It was another long club night in Berlin. His walk home through the Kreuzberg dawn offers Peter Fox a cornucopia of the city’s curiosities. As the hit single Schwarz zu Blau (Black to Blue) puts it: “Tired figures in the neon light, deep wrinkles in their faces. The early shift are silent, every man for himself.” He walks past scene-goers, punks and the homeless to the local oriental bakery for breakfast. Scenes like the ones captured many years ago by George Grosz, the master of New Objectivity, in his paintings of Weimar Republic society are finding a musical counterpart eight decades later in a relaxed dancehall rhythm. Fox wrote Schwarz zu Blau for his solo album Stadtaffe (City Monkey), which has sold over a million copies since autumn 2008. A very successful genre painting of today’s pop culture in Germany.
Peter Fox is one of three singers in a ten-member band called Seeed that plays music inspired by hip-hop, dub and reggae, a musical mix that used to only interest specialized album collectors. But with their German lyrics about everyday life in “Big B” (i.e. Berlin), both Seeed and singers Fox and Demba “Ear” Nabé reflect the contemporary feelings of a broad fan base. Since their performance at the opening ceremony of the 2006 FIFA World Cup, Seeed have outgrown their former insider status.
Enthusiasm for the band is based on their many years of artistic integrity. A respectful development of the original Caribbean sounds is more important in this context than the German-Basque parentage of Pierre Baigorry, aka Peter Fox, or the West African roots of Demba Nabé. The multicultural background generates exciting fusions which have been able to mature in a kind of diverse urban environment that is otherwise more typical of London, New York or Barcelona. German pop music is increasingly developing integrative models: the opposite of the phenomenon of isolated parallel societies to be found in some migrant-dominated areas in major German cities. The pop slogan “One nation under a groove”, which can sound socially romanticized at times, has its justification here. The dancehall band Culcha Candela, whose six band members come from five countries, swear by the unifying effect of driving rhythms. In the style of a multinational orchestra, the band are masters of various styles and combine party hits like Hamma or Chica with an explicit commitment to combating xenophobia and nationalism. “When we met we were different people interested in coming together and learning from each other – with respect and a desire to make progress as a society, both in smaller and bigger things,” says singer Johnny Strange.
Musical collectives like Seeed and Culcha show that things have been changing in the German pop-music scene. Today, many authentic styles compete with electronic phenomena that have long been regarded as “typically German”. The shimmering techno movement or the world-famous musicians of Rammstein are today only part of a bigger whole – a development that would hardly have happened without a sustained social change. Since the mid-fifties, a massive migration (of workers) into West Germany has generated a variety of immigrant cultures, each with their own sounds and media structures. Initially they were hardly noticed by the mainstream of society until the children of the “guest workers” – who had long-since been living permanently in Germany – raised their voices. In the early 1990s this young generation discovered the hip-hop of what became Afro-American role models, and rap became the language of the immigrant kids in suburban youth clubs. Many musical careers began here, including those of some who today are successful in very different spheres.
The career of musician Xavier Naidoo is a good example. Son of a German-Indian father and a South African mother, he grew up in the multicultural, industrial Rhine-Neckar region. After his musical beginnings in a gospel choir, he turned to the regional club culture, which brought him to the Frankfurt hip-hop duo Rödelheim Hartreim Projekt. Here, Naidoo began as a background singer for the rappers, before they formed the 3p production company in the mid-1990s.
Later, Naidoo, a real Mannheim patriot, emancipated himself from his discoverers and developed his own ideas of German-language pop music with a spiritual touch on his 1998 debut album Nicht von dieser Welt (Not of this World), a kind of gospel from the Neckar river. In Söhne Mannheims, a large musical collective, Naidoo also acts as a singer and a source of ideas for many special projects – for example, in 2008 at the symphonic “singing contest” of their repertoire at Schwetzingen Castle. The German-American singer Cassandra Steen also shows how far-reaching this network structure is. In 2001 she brought a convincing soul feeling to a German-language love song with the 3p band Glashaus and the song Wenn das Liebe ist (If That’s Love). Eight years later, Steen went one better with Stadt (City), a similarly succinct composition with the Berlin-based singer Adel Tawil. Like many of his colleagues, Tawil, who grew up with his Egyptian father and Tunisian mother in the Berlin Siemensstadt district, started with self-organized hip-hop concerts: “Something was not quite right with my hip-hop stuff. At some point I’d lost my sense of direction,” he recalls. Tawil changed genre and later formed a pop duo called Ich + Ich together with Annette Humpe. Hip-hop was replaced by a musical dialogue between the generations – with a woman pop producer 28 years his senior.
As in other European countries, rap still has a major identification role to play for young people from immigrant families. However, the genre seems too limited for a long-term artistic career. Even the prototypes of provocative street rap, like Bushido or Kool Savas, are turning to other fields. The collaboration between Bushido and the Czech pop singer Karel Gott on the cover version of Für immer jung (Forever Young) may be a marketing idea dreamed up by the record company. But it’s also an expression of a diversity of styles that is not afraid of being a bit wacky at times.////
