The stuff where I put more stuff in

It's been a while since I've made a blog post about the only music genre I actually care about and before I make more buzzed shitposts let's give people who are open-minded enough to listen to rap they can't understand the lyrics to something to chew on.

Let's talk about a guy who is a bit of a phenomenon in German rap right now, Xatar.



Aw yeah, Xatar. The guy came on the scene during the waning days of the gangsta-rap dominated era of German rap. And he made tracks that...uh...okay, they weren't the most stellar of them all. He had a voice (and body to match) that made you piss your pants and aggressive intonation. But for the average listener he wasn't something special. This is at the break of technical fetishism were the general audience first heard of the length of rhyme-chains and how longer rhymes are actually more complicated than shorter ones, and roughly 2 years before everybody started worshipping doubletime (chopper-style rap for you Americans) so beyond the, now much smaller-seeming as rap got more mainstream appeal again, gangsta rap listener base he didn't really get that much attention. People knew him, yeah, but they weren't jumping on him as they are now.

The problems with tracks in his beginning career is that they are, quite frankly, nothing new. We would later learn that what differs him from most gansta rappers in Germany is that he actually had REAL STREET CRED and shit but as of now we have a guy who did your standard gangsta rap topics in a standard fashion. Kurdish Bodybuilder Bushido was still just a Bushido clone to most.

So what happened to make him one of the most hyped German rappers?

Crime. Crime happened.

Crime happens every now and so often. German rappers, as much as they stand behind their American colleagues in this department, are often people that aren't on the best terms with the judical system. Assault charges, charges for dealing small-or-not-so-small amounts of drugs, small-scale armed robbery or just simply getting sued for using some celebrity girls name in a track for a "random bitch i fucked you heard about", everything happens. He also had a few of those (most famously for being invited to a Playboy party in LA and breaking a bunnies nose). But he was a level above this stuff as the general public would soon find out a bit later.

2009 he and a few buddies of his hijacked a gold transport.

1.7 million euros worth. Gold that was, to this day, never found. Statements of his make it seem like he wasn't doing this because he really wanted to bathe in a bit of cash, rather that there was something going on in the background that we will probably never hear about. Or maybe we will, he's planning a movie. You probably won't though seeing that you don't obsessively follow Good Music.

This is the time frame where he actually becomes interesting as an artist. Why? Because he produced German rap's (and probably German music's in general but who cares) first bona-fide prison record. Recorded under a blanket with a digital voice recorder he smuggled into prison he sent an album-sized package of rap-parts to his producers enjoying freedom who had to mix his recordings of middling-to-awful quality on beats. Together with Xatar's (Kurdish for "danger") infamy the record (called Nr. 415, like his cell number) now enjoys classic status among rap nerds like me.

So this is where I think he becomes interesting for English-or-other-language-speaking-people. On his debut album he already had a nice selection of the beats that would later become the signature of his entire label, but they weren't as prominent as they were on Nr. 415. He still seemed to flirt every now and then with the dark, minimalist but atmospheric beats that were the norm in German gangsta rap (codified by the aforementioned Bushido like in this classic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-e6mW3eIRwg ) but here there was a clear new direction.

The guy singlehandedly brought German Rap actual, good, g-funk styled beats with gangsta rap lyrics.



The backpacker faction appropriated these kinds of beats way, way before Xatar even made his first records. But they used them for their topics, which, if you ever listened to German backpacker rap, wasn't exactly the kind of stuff they were used for in the states (for the unintiated g-funk beats are associated with Dre and Snoop whose lyrics address topics the average German university student probably didn't care much about). He brought them home.

During his prison time his label colleagues (or signees seeing that he was the owner), the much more technically talented SSIO (great output https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwUxGH3IoJU ) and the female Schwesta Ewa (probably one of the most interesting German gangsta rap artists in her own right based on her biography, former prostitute/dealer/pimp turned rapper) released records also sporting the trademark beats (I'm told they use harder New York style drums in addition to a few other elemtns to turn the G-funk west coast beats into their own thing but I'm actually no good in beats if you ask me anything beyond "vague geographical location" and "most likely used for subgenre x") and the g-funk rennaissance made in Germany was born.

Once he got released, 5 years after his 8 year sentence, he dropped a record that finally unified the g-funk beat masterpieces, honed by years of producer experience and the artistic development of the other rappers on his label with actually well-recorded studio parts by the man himself. Providing the justification that, previous to him, real German gangsters didn't enjoy German rap in part due to the fetishization of technique above all else, but now everything was fine and dandy to him, he also showed a massive technical improvement. It was still simple compared to the absolute technical top tiers of German rap but using hometown slang nobody really was familiar with before his label, the addition of vocabulary in Kurdish, Arabic and other languages he made something truly unique

He released one of the best albums in German rap history.




so yes i guess not as personal as the last one but im drunk give me a break next time ill give you a breakdown of my fave guys