8/20/08
Thanks DAAD!
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Well, I'm back in the states.
We left on Monday, but not before a terrific final show on Saturday--the Graffitibox Summer Jam.
The show was one that I missed last summer while I was in London completing my fieldwork. Fortunately, I was able to go before I left this year. In fact, this year's event was organized by two of my better friends in Berlin's hip hop community: User 1 and Devilist Dave, so I had to make sure to attend. Despite the lousy weather, the festival was great! It seemed to be very well received and also proved a great chance for me to reconnect with some of the rappers that I had not met up with on this trip.
It was hosted by YAAM, a sprawling beach bar and club on the Eastern bank of the Spree river. YAAM usually hosts reggae and dancehall acts, but was perfectly suited to the hip hop summer jam with its three stages, food stands, and basketball court for breakdancing and graffiti art demos.
The YAAM is right at the end of the East Side Gallery--a mile-long section of the Berlin Wall preserved and painted with pop art and graffiti. On the way to the jam, I came upon this graffiti on the Gallery wall and decided it would make a nice part of my close to the blog here at DAAD.
Please note: despite the uncanny coincidence (outside the graffitibox jam, while finishing a grant period from the DAAD for which I am grateful) this is not my graffiti. It does sound fishy though, eh?
So here's my blograffiti:
Thanks
DAAD
16.08.08
So...
Interestingly--and perhaps similarly, in the wake of seeing the DAAD graffiti outside of YAAM--the Graffitibox Summer Jam had an unexpected bit of impact on my research regarding Aggro Berlin. As soon as I got past security I ran into an old contact and friend named Tarik. I introduced my wife, Mary and then we exchanged information about what we'd been up to over the past year or so. He said that the closing of the freestyle sessions at Teroabar and Fraystil had pretty much cut off his chances to rap for an audience regularly. Apparently the other freestyle sessions were few and far between. Nothing had risen to take the place of the popular sessions in the intervening year. This was essentially what I'd been hearing, but I told him about the new session hosted by DJ Bulet at Bar 11 that seemed to be going well.
What tied in with Aggro was that this whole time we'd been talking, a relatively annoying rapper sang verses such as "Mein Penis ist mein beste Freund." I couldn't help but hear the rapper while trying to talk to Tarik. Finally, I made an annoyed gesture, and Tarik explained that this guy was a real problem. According to Tarik, the rapper had recently released a very homophobic and anti-gay track entitled "Keine Toleranz" that explicitly made calls for anti-gay violence. Tarik explained that he could barely stand listening to the guy's hateful lyrics. Our conversation continued as we tried to shout over the rapper's shouted lyrics (he rapped so loudly into the microphone, that the system was constantly distorting). I gave Tarik a pound and continued milling about.
Not five minutes later I ran into another friend from last year (who I'll leave anonymous here). We also caught up with each other's recent affairs, and after bemoaning the fact that 70 percent of the artists at the jam were not worth listening to, he said that the guy performing across the yard (just mentioned) was a perfect example of such "crap." He explained that the guy was G-Hot--an artist formerly signed to Aggro Berlin whose contract was not renewed in the wake of the "Keine Toleranz" controversy. It turned out that this guy, who Tarik was just telling me about, was G-Hot!! (G-Hot's stage name is supposed to sound like "Jihad." It's just provocation as he's not explicitly Muslim or fundamentalist, but hisfather is Turkish and his mother is German). Apparently, he'd released the track without the label and paid the price. I'd heard some of G-Hot's music before, but did not recognize him on stage while I was talking to Tarik. And Tarik didn't mention his name. This other friend noted that the guy was on his way down after Aggro let him go. His new band and label is called Suppe Inna Puppe. I asked my friend "like soup in a puppet?" to which he responded: "Yeah, I don't know. The guy's just stupid."
This bit of hip hop gossip was interesting to me because it showed that despite its success in the provocation business, Aggro had its limits. A song with the homophobic lyrics of a typical hip hop machismo might be permitted, but an overt call to anti-gay violence seemed to cross the line for the label. It's the difference between posturing and clear and present danger, I suppose.
Typical Griff Aside: This reminds me of a conversation that I had with a friend of a friend at a gallery opening about my work. After being introduced, by my friend Ryan (the owner of the small P-Berg gallery) we got to talking about our respective work. Ryan's friend was gay and remarked that there seemed to be a rise in anti-gay behavior associated with young Turkish hip hop fans. He talked about how the rainbow flag outside of one of his favorite bars was torn down weekly by such kids, and how he both experienced and read about such anti-gay behavior. His final point was especially interesting: "it's sad because if it was the 1940s we'd probably be on the same train." His point about Nazi "outsiders" including foreigners as well as homosexuals and communists, relied on an assumption about a mutual distaste for mainstream society, its morals, and its bigotries, on the part of minority youth and gay and lesbian communities. Certainly the point holds true in the US, where such marginalized interest communities that might find a common enemy in prejudice and discrimination instead tend to alienate themselves from one another.
In any case, the fact that Aggro Berlin cut G-Hot off indicates a certain decency (or maybe just economic savvy) that shows the limits of such idiotic hate speech. Here's the album cover of G-Hot's "Aggrogant" (showing the crass humor side of his schtick).
He has since come out with an apology for the track "Keine Toleranz," claiming that the track is from a "3rd person perspective" and is a send-up of anti-gay feelings in the culture at large. Apparently no one buys it. Not Aggro Berlin, and not the folks I spoke with at the Graffitibox event. Here's G-Hot's apology/explanation on YouTube.
Along with a main stage performance by one of my friends, Amewu, the highlight of the night for me came with the performance of Jeneez--a trio of young women who really got the crowd into their performance. They had two (also female) dancers and great choreographed moves and chants. In hip hop an underground mentality tends to cause the better rappers to have the worst stage presences. Keepin' it real, i guess. As though entertaining a crowd is beneath them. This was not the case here as these three women proved that you can put on a good show without compromising lyrics.
In fact, the best part of their show came with their third number. A smooth and bass heavy R&B track entered to which Ninjah (I later learned the names) sang a typically inane "baby, baby, baby" line (recalling a De La Soul track from the 1990s). The three did a writhing sexy dance to match the song. Just as I was settling in for the track (they'd already impressed me and Mary and I was giving them a break for this less exciting number) the DJ scratched the record into a quick spin disrupting the smoothed out number. Coming out of this disjuncture, the three rappers made it clear that this intro was only a joke, and they proceeded to launch into a propulsive hip hop track. The three started rapping instead of singing the melismatic (many note lines, a la Mariah Carey) "baby" lyrics and caught the crowd off-guard, but I think everyone got the joke: we expect girl groups to do such syrupy pseudo-romantic things. This was not the case here, and it was appreciated by the 90 per cent male audience.
There were calls for an encore for a couple minutes after the performance, but apparently the group didn't have other material ready (and I'm sure the organizers had to get on with the next acts anyway).
Janeez (Anarey, Ninjah, and Roxy).
I talked with Ninjah and Roxy after the show for a good twenty minutes. They are all proudly from Berlin, although they celebrate their non-German roots as well as their city. There is a song that addresses the issue of Heimat (homeland) -- and I'll try to write a bit on this later -- but the members are of South Asian, Chinese, and African descent. They have been together since 2004, but are just now getting some attention from record labels and the like. Telling them about my work with Aggro and requesting a later interview (maybe next week over Skype) Roxy, the Afro-German member, noted that she really respects what Aggro is doing. This surprised me a bit, as Aggro tends to be on the misogynistic side, but she said that she and Ninjah have known some of the folks at Aggro for a while and she appreciated the business model. I told them that I could tell they were taking their careers and their performance seriously, and said that I hope she wouldn't take offense if I said that they presented a very "professional" show. She said, "absolutely not" and noted that that's exactly what they're trying to do. They've had offers from various labels, but haven't found the right one. In an art form where authenticity is valued it is refreshing to see a group that is not afraid to practice the art(ifice) that is so foundational to music making. This is not to say that other male rappers have no stage presence, but they certainly aren't doing any choreography and many of even the better rappers would do well to think more about how the lyrics, music, and movement work together.
I am going to see about doing the interview in the next week and will try to conclude the blog with a bit about Jeneez as well as an interview that I hope to do with Aggro's DJ (a very important contact that helped me secure the interviews with B-Tight and Tony D), Werd. I ran into DJ Werd the day after the Graffitibox Summer Jam having Sunday brunch with Amewu on the Landwehrkanal not far from my apartment in Kreuzberg. Werd had just gotten back from San Jose, California--his home. I wanted to get the American DJ's impressions on Aggro as a sort of final point in the work on Aggro. I figure he'll have some important insight on the label and broader questions of German racial and musical politics. We'd hoped to get together that Sunday, but will instead do a phone interview.
That's about it. I'll conclude the denouement next week after speaking with Jeneez and DJ Werd.
Goin' back to Cali,
Griff
Posted by griff at August 20, 2008 10:46 PM EDT
8/6/08
Tony and Bobby on "Ghettos" in Germany
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I've been listening through my interview recordings and decided to write a little bit about the concept of and discourse around ghettos in Germany.
A lot of the more aggressive or gangsta rap coming out of Germany is premised, like in the US, on the idea that the MCs are themselves authentic characters that come from blighted urban areas. The idea of authenticity is especially important in this music, because the chosen themes of violence and survival don't seem to work if the character is using the themes as fictional symbols of other personal struggles. In this way, gangsta rap is taken at face value.
I've been thinking a lot about this recently. Why, when Johnny Cash sings "took a shot of cocaine and I shot my woman down" in "Cocaine Blues," do we not assume he's actually doing those kind of things? We don't take his music literally. It's music after all. He's telling a story, and we're gripped by the story itself, not the idea that it is he who took these inhumane actions. Country music has its own authenticity hang ups, but we can go back to Frank Sinatra singing "Mack the Knife" and earlier to find examples of music telling violent and gruesome stories. It seems that gangsta rap has tricked mainstream society into thinking that this music is "real" and therefore more dangerous than the dangerous musics of times past.
Of course the purveyors of gangsta rap have worked diligently to find characters that can pull off the tricky magic of making these musical stories seems real. "Keepin' it real" if you will. Fifty Cent is just the most recent rapper to step into this role. His back story of being shot nine times and having dealt crack adds to the story, but the truth is of course that he is no longer a gangsta -- if indeed he ever was. The interesting thing to me is that the music industry people have had to raise the stakes every time they need a rapper with more ghetto authenticity. Now, apparently, you need to have been shot to sell a million records. That all said, I don't think Fitty is the worst rapper in the world. In fact, I got a big kick out of the first album. I thought it wasgreat drama and good... music.
This brings me to a point that B-Tight and Tony D raised in our interview: "it's all relative." (I'll go into this in more detail in a minute). Back when Ice Cube was America's nightmare, the supposed gang banger from Compton told stories about the ghetto. These stories were most commonly funny, sometimes violent, other times political, but they were always stories that need to be read in the context of fiction. Whether there's some truth in them or not, the music does not point a gun at you or rob your grandmother. Before gangsta rap, the shock value bar was lower. Today the bar is higher. I know that this is easy to say for a young man without parental cares and so forth, but it is also a reminder that if parents don't want their kids listening to this, then it's their job to stop them from listening--or better, teach them something about media literacy and instill in them an appreciation for the arts. It is not the job of musicians and provocateurs to stop making provocative music. And yes, that's what they are... musicians. (This is a fact despite the claims of those that dismiss rap music as "noise" as well as those that buy in completely to Chuck D's idea that hip hop is the black CNN.)
As Ice Cube has described in interviews since his NWA years, the bragadoccio and stories of street hustling were either exaggerations or simply stories about what he had seen and heard about in his neighborhood. The same sort of examples are given in Ice-T's interviews. You can't be a gangsta and a hip hop star simultaneously. And if you rap about having killed someone--and you actually did kill said someone--you're probably not smart enough to have a career in hip hop in the first place. Here are both Ice Cube and Ice-T on Terry Gross. The fact that they're both actors now should offer some indication of their storytelling abilities.
The point that I'm working towards here is that these guys know what they're doing. The idea of a raw musical talent who is fresh off of the streets of a dangerous neighborhood is appealing to record buyers. But the truth is that once you're contracted to do an album, you are subjected to a great deal of image control and PR spin. This is to say that if you're buying a gangsta rap album, it has already been through the fiction machine. In fact, even before the recording process, the ideas that go into a rap are being fictionalized. How could they not be? MCs are writing music, formalizing ideas, rhyming lines of poetry... not writing dry chronologies of life into their diaries.
(My favorite illustration of this art/life conundrum involves the French group NTM, who while performing at a French independence day celebration called "Rendezvous de la Liberté" and celebrating freedom, began a song about police brutality and were quickly arrested by the crowd control police in attendance.
The police heard the rappers' anti-police "chants" from the stage as "political speech," not "art" and therefore were within the law in arresting them. In the French legal system you can't speak out violently against the police or the state, but you can do anything in art. But, of course, the police should not be deciding what is art and what is not! NTM were soon released and later won an appeal.)
Okay, point made (I hope).
In my interview with B-Tight and Tony D I asked what the two thought of the Eko Fresh and Bushido track "Gheddo." The track talks about ghetto life in Berlin and Köln and makes the case that there are ghettos in Germany. The track is in response to statements made by German welfare reformer Peter Hartz that characterize Germany as having no ghettos--basically saying that nowhere in Germany is so bad. The track mentions Hartz by name ("please Mr. Peter Hartz come and see my 'hood") and the album on which the track appears is called Hart(z) IV. The title is a gesture to the fourth phase of the welfare code that Hartz developed, but is also a reference to the "ghetto game" of craps and the "hart" (hard) life in Germany's ghettos and housing projects.
iv.jpg)
Eko's Hart(z) IV
Here's a link to the video for the track "Gheddo." It starts with a young kid (who is marked as Turkish by the tea kettle and satellite dish in his apartment) waking up in a room with a microphone and an Ice-T CD on the table. The video is a narrative about police stereotyping and violence against middle eastern youth. Bushido (a former Aggro artist) is Tunisian-German while Eko is Turkish, and while the music is more about the difficulty of street life, the video makes more explicitly racialized points about this life as suffused with both class and racial marginalization. Check it out.
To my question Tony answered that they weren't especially interested in what Eko was doing, but when I rephrased the question--"do you think Germany has ghettos?" the conversation became quite lively.
Tony started by saying that in Germany "It's more like ghetto light." Bobby followed up: "Yeah, if someone from LA looked at the lower income areas where we grew up, they are not really so bad. But if maybe a person from the ghettos in Brazil came to LA they would say: 'this is no ghetto.' It's all relative."
This point seemed rather profound to me. In a socialized country like Germany everyone has been taken care of pretty well. The old social safety net offered a very livable stipend and free health care and so forth. The recent Hartz IV program tightened up the purse strings, however, moving in a direction closer to the US welfare to work reforms in the 1990s. The problem, of course, is that the relative wealth between the richest Germans and the poorest will also grow as welfare is cut and fewer taxes on the wealthy are needed to support the poor. If you say that you live in poverty in Germany, someone from India might laugh. But the context for your poverty defines the debate. When you see extravagant wealth it becomes a powerful sign of what you do not have, and when there's a racialized component to this income gap the relative disadvantage becomes even more sinister.
Tony and Bobby went on to explain their feeling that what a ghetto really is is a community of people who are similar in terms of culture or class. In that sense, they said, yes there were ghettos--and yes, Ausländer comprised a large part of the projects. They both claimed to have lived in such areas where small time hustlers controlled the neighborhoods.
Echoing Ice-T and Ice Cube they said that this was where they got their stories. While they didn't claim to engage in illegal activity, they said that they grew up around such activities. They named their first album together after the hustlers and their "hot commodities" (Heiße Waren) but said that they were more into music than drugs or robbery, so they were able to put their energies into that realm of street life.
Tony went on to say that, furthermore, it is the state that is ghettoizing people. He noted: "When the government comes and says 'you all live here,' that becomes a ghetto. They build these big projects and put a bunch of people together and there will be more crime because people don't have money." Bobby added: "And they start moving the projects out to the suburbs to keep them away from the people with money." I challenged them saying that the Kreuzberg Zentrum--a major project in my neighborhood--was in the city center. They replied that, yes, that was where they built them before the fall of the wall, when Kreuzberg wasn't a good place to live. It used to be surrounded on three sides by the wall and was made the primary destination of Turks who came on guest worker visas. They noted that even though Kreuzberg (or X-Berg) is now a very fashionable place to live, it remains a Turkish ghetto by virtue of the historical legacy and continued presence of Turks who have not yet been priced out of the area.
Interestingly, the imagery in the video for "Gheddo" is all centered on Kreuzberg even though neither Eko nor Bushido live there. Although Eko lives in Köln's Kalk area and Bushido lives in Berlin's Tempelhof district, they pay homage to the center of Middle Eastern rap life in Germany--Kreuzberg. They wear 36 hats (X-Berg's old postal code), sit on top of the Kreuzberg Zentrum, and otherwise film the video on the streets around X-Berg's Kottbusser Tor UBahn Station. In short, X-Berg is a font of authenticity that the two can draw on in the same way that Ice Cube came "Straight Outta Compton."
Stompin', walkin' in my big black boots,
Griff
Posted by griff at August 6, 2008 8:34 AM EDT
8/1/08
B-Tight and Tony D on: "Rasse" and "Ausländer"
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Happy August, everyone.
Today I'm going to continue with a topic that was central to my interview questions: the concept of "Rasse" (race) vs. "Ausländer" (foreigner) in German society. The topic relates directly to the DAAD's conception for this essay contest, so I'll start there. The theme, again, was "Migration Flows to or from Germany."
The album cover for another Aggro Artist, Alpa Gun's album Ausländer
My line of questioning began: "Do you think that Germany is having a healthy dialog about race? Or is the idea of race not used?" The two worked together in most of their responses, and this was also the case here. They looked across the table at one another and honestly didn't quite know what to do with the concept of "race," at least not how I presented it. (It was an admittedly open question, but that was the idea.) Their consensus response was that there was no discussion of race per se, but that there was racism against "foreigners."
I had heard this response before with other interviewees, and it stems from the idea that in most of Europe, the biological concept of race has been so thoroughly delegitimized that it is viewed as an artifact of history. Essentially, the sham science around race (developed by Gobineau and furthered by colonialists, slave holding societies, social Darwinists, and of course Nazis), maintains that humans can be divided into subspecies. Though the idea is of course total bunk scientifically, it provided the brutal logic for slave holding societies like the US. Namely, this science provided the logic to say its okay to subject other humans, so long as they are a separate and lesser breed. How very rational...
Notably, this logic also helped to prop up the idea of "nations," which were supposed to represent biologically related descendants of the people of certain (vast) areas. The root of the word, "natio," refers to birth and carries with it the idea of blood ties. This is how Germany, for example, united people of wide ranging cultures and dialects under one flag after the allegiances of nobility began to wane. (Remember: there was no Germany before 1871!) People were sold a quasi-scientific idea that said they were all related somehow and that they should get together for mutual protection and to improve their culture. Families gotta stick together, right? It's a powerful idea, really, and of course could be a positive one, except that with this supposed biological affinity comes a sense of difference. This is how nationalism becomes racism in Germany as the idea of an "Aryan" species of humans slowly leads to feelings of superiority and envy of other cultures. Anti-semitism, for instance, had been part and parcel of many pre-German cultures, but found its most horrific incarnation in the nationalist period. The race/nation idea offered a bio-logical imperative for purity. The end of this dangerous road is eugenics and systematic antisemitism and racism--no longer an interest in unity, so much as an interest in purity.
So that's my primer.
This brings me to the point. Tony and B-Tight, explained that the real concept that promotes racism is that of "Ausländer" ("foreigners," literally "people from outside the country," "outsiders"). This is not a bad word per se (like "race") but within the concept a number of sinister traces of the race idea loom. In short, there is a dialog about racial difference, but it is masked in the language of economic and cultural protectionism (protecting borders from invaders, etc.). My point has always been if you're protecting a nation, isn't this tantamount to protecting racial purity. Say what you will about wanting to protect culture, ethnicity, and "a way of life," but these are not static concepts. Indeed, should Germany return to how it was in 1871? Is that the ideal Germany? The country has until very recently maintained that it is "not a nation of immigration." This of course, flies in the face of everyday experience, especially in a city like Berlin, which has thousands of immigrants and their children who are citizens. Furthermore, many were of course part of the imported labor that fueled the famed "economic miracle" of German recovery.
B-Tight explained: "People see difference. Even if you're born here and you grow up here--a Turk or an Arab or a black person--it doesn't matter, you are an foreigner [Aüslander]. It doesn't matter if you're a black foreigner or an Arab foreigner or whatever... In the end you are either a foreigner or a German." He then pointed to Tony and said "For example when you see a Turkish guy and an Arab guy, of an Arab guy and a black guy, and so forth, many Germans see them together as the same thing: foreigners."
My point in insisting on analyzing this type of discourse in terms of race, is that despite the word's falling out of usage, its idea has remained in discourses about difference. Even though the sham scientific ideas have long been outof fashion politically, the residue--so to speak--of the race idearemains with us. We see racial difference, we feel racial difference, and theseideas have very real historic resonance though our modes of racial thinking. What's especially interesting to me is how all of the concepts around the race idea have found new ways of expression. The term "Ausländer" has very powerful connotations of racial protectionism, but shields itself from the idiocy of the race idea.
It is a widely remarked upon fact that the term Ausländer is commonly(mis)applied to natural born citizens of Germany. Indeed, this point hascome up many times in my research over the past years. This continuingmisuse of the term confirms the fact that the race idea is at workhere, despite the death of the word.
That all said, I wonder if the death of the word is a necessary precondition for the death of the idea. It's actually fairly liberating to not have to hear the word "race," but I still feel that not dealing with the word head on is actually like brushing dirt under the carpet. You're gonna have to throw it out properly at some point. In any case, toward the end of our conversation on the topic Tony noted jokingly: "The word race to me sounds like you're talking about some kind of monkey or something." All three of us laughed. They understood the idea of racism all too well, but the idea of race was as idiotic and illogical as the racists who sold such ideologies.
Gotta get back to my cage,
Griff
Posted by griff at August 1, 2008 7:03 AM EDT
7/29/08
Tony D's "Damage," B-Tight's "Der Neger Bonus," and Other Interview Notes
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The Saga Continues,
After talking to Anika and Regi, Tony-D arrived first, with a crutch under one arm. The D in his name stands for damager and indeed, the rapper has a well-defined image that stresses destructive energy, so this was an interesting first impression. From all that I knew of him, it seemed as though he may have broken a leg from kicking a door down. In his video for "Totalschaden" ["total waste" or "totally destroyed"] he is in a bombed out looking building carrying a sledge hammer, ready to kick in doors and smash windows. After introducing myself I asked how he had hurt it to which he replied, "ah, just stress." A less interesting answer than I had imagined, but one that proved indicative of the straightforwardness of the rappers and the disparity between their media images and their actual lives and personalities.
Indeed, Tony D (born Muhamed Ayad) was a really nice and relaxed guy with the carefree attitude you might expect from a 25-year-old. He reminded me a great deal of my younger brother, Jake, who while a devoted hip hop head himself, isn't especially interested in maintaining an MTV style hip hop image. Regarding the destructive image of "Tony Damager," he explained that it was really about youthful energy, not anger or inflicting bodily harm. "It's like punk rock," he said. "I'm not interested in hurting anyone, it's just a feeling where you have a lot of energy and you want to let it out. So, you know, smashing things, and so forth. That's why I'm 'Tony Damager.'" (As an aside, there is an American rapper named "Jeru the Damaja," whose message of "damage" is conceived more as a mental assault on ignorance.)
Tony's first recording for the title track of the album Totalschaden, featured a sample of Nirvana's popularizing hit "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Here's a link: http://de.youtube.com/watch?v=WsrrOZ7PWPs . The video has this sense of the post-punk grunge scene--with slam dancing, a live band, etc. But it also has a sense of "crunk" that Tony D capitalizes on. If you listen to the lyrics, in the very first line after the introductory repetition of "totalschaden" and "tony d," you hear him say (in german): "do you want to get crunk?" to which the crowd responds: "yeah, we want to get crunk." Although the crunk movement spearheaded by Lil Jon and the Eastside Boyz is a more aggressive and club oriented form of hip hop, Tony D forms from the crunk idea a more explicitly "destructive" punk mentality. The army jacket and mohawk haircut both mark him as punk despite his engagement with self-described crunk music and his music as a hip hop artist. The mohawk had grown in when I met him, and he had none of the aggressive energy that is so well-cultivated in his videos.
Here is Aggro's caricature of the Tony. It is essentially drawing on Arab stereotypes and fears: the menacing eyes, prominent nose, and of course, the beard. I don't think Tony has ever actually had a big beard like that. He certainly didn't on the day that I interviewed him. I'll get more into Tony's use of racial stereotypes in a later post. For now, this (along with the video) gives you an idea of his aggressive and dangerous marketing image.
After the video for "Totalschaden" was released, Nirvana's record company and publication people had Aggro Berlin take down the video from their website. The label then had to create a separate backing track for release on the record. When I asked him whether he expected that to happen, he replied by saying that he thought perhaps Nirvana would be more amenable to such uses, but that since the original was already out there in cyberspace, that it didn't much matter at the end of the day. He said: "Now there are six versions, I think. I like them all, but you can still hear the version with the Nirvana line." Here is the album version: http://de.youtube.com/watch?v=9Y6uCsNSQn0
This should go without saying, but it is important to remind myself--as it should be to us all--that rappers are not political operatives or journalists, but musicians. Perhaps, they are in a sense the "CNN of the black community," as Chuck D so eloquently put it, but they are not ONLY that--or even primarily so, I would argue. They are primarily musicians. This does not mean that they are "mere" entertainers, but that they are, in fact, putting on a show. Then again, that "show" may have profound political implications with the potential of reaching farther than a journalistic investigative piece--or it may be rather vacuous, but at all times it is musical. This is all to say that it was interesting to note how I'd fallen into the authenticity trap laid by such well cultivated media images when I came to speak to them. Of course, this was cleared up right away as the interview, with such carefully constructed questions, quickly became a comfortable and informative conversation.
B-Tight (born Robert Edward Davis) arrived about five minutes after Tony. I introduced myself, but then "Bobby" had to finish up some business with one of the other office folks. After a couple minutes of finishing up with Tony, the joint interview started in earnest. B-Tight also turned out to be a very easy going and laid back guy. He is a little older than Tony at 29 years old, but as he explained later, he was quickly becoming much older as he is now a father. B-Tight's media image was also a far cry from the reality that I saw on that day. He was dressed in more pronounced hip hop fashions, but was also wearing his glasses and his hair had grown in from the shaved head that is always featured in his album art and press materials.
One of the most interesting things that B-Tight had to say came up about twenty minutes into our fifty minute conversation. In response to my question about his track "Der Neger" (see my post of 7/18 ) B-Tight noted that racism is not quite the same in the US as in Germany. "Here," he said "we have this 'Nigga Bonus' thing. When you walk in to a club you are instantly the coolest one there. It is because there are not so many black people here in Germany. It's a bit exotic." His point in formulating this idea of a "Neger Bonus" for Afro-Germans, was that although racism is alive and well in Germany, it is not so prominent of an ideology of hate among a wide group of people. He explained that in Germany, like the US, there are still pockets of outright racists, but that the most common forms of racism are more subtle. While the US has a large number of people of African descent, in Germany black people are still rather uncommon. Therefore, especially when a black person walks into a club, well-meaning Germans crane their necks to see how well he/she is dancing, dressed, or what he/she is drinking. Despite the "bonus" that he refers to, it is clear that he realizes it is still a form of racism that while perhaps useful in the club is not so helpful to advancement in other fields: sciences, business, politics.... His track "Der Neger" works with this idea of "Der Neger Bonus." As I describe in my essay, the German and Turkish people pointing at him in concert was a little encapsulation of this point: the Afro-German person always sticks out in light-hued Germany.
B-Tight's point obviously has implications for my thesis about African Americanization. The stereotypes about black musical ability were forged predominantly through American racism and were distributed by American media. Furthermore, African American music still dominates the top spot in global cool. Nonetheless, it was interesting to hear B-Tight explain one of the paradoxes about racism: despite racism being an insipid remnant of outmoded biological thinking, it has lived on in unexpected ways taking on "good" and "bad" valences in varying contexts. I use scare quotes here because, in the end, clearly there is no "good" racism. There is no bonus to racism.
When I turned to ask Tony D if there was a "Kanacke Bonus" (referring to the derogatory term for Middle Easterners in Germany)--both of them erupted into laughter. "No there is a Kanacke Minus!," said Tony. "There are millions of us here. There's nothing special, we don't get special treatment. We're just bad!"
Shortly after his point about "Der Neger Bonus" in the interview, B-Tight looked at his arm, made a gesture noting the darker hue, and said: "I look at what I have and I make use of it. Yeah, I'm making money, but I also get to say something... My fans get it. People who don't get it, I could care less. They're not going to try to get it anyway."
Here is yet another fantastically provocative (if confusing) image from Aggro Berlin's marketing department. B-Tight is quite blunt about the business mentality behind these provocateur concepts, but it is especially noteworthy that these images are remarkably far removed from the Robert Davis that I interviewed.
B-Tight explained that he thinks a lot about his bi-racial identity. The image here seems to be a gesture to the "one drop rule." He has his (shaved) "real" bi-racial head in his hand and is moving to decapitate his "fake" racialized self as caricatured in the black face of minstrelsy. This is to again remind us that B-Tight and Aggro Berlin are in the business of artistic expression. How could this be interpreted as anything else?! This image may be perceived as overly violent, but it is certainly more thoughtful than most popular music artwork. What interests me is how the bespectacled Bobby with his hair grown in (who I met) fits into this picture.
I'll pick up here next time, when we'll continue looking at the interview.
A'ight, Chill!
Griff
Posted by griff at July 29, 2008 11:16 AM EDT
