The Funkhaus and the Fat Bread

"Emanuela," "Schwule Mädchen," "Bettina, zieh dir bitte etwas an"—these songs occupy a specific region of German cultural memory, the part that activates at house parties and late-night karaoke when someone’s had enough to drink and wants exactly this and nothing else. Fettes Brot, the Hamburg hip-hop trio, have been doing this since the early nineties, which is long enough that their most famous songs have become the kind of thing you singalong to without registering you’re doing it. Pure reflex.

What’s easy to underestimate, looking back across decades, is how genuinely strange some of that early material was. "Schwule Mädchen"—a 1995 song that essentially just said queer people are fine and everyone should calm down—felt almost aggressively earnest for the era of German hip-hop it landed in. "Bettina" was pure comedy, a three-minute argument delivered in rhyme. König Boris, Schiffmeister, and Rektor Donz never tried to sound American, never chased whatever was crossing the Atlantic that season. Stubbornly themselves, which turned out to be a more durable strategy than most of their contemporaries managed.

In early 2010 they kicked off a new tour at the Funkhaus in Berlin’s Nalepastraße—a building with enough historical weight to make any concert feel slightly absurd and slightly sacred at the same time. The Funkhaus was the production center for East German state radio: Stimme der DDR, Radio DDR 1, Radio 2. The whole apparatus of a state broadcasting system, transmitting into a country that no longer existed, from a building that somehow survived and became an event space. There’s something right about Fettes Brot playing there specifically. Hamburg noise bouncing around a concrete monument to a dead information order.