Rap in crisis: When hip-hop legends lose their realness

When the world was still in order, the rappers Celo & Abdi were jumped by a ram in the zoo and Xatar dreamed of a kofta skewer in prison. I think of YouTube content linked to German rap from the 2010s and feel briefly nostalgic. It was the time before the great gold rush.

The platforms had not yet completely lost their anarchic amateur vibe, and even professional productions could not get rid of the DIY character. German rap interview videos on channels like 16Bars were so poorly lit, everyone looked sickly. The interviewees started talking. They monologued and suppressed the urge to appear polished.

Many of these extra-long interviews seemed like disguised therapy sessions; in others, child-like street rappers almost forgot to hide this very childishness. What happened there was “real”, low budget and not a big deal. It was the first time that people with a migration background in Germany had so much speaking engagement and screen time. That would have been unthinkable on television.

Then the so-called cloud rap hit: with its “aesthetics of holding on,” as cultural journalist Sascha Ehlert once called it. He covered this reality with more and more irony. Here too, between the Soundcloud hits, the LiveFromEarth channel and Twitter meltdowns, it was clear: it's primarily about fun and secondarily about selling - which sold pretty well.

Even the YouTuber Rooz, who philosophized about life with Bushido's ex-manager Arafat Abou-Chaker, was macabre and completely off even back then, but also: justifiably fascinating? The homophobia, the sexism, the absurd conspiracy stories from reptilians in all the videos: bad. But just as often it was all fun and human. No slop, no script. This content worked independently of the music.

And today? Arafat Abou-Chaker sits at the right-wing extremist Compact magazine. Capital Bra does casino streams. What was going on with the arrest warrant was voyeuristically exploited on Netflix.

And Rin and LGoony, who were part of “Cloud Rap” at the time, are currently speaking publicly in videos about the fact that it is no longer running. Content as crisis communication. Tours are being canceled and the dominance of streaming platforms is scourging the middle class in music.

Maybe a few Tiktok stars enjoy content. Ikkimel, Ski Aggu, predictable and scripted. Like “Stoked” or Apple Music, interviews are financed by the music industry. Accordingly, they often seem affirmative and cramped. The “aesthetics of staying on top” has degenerated into a relic or is just a holding on to human decay. Rappers like Pashanim almost completely avoid content, it's probably the smartest way. A bubble burst.

What remains is a return to professionalized hobbyism. The binhieramleben collective gives me hope. The formula is simple. They stream live on Twitch with a changing line-up, build a beat and rap. These streams are about the firm belief that there is always a better rhyme for house than mouse. Watching these people in their shared room in Leipzig, shit-talking, creating songs about brushing their teeth and small Saxon towns, and the camera rolling along, has a healing effect. Something is happening in the rubble of the burst bubble.