Haiyti: A Girl Boss Gangster shakes up German rap
German hip hop has not experienced such trench warfare for 15 years – the Hamburg rapper Haiyti could emerge as the winner with her mixture of Dada pop and gangsta rap
"Not real, she's an art student!", someone posted under her first rap video on YouTube: Ronja Zschoche, Haiyti's real name, would have preferred to keep quiet about the subject. For a long time, only her closest friends knew that she was enrolled at the Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts. Gangsta rap as an art project? You'd like to believe it, if only to be able to classify the confusing impressions that her overflowing YouTube output leaves in your head more quickly. A young woman with a ponytail, whose rebellious facial expression is reminiscent of Little Mü from Tove Jansson's Moomin saga, raps as tight as a machine gun salvo about hookers, coke and robberies, while posing in front of sports cars on fucked-up wastelands in the focus of a shaky cell phone camera. That can only be irony. Meta-entertainment for hipsters and feature readers. Possibly even a critical commentary on the appropriation of black ghetto codes by white educated citizens. Sure!
When you meet Haiyti in person for the first time, suddenly nothing is clear anymore. The rapper, who has at least managed to keep her age a secret until now, welcomes us in her neighborhood in St. Pauli. It is an indecisive autumn day, and glaring light keeps breaking through the clouds, making you want to put on and take off your sunglasses and jacket every minute. She heads towards us in a street parallel to the Reeperbahn, flanked by a pack of men who tower far over Haiyti, who is just under 1.60 meters tall. One of them, with a boxer's face, a very short military cut and a "hate" tattoo on his neck, introduces himself as Joey Bargeld. His voice doesn't match his appearance at all. Toneless and powerless, somewhere between a beaten dog and a hoarse hooligan. The other two, with their dark glasses and hats pulled down over their faces, look like bodyguards at first glance. They are Trettmann and Fizzle, two thirds of the production team Kitschkrieg, with whom Haiyti released her "Toxic" EP in July, which was celebrated in the scene. The wiry artist leads the group, bouncing and shuffling at the same time, then she collapses onto a wooden bench in front of a Turkish kiosk. Her chronically tired eyes blink in the sun, she giggles: "Let's get started!" and pulls her knees so close to her body that they almost disappear under the oversized bomber jacket. Defensive stance.
German hip hop has not experienced such trench warfare since the Aggro Berlin label crushed the good student rap of Freundeskreis & Co. with a gangster's fist at the beginning of the 2000s. And Haiyti finds himself in the middle of it: as a supposed part of a controversial new wave for which the vague term "cloud rap" has now been established. Young hip hop fans in particular are celebrating the phenomenon, which has become a hype in the last three years outside of the big record companies, as an epiphany.
“Today you still have to show your ghetto certificate if you do rap”
While aggressive rappers like Bushido and Sido tried to transfer US gangsta rap to their German world, newcomers like Yung Hurn, LGoony or Hustensaft Jüngling simply throw the codes of American southern rap into the room without comment. Milk-faced people who look harmless but exaggerate as gangsters, wave guns around, let purple bills rain down on the curb and show off their supposed wealth by babbling more than rapping. Their whole attitude is a declaration of war on the realness dogmas and street credibility constraints of the old school, and it's so Dada and exaggerated that once you've got a taste for it, you can't get enough of it.
Ever since a master's thesis by scene pioneer Money Boy entitled "Gangsta Rap in Germany. The reception of aggressive and sexist song lyrics and their effects on young listeners" appeared online, cloud rap has been perceived outside the scene almost exclusively as an ironic joke and musical equivalent of an internet meme: shallow, hermetic, exaggerated and with only a short half-life. Haiyti, self-proclaimed "girl boss gangster" and so far the only woman in the cloud rap cosmos, is also often accused, not least because of her art school background, of being at least as fake and lacking in substance as the designer clothes she raps about so extensively. Yet she is probably the only one who has the potential to finally maneuver the scene out of its bubble.
"Today you still have to show your ghetto certificate if you do rap," she complains about the narrow-mindedness of the German rap mainstream. "I can do that too. Now I have to put art school on it too." Her voice sounds just as snotty when she speaks as it does in her raps, the sentences are peppered with anglicisms.
“I’m a Porsche driver, but I drive a Polo”
Punchlines also rumble off her lips as if in passing: "I drive a Porsche, but I drive a Polo." "I have no friends - just neighbors and enemies." She makes no distinction between a fictional character and a real person, she claims dryly. "I know how to behave in certain situations, but that's it." She ended up at art college by chance. The job center gave her the idea after her poor secondary school leaving certificate, because you can study there without a high school diploma. Now she paints large-format oil paintings of gang signs, fast cars and mobile phones in the class of art star Anselm Reyle. Or she makes baseball caps out of ceramic with "Nice" and "World Boss" written on them in sausage-shaped letters.
"There used to be people at my university who used the printing press to print money," she continues her rambling defense speech. "Even Haftbefehl shot his videos with art students at the beginning. All the Hartz IV gangsters didn't have a decent camera." Her crew laughs. If Haiyti plays a role, it has obviously become second nature to her, just like with the Money Boy she admires. The words just bubble out of her, unfiltered, unvarnished, immediate. That's exactly how she writes her songs, says her colleague Fizzle: "This tactical thinking: How does this work, where can I place it? – this thinking is practically non-existent with her. It's pretty crazy." Trettmann, who has been in the business for a long time and has had a few hits himself as a solo artist, agrees: "I've never seen anyone like her in the studio. This back-to-the-essence. To doing. To doing things quickly. For someone like me who thinks a lot about her work, she was very inspiring. Haiyti is an artist through and through."
Beneath all the excited fidgeting and formulaic rattling off of rap cliches, Haiyti's songs always contain a burnt-out sadness, not unlike the despondent depth of a hangover. "Everything around me is crashing. Where are all the punks? I'm lying in the park and drinking schanko. Don't ask why," she croaks in the bum anthem "Akku". In her video for "Speedleiche" we actually see her in a Reeperbahn dive bar, drinking a shot with Kiezkaputniks. She knows this world. Many of her tracks tell stories from the very bottom.
"I want to be happy, but it just doesn't work. I think many of my fans know this feeling"
"Waiting for the tide/ I've been cursed for years/ And my heart is at the bottom/ Diving deep, can't come up," she howls in the first "Toxic" single, "Messer." And then comes this memorable line in the chorus that you can't get out of your head, delivered in a voice that shatters in your head like glass: "Tattoo me a knife right under my heart!" Harbor songs in a ghetto update. "I've always felt like a border crosser," says Haiyti. "I want to be happy, but it just doesn't work. I think a lot of my fans know that feeling."
Before we move over to the recording studio, where she is currently working on new songs with producer Farhot, Haiyti has to go to her apartment around the corner. She pays just under 330 euros in rent for the old 30-square-meter sailor's shack. There is no heating, and the plaster is peeling off the facades. It is possible that Haiyti is simply the first musician to credibly bring together the precarious lives of rappers and artists. After all, even the highest rate of BAföG is still lower than Hartz IV. And art school graduates are generally not among those academics who can easily pay back their student loans later on. "Is that still bohemian or already the lower class?" Britta sang ten years ago, probably meaning something similar.
Is this still bohemian or already the lower class?
Farhad Samadzada, alias Farhot, is one of the most respected hip hop producers in Germany. Despite this, his studio looks more like an average rehearsal room. Dusty carpet. Keyboards and turntables are lying around. Records and cups are piled up in the corner. While Haiyti makes tea for everyone, the guys lounge on the sofa and rave about working with her - in the third person, but that doesn't seem to bother them. It's not sexism, their gender actually plays almost no role in their environment.
“She has balls, says German rap star Haftbefehl”
Even in the comment columns under her videos, the sexist outbursts are surprisingly rare compared to other German rappers like Schwesta Ewa. Although her lyrics are insanely exaggerated, Haiyti is taken more seriously by male rappers than most of her colleagues. "She's got balls," says German rap top dog Haftbefehl. The German-Afghan producer Farhot, who made the beats for Haftbefehl's breakthrough single "Chabos wissen wer der Babo ist," among others, particularly appreciates Haiyti's impulsive authenticity. "I founded a label specifically to do more things like that. I don't feel like having to chat to stylists, managers and labels every time before something comes out. It gets on my nerves."
Haiyti's first two mixtapes, "Havarie" and "City Tarif", were recorded in just a few days, like everything she has released so far. Musically, they are heavily influenced by Young Thug's dirty south rap and Gucci Mane's narcotic trap from Atlanta: ticking hi-hats, swirling synths, droning sub-basses, slow-motion beats. In Germany, where classic boom-bap rap dominated until recently, she was one of the few who practiced this slow-paced style of rapping for a long time, says Haiyti. She never imagined that this sound would one day culminate in a new German rap movement. "In the club, it's a strange feeling that people are now into things that you celebrated years ago. Back then, the cloud rappers were still standing on their skateboards with a lollipop. For them, it's hype music. And that's what sets me apart from them."
Despite this, she has worked with just about everyone. Her voice can be heard on the Ron & Shusta remix of "Wie kann man sich nur so hart gönnen", the hedonistic youth anthem. She recorded a track with Juicy Gay, which, with its queer coquetry, proves how far the scene has already moved away from the old battle rap machismo. And Haiyti has teamed up twice with Money Boy, whose "Dreh den Swag auf", a stupidly Germanized Soulja Boy cover, is considered the big bang of the local trend. "I get on well with Money Boy. Shockingly well! He really created something.” It is easy to consider 35-year-old Sebastian Meisinger, who now wants to be called YSL Know Plug instead of Money Boy, as the dullest of the new hip-hop wave – in fact, hardly anyone since Udo Lindenberg has shaped German youth language as much as the box-headed Viennese with his constantly morphing Twitter slang (“What kind of life is this?”).
She is also planning a collaboration with LGoony, the skinniest, palest of them all. "He's such a nerd! But now he's sent me a song that's so cool, I just have to do a feature. That proves that music is ultimately stronger than trends," says Haiyti, who, like most of the new hip hop generation, rejects the genre term "cloud rap." Although the newcomers do have some very different approaches, they are united by a common attitude: do everything themselves, don't think too much about it, and just let it out as soon as it feels good. There's a lot of punk spirit in this music, with programs like GarageBand, iMovie or the gurgling voice software Auto-Tune taking on the role of the infamous "three chords." With them, bedroom producers who would never have called themselves musicians, let alone singers or label makers, are able to release underground hits in one fell swoop.
"I see this cloud rap thing as a platform where everyone can let off steam," says Haiyti. "The good ones get a contract at some point, and the mediocre ones don't." Although her career is still in its early stages, Haiyti is already a step ahead of most others. Her punchlines hit better, and her sense of timing and melodies stand out. On "Havarie" she had already dared to do quieter numbers and even love songs. And on her new mixtape, "Nightliner," she opens up even more towards pop in songs like "Globus." "That's why Haiyti no longer fits into that category. She seems more like an update of Nina Hagen or Falco to me," says Fizzle. "A journalist once spoke of the 'Extraneue Deutsche Welle' - I thought that was apt."
Then Haiyti tells us a secret that not even her fellow musicians know. Her father, she says, was actually part of the New German Wave. He even had a hit under the name Vitale: "Komm doch einmal (Gefühl ohne Ende)" from 1985. At the end of the 80s, he sang rock ballads in the style of Bon Jovi as Guido Mineo, which earned him a record deal with Teldec. "He could have been a star. But he messed it up... His lifestyle," sighs the daughter. Does she mean the cocaine that caused so many careers to collapse back then and which she herself raps about so obsessively today? "Let's just say: sex, drugs & rock'n'roll," Haiyti replies in her very own sing-song voice. "For a rapper, it's always a question of whether you can tell stories from your environment authentically," her friend Joey Bargeld explained as we waited in front of her run-down apartment block for her to climb down the worn steps. "And Haiyti can do that."