The Argument for German

Die Fantastischen Vier—Stuttgart’s most famous export, Germany’s most important hip-hop group—played an outdoor show that summer on the grounds of a television broadcast center near Munich. Corporate sponsors, incongruous venue, transmission towers in the background. Part of the Telekom Street Gigs series, which had the interesting idea of staging concerts in spaces that weren’t designed for them. It works better than it sounds.

Fanta Vier, as everyone calls them, have been making the argument for German-language hip-hop since the late 1980s, and by 2010 that argument had long since been won. They came out of Stuttgart at a moment when rapping in German was considered either technically impossible or simply embarrassing—English was the only language that worked for the genre, or so went the received wisdom. They proved that wrong in the most direct way possible: by doing it, and doing it well. The German language, with all its compound nouns and grammatical machinery, turns out to carry rhythm and wit and genuine personality just fine.

What Smudo and Thomas D built together across thirty years is a kind of playful intelligence that never calcified into self-importance—a trick almost no act manages to pull off long-term. I grew up with their records in the background and never stopped listening. Seeing them play surrounded by satellite dishes should have felt anticlimactic. It didn’t, and that’s the whole story of Fanta Vier in miniature: they make improbable settings work.