public to interpret the emergence of hip-hop in German pop culture as 'cultural imperialism': in other words, as a movement that emulated the culture of the United States at the expense of their native German cultural traditions. The influence of American hip-hop artists was clearly observed in the German hip-hop scene in its stages of emergence: concert themes and music videos carried similar symbols of power and luxury, such as cars and jewelry. Though the styles found in US hip hop nowadays still have an enormous influence on German rap, the stories that are told, mainly about embracing identities, are authentically German and don't imitate American culture like they did in the 80s and 90s (video below). To come to such an evaluation, questions asked should seek an in-depth understanding of how people make sense of lived reality in their social worlds, in the case of the topics – how people express their opinions in the songs.

Die Fantastischen Vier - Sie Ist Weg Die Fantastischen Vier

German hip-hop did just this as it took U.S. rap and gave it a new meaning and identity in German culture, that started from the middle-class kids, who were trying something "fancy" and new from the overseas countries. Black American gangsta rap, however, is not the only type of rap that has developed in Germany, according to the author Schacht. Some of the most innovative rap music in Germany was made by Germans or by underground crews dedicated to rap for both political and artistic reasons. Rap has been able to succeed in Germany not just due to a different national culture of the U.S., but also because people were responding to other racial and ethnic cultures. Especially during the massive waves of immigrants to Germany during 80s and 90s.

Even though the very first hip hop music was not as praised by the audience as its English-spoken-mimicked versions, very soon listeners spanned from the local bands and districts in Germany to the international rap lovers, who found this unique appeal in the rap, produced in Germany. The positive reception of micro-audiences, which started from middle classes, has set the pace of a rapid growth of popularity of rapping, not only in a case of the listeners but also the MCs.

The other interesting matter to mention is the topics and themes that were covered, and that even drove the rap in Germany and German language. Those topics were mainly tied to reality – the specific events during specific times. To closer explore the themes that go deeper than the cars and jewelry, we will be examining the change in the audiences and, therefore, reception, which affected the rap genre in both ways mutually. When hip-hop music was read, we can trace a throwback to some main events that happened in Germany during the period of the 80s to 90s. The events court a particular affective response from the listeners, according to the article Theories of Media: Performance (Ahern, 2003), and thus, certain events not only represented political influences or, in a bigger global scale influences, but also represented that fluid interaction between performers and the audience using which the former intend to reflect the latter's re-discovery of his/her humanity (Ahern, 2003).

On the video below, a German rapper Bushido, whose father was Tunisian, feat Shindy. The rap theme clearly indicates luxury, cars, and girls.

When not rapping in English, many German rappers employed a dialect of German, developed in particular communities – lower classes, specifically –, and which was, therefore, associated with immigrants and the German "ghetto." According to one of the scholars, Loentz, the choice of performing the rhymes in the German language in their music enabled MCs to levy criticism and protest aspects of society and politics that they perceived as having disadvantaged them and their communities (Loentz, 2006). During the 1980s, Germany also first saw a wave of second generation immigrants coming into the country. Immigration became a big issue in hip hop albums at that point. 

The author of the book, Yiddish, Kanak Sprak, Klezmer, and HipHop: Ethnolect, Minority Culture, Multiculturalism, and Stereotype in Germany, states that the German synonym for an immigrant is Gastarbeiter, which means 'guest worker,' and those ‘guest workers' were rapped about often (Loentz, 2006). But not only the immigrants were rapped about; the immigrants themselves acquired rapping as the way of performing. Immigrant teenagers commonly used rap and hip hop as a way to defend themselves in a new country. Loentz then argues that the minorities that formed "ghetto," similar to the ones in the Unites States, were also influenced by the following fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989, and German re-unification, and "played a role in German Vergangenheitsbewaltigung [mastering the past]" (Loentz, 2006). After the reunification of Germany in 1990, many Germans saw a growing wave of racism. 

Because many hip hop artists were children of immigrants, this became a major theme of German hip-hop at that period. In Germany, gangsta rap – which is a subgenre of rap, emphasizing on gangster lifestyle – has become popular among youths who sympathized the violent and aggressive lyrics. Some German rappers openly or comically flirted with Nazism. One of the MCs at that time, named Fler, "had a hit with the name Neue Deutsche Welle – meaning "New German Wave" – completed with the title written in Third Reich style Gothic print and advertised with an Adolf Hitler quote" (Kuehnen, 2005).

Completing various observations about the inner life of people in the country during the rap emergence help to better understand the deeper influences on the music genre development. Therefore, rather than studying people from the outside, you learn from people from the inside.

Many German hip-hop artists of the time of immigrations were of Turkish-German background, commonly known as the third generation of German citizens who grew up in comparatively poor neighborhoods, like "ghetto" in the USA. Identification with their roots in communities stood up for an important aspect of the identity of individual rappers.

The shift of rapping from English into German increased hip-hop's appeal to the German people, Gastarbeiter (guest workers) included. Growing self-confidence among Germany's immigrant population coincided with the use of the German language in German hip-hop, and provided them with a vocal outlet in line with the plight of poor African-Americans, out of which hip-hop music had initially emerged. As to highlight the point of how much of an influence immigration had in Germany, there is an example of the Russian rap artist, who's family immigrated to Germany in the middle 90s, when he was very young. But first, it is important to mention, why rap is so much different from pop. Nowadays, rap has taken various topics, even though most of the rappers – and not even in Germany – prefer to put as much of symbolism and meanings into their "songs" as possible. It is logical because an average song contains less meaning and explores the theme so much lesser than in rap for the reason of the time limit.

Miron Fyodorovich, under the nick Oxxxymiron, immigrated with his family to Germany during the active development and growing popularity of rap in the country.

In Russian-speaking countries, Oxxxymiron is often called as a Russian Eminem and is gaining so much popularity nowadays in Russia and Ukraine. From his interview, he refers to his style as "Grime" rap, initially coming from street rap in Germany in 1980s and 90s (Oxxxymiron, 2012). Oxxxymiron also mentions that when he started reading rap in Germany as a teen, he believed that rap existed only in Germany, and with his move to Russia he brought the Grime rap, the new trend, which has started in Russia from this rapper. Being in high school, as an immigrant, young Miron had the tense relationship with his classmates, for being a newcomer from the lower class. The teen started writing a rap to release his anger, which again supports the point that immigrants found rapping as a way to defend themselves. Later in his career, the rapper addressed his high-school experiences in a song “The Last Ring,” which you may see below.

It is an interesting moment that during the inception of hip-hop into Germany, most famous hip-hop artists have come from West Germany. This could be because of the large immigrant population there at the time. For example, the community with the most significant number of immigrants was the Turkish community. Within the Turkish community, only 5% of its population were of age 60 or older. Such statistics give justification for why hip-hop may have flourished in Germany; many of the people were young. Furthermore, German hip hop, much like many other countries, was heavily influenced by the western world.

In the mid-1990s German hip-hop was growing. Falk Schacht, the author of the article How German Rap Found its ‘Flow,' uses the term 'recontextualization' to describe the process of “borrowing cultural ideas and integrating them into a new society” (Schacht, 2015). The German rappers of the 80s did not make a solid effort to give hip-hop music a German identity, authenticity, in other words. Rather, the distance the genre provided by their language and their culture was the glue that bound the rappers of the first waves together. Their goal was to be as "gangsta" as possible and to stay as far away as they could from anything that could be considered commercial (Schacht, 2015).

The way the rap found its way in Germany had a critical moment, which played a great deal in composing German hip-hop music that became so popular nowadays – the language itself. 

According to the author, he states that Germans underestimated this shallow moment in the early waves of rapping in the European country, and rapping in mother-language was only addressed almost fifteen years later. From that shift, it became to gain this "personality," which makes it unique and different (Schacht, 2015). The way the German language sounds itself, states his observation the author, cannot be assigned to "flowing," as it is with an English-spoken world, but rap, in some sense, is intended to sound different from pop, for instance, and even harsh to highlight the problems it addresses. That is why rap in its early years in America was popular amongst ghetto and lower classes, as well as immigrants, whose English sounded "broken." Music videos, mentioned throughout the essay, stand for an acoustic example. The words, in a sense, combine and go along with the sharp beats of the background music, creating a better feeling of belonging of the words to the music. The first rap artists who started trying rapping in German took careful, but steady steps.

Therefore, it was over the course of the 90s that German artists first started making a serious effort to emancipate themselves from Anglophone countries – such as US and England –, and English hip-hop as well as from their German predecessors, The Magnificent Four.

As for a Russian listener of rap, I may argue the point that the German language is somehow similar to Russian regarding harsh sounds and sharp and distinct pronunciation. There is a comparison of how similar two languages may sound below in the videos, and for me – and maybe, some of you – this will strengthen the point that rapping in German brings rap a unique from English sounding. That is the primary argument for the importance of the mother language of Germans in shaping the German hip-hop music that is known nowadays.

Shindy feat. Bushido - Sterne

Oxxxymiron ft. dom!No - Привет со дна (’Hi’ from the bottom)

The rapping in Germany has undergone changes since it has first entered the country at the beginning of the 80s, and according to some of the studies, the reception it got from the native German audience was not smooth at the start. The shaping of a new genre of Hip-Hop music in this particular European country is strengthened with the help of audience reception observations, which sheds light onto the routine and reactions of both performers and listeners of rap. Their influence on the topics and range of growing popularity of rapping in Germany stands for a critical point of the new genre emergence in the country. Both historical events and language barriers have eventually shaped the genre with its unique style and sounding as we hear today on radio and MTV. Mainly, the past events concerning immigration and more visible division between classes, affected the process of development of rap's "personality," though, how hip-hopping in the mother language of Germans shifted at some point during the 90s is still an arguable topic. In some sense, it is absorbing that the change occurred after the massive waves of immigrants into the country, and most of the popularity of rapping lived within the lower classes of immigrants. That means, in a logical manner, that rapping should have been performed in other languages, but German, for the immigrants came from different countries, and mainly from Turkey. But on the contrary, the hip hop music in Germany sparked a new direction, being vocalized in the German language instead. This adjustment of immigrants to a new country is for sure the main setting point.

The audience reception analysis helped to understand, first of all, how the language, being the primary mode of communication such as expression of thoughts, feelings, and ideas, stood as the most important argument for the success of rapping in Germany.

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[ianavish-blog]

Rap Musik in Germany

In the study I am conducting at the moment, I will be exploring the emergence of rap music in Germany, as well as its influence on the culture of the country, and how it was affected by specific events by itself. The main question I will be reflecting on throughout the research will contain the researchers about the origins of rap in Germany – which is closely connected to hip hop from American culture. And logical conclusions that will combine the history and culture and shape the overall identification of rap in Germany for a better understanding.

To start the analysis, it is first important to mention that rap music, according to the author of the research Rap in Germany the Birth of a Genre, Mark Pennay, (2001) “…rapping is an expression of culture” (Penny, p. 112), therefore, the very first question to unwrap on the issue is to dive into some history of Germany during the first hint on rap birth. It all started from the hip hop, and breakdance music beats on the streets of West and East Germany, resulting in a gradual emergence of a new cultural phenomenon. That is the reason my first pin I chose is simply “Hip Hop.” Let it be the starting point of the essay. At the time rap in America was practiced for a long time already, in Germany, the term did not exist yet, and the Anglophone’s “rapping” was indeed something that Germans did not possess in their culture.

The methodological approach I am practicing in the paper is the cultural analysis, for the reason that rap is a part of culture, with its history, certain traits, and subjects (Manovich, 2007). The approach will help visualize the flows of cultural ideas and trends, which are hip hop and music in this particular observation. I chose the image, more like a poster, that perfectly, in my opinion, combines several triggers within the German culture, that all forged the rap the Germans have nowadays; the rap we, people from other cultures and countries, hear today on weekly music charts. The poster combines three major components – graffiti, dynamics of dancing, and type. According to the source of the image (Mr. Tang, N/A), “Even if you can’t understand the lyrics, B-Side always comes correct on the production tip.” The article is short, but it has a very specific example of modern German rap, influenced by culture and ideas.

The third image is a photograph of a rapper, Oxxxymiron, born in Germany during the birth of rap in the country. But first, it is important to mention, why rap is so much different from pop. Nowadays, rap has taken various topics, even though most of the rappers – and not even in Germany – prefer to put as much of symbolism and meanings into their "songs" as possible. It is logical because an average song contains less meaning and explores the theme so much lesser than in rap for the reason of the time limit. Now back to Oxxxymiron. The rapper is often called as a Russian Eminem and is gaining so much popularity nowadays in Russia and Ukraine. From his interview, he refers to his style as "Grime" rap, initially coming from street rap in Germany in 1980's and 90's. (Wikipedia, Oxxxymiron, 2012) Oxxxymiron also mentions that when he started reading rap in Germany as a teen, he actually believed that rap existed only in Germany, and with his move to Russia he brought the Grime rap, the new trend, which has started in Russia from this rapper.