A short while ago, I gave a bunch of American friends a tour and, as expected, had to endure laughter when I talked about that architectural pearl the Pallasseum and its dirty past as a popular prop in German gangsta rap videos.
“German Rap is sooooo ridiculous. Who are these clowns posing as gangstas? No projects here so d’uh. These bozos aren’t Gangstas!”
Before we dive into the topic, I’d like to briefly introduce you to…
The Reception of Reality
The thing is that images that are seen on MTV or even some tacky documentary can be more powerful than what we talk about when we talk about reality, which everybody perceives differently anyway. I am not sure if you are familiar with the philosopher Jean Baudrillard and his theory of hyperrealities, the idea that an image of a real thing is many times so much more influential than the actual thing. It is as if you would take a Barbie and declare it more real than a woman.
Think about the Berlin wall, which was once a symbol of suffering. Nowadays Instagramers flood the East side gallery thinking what a cool hip place this is, with the street art and remember that David Hasselhoff-stunt when he brought down the wall through the angelic gift of his high-powered yodeling? So culty! And then there was you know the other David! David Bowie, who did not speak a word of German and yet basically made the most famous song about the Berlin wall, that talked about two lovers meeting at the wall. It turned out that he was talking about producer Tony Visconti and singer Antonia Maaß whom he spotted having a snog at the wall. Hardly a political song. Btw if you don’t believe me how bad Bowie’s German was, just ask Antonia Maaß, who also wrote the German version of We can be heroes and how much of a field day she had, teaching him the few lines he had to sing in German. This might sound like I am bashing Bowie, but nothing could be further from the truth, I truly think he was a genius. But for me Bowie’s appeal does not lie in his skills as a historian or speaker of German. We can be heroes is an amazing song, my point is you can tell the history of the Berlin wall and even experience it completely detached from its political meaning and the history of oppression and violence. The pictures of the wall we encounter in pop culture and even the ones we can physically experience now when we visit the East side gallery are probably much more present for someone who was born say after 1990, far away from East Germany.
Well, I gotta stop myself here because I want to make this topic part of a separate blogpost.
Examples for Hyperrealities
We are talking gangsta Rap here and I am going to discuss its birthplace in a bit: I once did some research for a paper about gang violence and read that notorious Compton gang The Crips passed on TV in the pre-internet stone age of the 90s and very soon after there were criminal gangs named the Crips all over the US. It took gang experts quite a while to figure out that the New Orleans Crips were not affiliated with the LA Crips at all. They probably just saw them on TV, identified with them and their living circumstances and subsequently copied their style. Not much later in the late 90s different members of the Crips were arrested in The Hague in the Netherlands. Yes, those Netherlands, Holland, the one in Europe. Basically, Dutchies who had enough of their work in the windmill, tossed their wooden shoes, slapped on a blue Bandana and robbed a bank. Or something like this.
If you are reading this, chances are higher that you are younger and your preferences for gang style include iced up grillz over bandanas. I recently saw an interview with British literature sensation du jour Gabriel Krauze. He is kind of inescapable at the moment, even for us folks on the wrong side of 30. You can be called inescapable if Sarah Jessica Parker is filmed stretched out on a sofa reading your book “Who they was” in the Sex and the City sequel And just like that.
Who they was talks about Krauze’s violent past as a gang member/jailbird/literature student/lover of Nietzsche’s moral philosophy. During the interview the obvious questions about such a double life followed because somehow people still can’t wrap their head around the fact, that a thugged out exterior does not exclude an interest of intellectual pursuit by default. He followed up with a James Baldwin citation. “Identity would seem to be the garment which one covers the nakedness of the self” and then continued taking about personality being more malleable and influenced by a gazillion things apart from upbringing. (Thanks!) He talked about having a twin brother who had a complete different lifestyle and don’t we all love twin studies (I have a Portuguese passport so I decided I can say these things innocently). It was one of those nights where I feel deep into the internet blackhole and dug out a 2001 Guardian feature talking about a certain Guardian cartoonist named Andrzej Krause talking about his 15 year old twin sons “one a fine violinist, the other a cellist who has decided he wants to be a rap artist”[1]. So briefly: Gabriel moved out of his parents’ home in North London to move to the notoriously violent rough-tough neighborhood Kilburn and developed a penchant for robbing society ladies, while unnamed twin brother preferred entertaining casts that probably looked like they just staggered off a set of Downtown Abbey.
You think that’s ridiculous? Then wait for my next example. (I promise it is the last and I will return to my original point.)
Even before that mass media sensation that television was, became a thing, the mere act of hearing stories about a thing happening somewhere far away inspired people to emulate what they heard about. Obviously, information did not travel as fast back in the day, but it still traveled very fast, come to think about it. Take the Haitian revolution for example, that happened two years after the French revolution. Historians agree that hearing from what went down in France inspired the Haitians to start one themselves. Btw please don’t shitstorm me here, I am very aware that I simplified galore and that Haiti back then did not even exist, it was called St. Domingue but I think by now my point is clear.
NWA
I know we like to laugh at upper middle-class kids who watch gangsta rap and start emulating them and their habitus. The world of gangsta rap is oddly fascinating and seeing guns, lots of tough dudes in one video was a thing you could not see in Germany before Azad and then Bushido and yeah that was clearly something copied from American Rap videos. But many of the American hoodrats did not live such a reality either. At least not if you define reality like a one-on-one replication of what you would see and hear in gangsta Rap-videos. Let’s take the founding fathers “America’s most dangerous band” NWA, as they were promoted back in the early 90s.
None of them were in a gang. And even if they would have been in a gang it would not be an exact replica of a regular gangsta rap song, since, let me quickly quote gang expert Malcolm Klein in American street gang:
“There is the undeniable excitement that attends the anticipation of gang activity. I stress the anticipation of gang activity because… the most common activity is inactivity. But I spent many hours watching gang members animatedly discussing events – past events, rumored events, proposed new events – and emotionally feeding off these much as they might reenact an Arnold Schwarzenegger or Clint Eastwood movie. They rehearsed and relived the battles, embellishing them with little concern for reality”[2]
Let’s focus on Eazy E here the “trash-talking, gun-toting hustler who brought the image of the young Compton street kid”[3]. Yes, just like Ice Cube, Dr. Dre hailed from infamous Compton but while the neighborhood was unstable his home life was not. His father worked at the post office and his mother taught at a Montessori school. Eric himself neither drank nor did he get high.
Are you telling me that this figurine is not an exact Madame Tussaud-like replica of reality??
I am mentioning the fact that he does not drink, due to the ubiquitous St. Ides Malt liquor that was found in basically every second Gangsta rap video in the early 90s as well as in the 1991 classic movie Boys in the hood starring Ice Cube. A gun and a bottle of St. Ides 40s to a gangsta Rapper was basically the equivalent of what scepter and sword was to a king.
“The brew boasts a sweeter taste, and in doing so declares a rejection of finesse: it stands, just as gangsta does, in opposition to respectable or acquired bourgeois tastes”[4]
Malt liquor’s lower-class ghetto-centric status was exactly the point. That’s why people like Ice Cube became early endorsers of the brew. It was something fashioned by white corporates though with the strict intention of a trickle-up effect so that suburban youth could buy into the subcultural cachet.
When Eric “Eazy E” Wright’s parents moved to Compton after World War 2, they were among the first black families in Compton. Compton had been mostly white. And by white I don’t mean just white, I mean George and Barbara Bush-kinda white. Btw, this was not a metaphor. Barbara and George Bush literally lived in an apartment complex in Compton in 1949.[5]
I read mixed things about the myth that Eazy E’s record label was funded by drug money. Many scholars, journalists, Fangirls and -boys who wrote about gangsta rap take that as a given such as Ben Westhoff (whom I admire a lot) but NWA’s notorious manager Jerry Heller who in his biography said that neither he nor anyone that was really close to him, actually believed that Eazy was a major drug dealer. What is unmistakably confirmed by everyone is that Eric Wright never drank, smoked or did any drugs whatsoever himself. And by the way a 1990 estimate suggested that the average dealer made about 700 dollars a month. Hardly enough to fund a record label. 1990s drug dealing legends like Rick Ross who pushed in a million a day, that was just another image propagated by the media (and later Rap, Ha!) that can not find an equivalent in real life. Hashtag hyperrealities y’all.
Heller was also with him for long stretches of time and never saw him dealing. He obviously never bothered to deny the rumors since the notion contributed a lot to their overall street credibility. Heller being a somewhat controversial figure himself, most notably portrayed in the Straight Outta Compton movie was and is far from universally admired. One fact though is that he had been representing A-listers since the 60s and deffo knew what he was doing. Ike & Tina Turner, Marvin Gaye, Otis Redding, Black Sabbath, The Who and many more, all managed by Jerry. He was probably one of the first who recognized the potential of emerging West Coast Rap artists who would later become Rap aristocracy.
I am not taking away from the rough upbringing of the NWA members. Eazy’s cousin was killed; Dre lost his younger brother. You just can’t help but admire where they are today taking in regard where they are coming from. There are examples in American gangsta rap that pretended to come from the hood with far bougier backgrounds, I just decided to focus on Eazy E, not only due to the fact of them being “the earliest and most significant popularizers and controversial figures of the gangsta rap subgenre” as Wikipedia calls them but also because I like comparing Berlin to Los Angeles because it’s basically the opposite of Berlin. I like Michel Foucault’s description of Los Angeles as the carceral city due to its plethora of no-go areas, gated communities and most worrisome the rising number of law enforcement facilities. That trope is simply in such stark contrast to all that twaddle about freedom the west stands for, and obviously you can’t go further west than the American west coast. Hashtag hyperrealities once again. (Get why I mentioned Baudrillard in the beginning? Remixing Los Angeles with Hip Hop was bound to frankenstein an overabundance of hyperrealities to a point where you ask yourself if apartments come with toilets and if yes what for??)
In the end you should not expect too much of me, as a Berliner I am basically genetically predisposed to find Los Angeles obscene and worship cities that are spiritually linked to Berlin like New York City, so no surprise here.
My main argument though…
Does it take away from their music? Their music was still gangsta. It founded a new genre and say what you want about the genre and what it made out of hip hop, but it was unlike anything you could hear before. Eithne Quinn makes a case in her book that gangsta rap came to embody the epic figures of the traditional badmen folktales such as Dolomite simply by switching from narrating that role to assuming it. “Rather than quoting the pimp’s golden tongued rhyme, they took it as their own”[6] How they did it? Easy. “I saw” became “I did”.
Further she writes:
“Author/narrators deployed the first person not simply because they had lived through the brutal ordeals they recounted, but also because this perspective enhanced reader’s identification, thus personalizing the institutionalized violence and exploitation of the slavery system. Gangsta rap may be far removed from early back autobiography; but with its powerful testimonial thrust, gangsta stories also invite listeners to take accounts as documentary, if not autobiography. Rappers vouch for the authenticity of their tales through interview statements and publicity bios in a process that bears loose relation to the authenticating letters by prominent abolitionist appended to black autobiographies. Like early black writers, who carefully placed their personal suffering within the wider context of slavery, rapper’s dramatic survivalist tales also often glimpsed the overall structure of domination”[7]
So Chuck D’s famous quote that “rap is black people´s CNN” basically stopped being applicable once the movement had spread or moved, however you wanna define that, to the west coast.
Back to the introductory topic…
It is true that there are no projects like there are in the US. But I still cringe at the notion of this socialdemocratic wonderland America sometimes paints Germany to be. Adding insult to injury there are countless American (but don’t worry also Australian and British) publications that come up with hmm badly researched articles about Berlin. Let me just quote one here:
“For every German there is a national pension plan, work-related accident insurance, and welfare for extreme situations. No one lives homeless except by choice.”[8]
I am going to leave that citation here uncommented because anything I could write about it would diminish its distorted perception about what Americans think Northern Europe is.
Once again, it may look like I am judging or wanting to ridicule American’s perspective. I get it, Americans do not grow up in a country with a social security system ergo if there is one, people who are homeless must choose so. But to keep it short:
There are still groups in Germany that are very much excluded, othered and made to feel like trash, listening to US Rap hit a certain spot and they emulated that.
I am btw not a fan of Bushido at all nor am I endorsing any of the next level fuckery he has pulled off during his career and whats left of it. In my tours I talk about Bushido because of my interest in architecture and the Palasseum. I find stories that mythologize buildings and how quickly their image changes fascinating. There is still some amount of social housing but no Rapper shooting for street cred would flash the building in the background. Buildings grow up too.
Featured image by (and courtesy of) Gabriel Krauze
Sources
Heller, Jerry. “Ruthless, a memoir”. Simon&Schuster, New York, 2006
Klein, Malcolm.”The American street gang” Oxfor university press. 1997
Moss, Stephen. “Spitting Images”. The Guardian. 2001https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2001/oct/17/artsfeatures2
Quinn, Eithne. “Nuthin` but a g-thang” Columbia university press, New York, 2005.
Van Buren, Peter. “I went looking for trouble in Berlin”. The American conservative. September 10, 2019
Westhoff, Ben. „Original gangstas“. 1.ed., e-book ed. Hachette books, 2016.EPUB
[1] The Guardian 2001
[2] Klein, p. 78
[3] Westhoff,p
[4] Quinn, p. 18
[5] Westhoff, p.
[6] Quinn, p. 45
[7] Quinn, p.45
[8] Van Buren, 2019