“If no matter what I did, I would be treated as a colorful parrot, then I might as well do what I want.”Īli As’ lyrics are sarcastic, peppered with references ranging from the Greek mythical character Icarus to actor Forest Whitaker, street artist Banksy, and the movie Psycho. “It didn’t matter how German I was, how bourgeois, I was always treated like an outsider,” said As. At the time he had just started studying theater, but decided to break off his university studies. Still As had never considered a hip-hop career until 1999, when a friend and fellow rapper got him into the scene. “I remember walking through Goethe Platz in Munich when I was a kid with my mom and some drunks throwing pebbles at us because we were immigrants,” As told Quartz over the phone. As, whose parents come from Pakistan, could relate to the heavily slanged, street speech of the music, as well as the themes of alienation. It was the kind of music that influenced Munich rapper Ali As when he was younger. In the 1995 song “Fremd im eigenen Land” (“Foreign in my Own Country”), Advanced Chemistry raps that despite having a “passport with a golden eagle,” they are among the few who must show their passport when traveling or field questions like “Where are you really from?” Despite having German citizenship, the group’s members, who have immigrant backgrounds, rap about not being seen as German. The group’s lyrics, however, tell a very German story. Artists began rapping in German, weaving expressions from Turkish, Arabic, and other languages into their music.Īdvanced Chemistry was one of the first groups to start rapping in German, and its music borrows heavily from New York hip-hop. Hip-hop doesn’t require formal musical education or even instruments, so kids could teach themselves to rap just by listening to other artists, Staiger said.
The genre grew quickly in Germany and evolved into its own hybrid.
They are saying “I am also here, listen to me.” “Hip-hop culture gave a voice to people in the society who weren’t otherwise represented,” Falk Schacht, a music journalist, hip-hop artist and record label owner told Quartz. Songs like “Fight the Power” spoke to people who felt outside of German society. Hip-hop came to Germany by way of American groups like Public Enemy, music journalist and former record label owner explained to Quartz at a Turkish café off of Kottbusser Tor in the heart of Kreuzberg. And that has the country’s political leadership worried, particularly after one rapper joined ISIL and served as a recruiter for the terrorist organization. While some artists are urging Germany to open itself up to migrants and accept them as an integral part of the social fabric, others are transmitting a violently anti-Western message. Today as the country struggles to integrate millions of new Muslim immigrants, hip-hop is exposing the fault lines in Germany’s imperfect embrace of its immigrant population.
Over the decades, however, as the number of Muslim immigrants to Germany grew (one estimate forecasts that Germany’s Muslim population will expand by another 25% to 5.5 million by 2030), the country’s hip-hop artists have adopted a much harder, more strident tone. When hip-hop first became popular in Germany in the 1980s, it helped the country’s Muslim immigrants express their plight with lonely anthems of exclusion and alienation. “It is the music of the marginalized, transcending the nation state and national borders.” Hip-hop, which got its start in the US as a form of urban protest, quickly became “the voice of the European ghetto,” Hisham Aidi, author of Rebel Music: Race, Empire and the New Muslim Youth Culture, told me over the phone.