Eric Barber Digital Marketing

 Initially taking cues from the likes of Public Enemy, the sample-heavy, politicized sound has found its very own identity amongst a myriad of multi-cultural nationals, with a heady mix of old and new styles. Breaking down the starting points, biggest artists and latest trends, this is the ultimate guide to German hip-hop.

 German hip-hop is real, and comparatively, it’s as important as electronic and rock music when it comes to the cultural conversation. Today, there’s a multitude of styles, both on the over- and underground. Going back, German hip-hop can trace its roots to the town of Heidelberg in the mid-to-late 1980s. Frederick Hahn, better known as Torch, was an MC for Advanced Chemistry, a local political hip-hop group whose members came from immigrant families. The group – one of the first to rap in German – were vocal in their support against racism, police violence and right-wing politics, politicizing their own identity as Germans while the country was forging a new cosmopolitan future. One of their biggest-selling singles was called ‘Fremd im eigenen Land’ (“foreign in my own country”), placing pro-immigrant politics in the mainstream and setting a template for what was to come.

 At around the same time, a very different type of German hip-hop group emerged: Die Fantastischen Vier aka “The Fantastic Four”. The rappers from Stuttgart sought to distance themselves from the American sound, aiming to create something inherently more German, and ultimately more attuned towards commercial success. But with two separate ideologies, Die Fantastischen Vier became embroiled in a classic rivalry with Advanced Chemistry right from the get-go, pitting the two different hip-hop communities against each other.

 Alongside acts such as Fettes Brot and Fünf Sterne Deluxe, the early 1990s became dominated by a contingent of similar white, middle-class hip-hop groups. With chart-topping hits, the scene was set for Germany’s hip-hop community to grow while simultaneously cementing a very unique, German twist to hip-hop’s quintessential nature.

 Towards the end of the 1990s, German hip-hop became narrated through second-generation immigrant musicians who eventually went on to become the scene’s stars. “The biggest German hip-hop artist of all time? Most would say that would be Kool Savas,” says Marc Leopoldseder from leading German hip-hop publication Splash! Mag. Born to a German mother and a Turkish father, Kool Savas brought a more ardent, street sound to the whole scene, scoring number one chart positions with his albums Aura and Märtyrer. As immigration in Germany increased during the 1990s, hip-hop became an ever-important vessel for those whose voices needed to be heard, especially the Turkish, which there were two million of towards the end of the decade.

 Another of the scene’s biggest artists was Bushido, a controversial artist with a Tunisian father and German mother. “He’s like the godfather of German gangsta rap, and a big role model for Arab and Turkish kids,” explains Marc. “He was the first famous rapper that didn’t want to look like an American, but more like the guys from the rough Berlin neighbourhoods.” Along with the likes of Kool Savas, edgier rap artists helped further politicize the scene, driving home a darker street sound. Artists such as Sido, Kollegah, Haftbefehl and Megaloh all started to create a new German hip-hop identity, along with one of the most prominent rap stars from this time, Hamburg’s Samy Deluxe.

 In Europe, every country claims its own hip-hop identity, with France having the most unique and formidable character. In recent years, a lot of German acts have been taking their cues from the explosive Parisian duo PNL, an act that has been blowing up with its unique flavour and socially-rooted rap. “As most of the German street rappers have Turkish, Arab, Persian or Kurdish roots, they identify more easily with French rappers than with Americans,” Marc explains.

 One such recent outcrop of musicians who have taken influence from PNL is 187 Strassenbande, a crew from Hamburg, consisting of Gzuz, Bonez MC, Maxwell, LX and Jambeatz. The 2016 LP Palmen aus Plastik released by Bonez MC and Austrian producer RAF Camora went to number one in Germany, and incorporated many modern style elements, with dancehall and trap influences.

 “Another crew that’s very hot at the moment is KMN Gang,” Marc points out. Hailing from Dresden, the KMN Gang rap about marginalization and criminality, taking many stylistic and lyrical cues from PNL and the French scene. Along with the more modern trap-based beats, Marc is keen to point out the “weird, cloudy, and artsy flavours”.

 Artists such as Young Hurn, LGoony, Juicy Gay and Haiyti are leading examples of young musicians creating new and exciting styles within the community. The latter, an exciting female rap artist from Hamburg, was described by Noisey as “the best and most innovative German rapper of our time”. Haiyti is also part of a newer contingent contesting the predominately male scene, alongside Leila Akinyi and controversial Berlin duo SXTN.

 Like Germany’s ever-growing international community, the scene is broad, accommodating all types of hip-hop. From dancefloor-oriented Peter Fox to the goofy witticism of CRO, from Berlin rogue troop K.I.Z. to the comedic and easy-going nature of MC Fitti, there’s a rich variety for all. There’s even room for a group consisting solely of hand-puppets, the Puppetmastaz. With the influx of Syrian migrants, it’s only a matter of time before the cosmopolitan community grows in diversity even more. One such artist who migrated to Berlin during the Syrian civil conflict was Mohammed Abu Hajar of the Mazzaj Rap band, who is already making waves on a local level.

 Due to language limitations, German hip-hop will never be able to challenge its American counterpart, but when checking the charts of leading hip-hop store store HHV, independent sales tell a very different picture. Re-issues of Fünf Sterne Deluxe sit next to Anderson .Paak and Joy Denalane in the top 100. Local beat-music collective BeatGeeks have a compilation record alongside local rappers Audio88 and Bushido, in a top sellers list that also includes A Tribe Called Quest and Sleaford Mods. It goes to show that in Germany, there’s still space for a wider, creative outlet.

 Hip hop or hip-hop is a culture and art movement that was created by African Americans[1][2] pioneered from Black American street culture,[3][4] also known as hip hop African American culture,[5][6][7] that had been around for years prior to its more mainstream discovery[8] while reaching other groups such as Latino Americans and Caribbean Americans, starting in the Bronx, New York City.[a] Hip Hop is one of cultural movements that has been shaped and dominated by African American males[10] though female hip hop artists have contributed to the art form and culture as well.[11]Hip hop culture is characterized by four key elements: rapping[b], DJing and turntablism, breakdancing, and graffiti.[12][13][14] Other elements include historical knowledge of the movement, beatboxing, street entrepreneurship, hip hop language, and hip hop fashion.[15][16][17] Some of these are argued to be the “fifth element”.[18]

 The Bronx hip hop scene emerged in the mid-1970s from neighborhood block parties thrown by the Black Spades, an African American group that has been described as being a gang, a club, and a music group. Brother-sister duo DJ Kool Herc and Cindy Campbell additionally hosted DJ parties in the Bronx and are credited for the rise in the genre.[19] Hip hop culture has spread to both urban and suburban communities throughout the United States and subsequently the world.[20] These elements were adapted and developed considerably, particularly as the art forms spread to new continents and merged with local styles in the 1990s and subsequent decades. Even as the movement continues to expand globally and explore myriad styles and art forms, including hip hop theater and hip hop film, the four foundational elements provide coherence and a strong foundation for hip hop culture.[21]

 Hip hop is simultaneously a new and old phenomenon; the importance of sampling tracks, beats, and basslines from old records to the art form means that much of the culture has revolved around the idea of updating classic recordings, attitudes, and experiences for modern audiences. Sampling older culture and reusing it in a new context or a new format is called "flipping" in hip hop culture.[22] Hip hop music follows in the footsteps of earlier African-American-rooted and Latino musical genres such as blues, jazz, rag-time, funk, salsa, and disco to become one of the most practiced genres worldwide.

 In the 2000s, with the rise of new media platforms such as online music streaming services, fans discovered and downloaded or streamed hip hop music through social networking sites beginning with Blackplanet & Myspace, as well as from websites like YouTube, Worldstarhiphop, SoundCloud, and Spotify.[23][24]

 Keith "Cowboy" Wiggins, a member of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, has been credited with coining the term[25] in 1978 while teasing a friend who had just joined the US Army by scat singing the made-up words "hip/hop/hip/hop" in a way that mimicked the rhythmic cadence of marching soldiers. Cowboy later worked the "hip hop" cadence into his stage performance.[26][27] The group frequently performed with disco artists who would refer to this new type of music by calling them "hip hoppers". The name was originally meant as a sign of disrespect but soon came to identify this new music and culture.[28]

 The song "Rapper's Delight" by The Sugarhill Gang, released in 1979, begins with the phrase "I said a hip, hop, the hippie the hippie to the hip hip hop, and you don't stop".[29] The 1980 hit Rapture by Blondie contains a rapping part with the line "And you hip-hop, and you don't stop, just blast off, sure shot." Lovebug Starski — a Bronx DJ who put out a single called "The Positive Life" in 1981 – and DJ Hollywood then began using the term when referring to this new disco rap music. Bill Alder, an independent consultant, once said, "There was hardly ever a moment when rap music was underground, one of the first so-called rap records, was a monster hit ('Rapper's Delight' by the Sugar Hill Gang on Sugarhill Records)."[30]

 Hip hop pioneer and South Bronx community leader Afrika Bambaataa also credits Lovebug Starski as the first to use the term "hip hop" as it relates to the culture. Bambaataa, former leader of the Black Spades, also did much to further popularize the term. The first use of the term in print, referring specifically to the culture and its elements, was in a January 1982 interview of Afrika Bambaataa by Michael Holman in the East Village Eye.[31] The term gained further currency in September of that year in The Village Voice, in a profile of Bambaataa written by Steven Hager, who also published the first comprehensive history of the culture with St. Martins' Press.[26][32]

Eric Barber Music

 In the 1970s, an underground urban movement known as "hip hop" began to form in the Bronx, New York City. It focused on emceeing (or MCing) over house parties and neighborhood block party events, held outdoors. Hip hop music has been a powerful medium for protesting the impact of legal institutions on minorities, particularly police and prisons.[33] Historically, hip hop arose out of the ruins of a post-industrial and ravaged South Bronx, as a form of expression of urban Black and Latino youth, whom the public and political discourse had written off as marginalized communities.[33]

 Jamaican-born DJ Clive "Kool Herc" Campbell[34] pioneered the use of DJing percussion "breaks" in hip hop music. Beginning at Herc's home in a high-rise apartment at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, the movement later spread across the entire borough.[35] On August 11, 1973 DJ Kool Herc was the DJ at his sister's back-to-school party. He extended the beat of a record by using two record players, isolating the percussion "breaks" by using a mixer to switch between the two records. Kool Herc's sister, Cindy Campbell, produced and funded the Back to School Party that became the "Birth of Hip Hop".[36]

 According to local sources, at a Sedgwick Avenue party on August 11, 1973, Herc introduced an original turntablist style – known as "breakbeat"[37] – that later became an essential element of modern hip hop.[38] According to Peter Shapiro, while Herc's innovation "laid the foundations for hip hop ... it was another DJ, Grand wizzard Theodore, who created its signature flourish in 1977 or 1978" – "scratching".[37]

 A second key musical element in hip hop music is emceeing (also called MCing or rapping). Emceeing is the rhythmic spoken delivery of rhymes and wordplay, delivered at first without accompaniment and later done over a beat. This spoken style was influenced by the African American style style of "capping", a performance where men tried to outdo each other in originality of their language and tried to gain the favor of the listeners.[39] The basic elements of hip hop—boasting raps, rival "posses" (groups), uptown "throw-downs", and political and social commentary—were all long present in African American music.

 MCing and rapping performers moved back and forth between the predominance of toasting songs packed with a mix of boasting, 'slackness' and sexual innuendo and a more topical, political, socially conscious style. The role of the MC originally was as a Master of Ceremonies for a DJ dance event. The MC would introduce the DJ and try to pump up the audience. The MC spoke between the DJ's songs, urging everyone to get up and dance. MCs would also tell jokes and use their energetic language and enthusiasm to rev up the crowd. Eventually, this introducing role developed into longer sessions of spoken, rhythmic wordplay, and rhyming, which became rapping.

 By 1979 hip hop music had become a mainstream genre. It spread across the world in the 1990s with controversial "gangsta" rap.[40] Herc also developed upon break-beat deejaying,[41] where the breaks of funk songs—the part most suited to dance, usually percussion-based—were isolated and repeated for the purpose of all-night dance parties. This form of music playback, using hard funk and rock, formed the basis of hip hop music. Campbell's announcements and exhortations to dancers would lead to the syncopated, rhymed spoken accompaniment now known as rapping. He dubbed his dancers "break-boys" and "break-girls", or simply b-boys and b-girls. According to Herc, "breaking" was also street slang for "getting excited" and "acting energetically"[42]

 DJs such as Grand Wizzard Theodore, Grandmaster Flash, and Jazzy Jay refined and developed the use of breakbeats, including cutting and scratching.[43] The approach used by Herc was soon widely copied, and by the late 1970s, DJs were releasing 12-inch records where they would rap to the beat. Influential tunes included Fatback Band's "King Tim III (Personality Jock)", The Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight", and Kurtis Blow's "Christmas Rappin'", all released in 1979.[44][dead link] Herc and other DJs would connect their equipment to power lines and perform at venues such as public basketball courts and at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, Bronx, New York, now officially a historic building.[45]

 DJs such as Grand Wizzard Theodore, Grandmaster Flash, and Jazzy Jay refined and developed the use of breakbeats, including cutting and scratching.[43] The approach used by Herc was soon widely copied, and by the late 1970s, DJs were releasing 12-inch records where they would rap to the beat. Influential tunes included Fatback Band's "King Tim III (Personality Jock)", The Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight", and Kurtis Blow's "Christmas Rappin'", all released in 1979.[44][dead link] Herc and other DJs would connect their equipment to power lines and perform at venues such as public basketball courts and at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, Bronx, New York, now officially a historic building.[45]

 The equipment consisted of numerous speakers, turntables, and one or more microphones.[46] By using this technique, DJs could create a variety of music, but according to Rap Attack by David Toop "At its worst the technique could turn the night into one endless and inevitably boring song".[47] KC The Prince of Soul, a rapper-lyricist with Pete DJ Jones, is often credited with being the first rap lyricist to call himself an "MC".[48]

 Street gangs were prevalent in the poverty of the South Bronx, and much of the graffiti, rapping, and b-boying at these parties were all artistic variations on the competition and one-upmanship of street gangs. Sensing that gang members' often violent urges could be turned into creative ones, Afrika Bambaataa founded the Zulu Nation, a loose confederation of street-dance crews, graffiti artists, and rap musicians. By the late 1970s, the culture had gained media attention, with Billboard magazine printing an article titled "B Beats Bombarding Bronx", commenting on the local phenomenon and mentioning influential figures such as Kool Herc.[49]

 The New York City blackout of 1977 saw widespread looting, arson, and other citywide disorders especially in the Bronx[50] where a number of looters stole DJ equipment from electronics stores. As a result, the hip hop genre, barely known outside of the Bronx at the time, grew at an astounding rate from 1977 onward.[51]

 DJ Kool Herc's house parties gained popularity and later moved to outdoor venues to accommodate more people. Hosted in parks, these outdoor parties became a means of expression and an outlet for teenagers, where "instead of getting into trouble on the streets, teens now had a place to expend their pent-up energy."[52] Tony Tone, a member of the Cold Crush Brothers, stated that "hip hop saved a lot of lives".[52]

 For inner-city youth, participating in hip hop culture became a way of dealing with the hardships of life as minorities within America, and an outlet to deal with the risk of violence and the rise of gang culture. MC Kid Lucky mentions that "people used to break-dance against each other instead of fighting".[53][full citation needed] Inspired by DJ Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa created a street organization called Universal Zulu Nation, centered around hip hop, as a means to draw teenagers out of gang life, drugs and violence.[52]

 The lyrical content of many early rap groups focused on social issues, most notably in the seminal track "The Message" (1982) by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, which discussed the realities of life in the housing projects.[54] "Young black Americans coming out of the civil rights movement have used hip hop culture in the 1980s and 1990s to show the limitations of the movement."[55] Hip hop gave young African Americans a voice to let their issues be heard; "Like rock-and-roll, hip hop is vigorously opposed by conservatives because it romanticizes violence, law-breaking, and gangs".[55] It also gave people a chance for financial gain by "reducing the rest of the world to consumers of its social concerns."[55]

 In late 1979, Debbie Harry of Blondie took Nile Rodgers of Chic to such an event, as the main backing track used was the break from Chic's "Good Times".[44] The new style influenced Harry, and Blondie's later hit single from 1981 "Rapture" became the first major single containing hip hop elements by a white group or artist to hit number one on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100—the song itself is usually considered new wave and fuses heavy pop music elements, but there is an extended rap by Harry near the end.

 In 1980, Kurtis Blow released his self-titled debut album featuring the single "The Breaks", which became the first certified gold rap song.[56] In 1982, Afrika Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force released the electro-funk track "Planet Rock". Instead of simply rapping over disco beats, Bambaataa and producer Arthur Baker created an electronic sound using the Roland TR-808 drum machine and sampling from Kraftwerk.[57] "Planet Rock" is widely regarded as a turning point; fusing electro with hip hop, it was "like a light being switched on", resulting in a new genre.[58]

 The track also helped popularize the 808, which became a cornerstone of hip hop music;[59] Wired and Slate both described the machine as hip hop's equivalent to the Fender Stratocaster, which had dramatically influenced the development of rock music.[60][61] Released in 1986, Licensed to Ill by the Beastie Boys became the first rap LP to top the Billboard album chart.[62] Beastie Boys were also one of the first white hip hop artists and a highly influential band in the history of hip hop, ranked as No.12 most influential band by Spin Magazine.[63]

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