Still Works

The Fettes Brot songs still work, years later. Emanuela, Schwule Mädchen, Bettina, zieh dir bitte etwas an—the kind that burrow into your head and don’t come out. Three guys from Hamburg made German hip-hop something crude and funny and alive, and they never stopped being good at it. Rektor Donz, König Boris, Schiffmeister. They sounded like friends talking to you.

By 2026 they’d been doing this for a long time. The Berlin tour in February landed them at Funkhaus, which used to broadcast the East German state radio, and now it’s where they played in front of people who knew these songs inside out. Maybe there’s something there—hip-hop in the room where official voices once came from—or maybe that’s just the kind of thing you think about when a building has history.

I didn’t go. You know what those shows are like if you’ve been to a few. The band plays what they’ve always played, the crowd sings along, everyone’s there because these songs stuck with them. That’s the whole thing.