Die Beginner, Slowly

I found out Die Beginner were working on new material. Eizi Eiz, Denyo, DJ Mad—three guys from Hamburg who made hip-hop that actually sounded like something, back when I paid attention to that stuff. They’d gone mostly quiet over the years, the way bands do when everyone’s working solo projects and paying rent and dealing with all the friction that slowly grinds a group to pieces.

Die Beginner had a specific sound for a specific moment. Their music was crude in a way that didn’t ask permission, funny without performing humor, genuinely hostile to what hip-hop was supposed to be. When I heard them, they sounded like three people who’d figured something out and couldn’t be bothered checking if you approved. Probably I was reading too much into it—probably I still am—but that’s what you hear when you’re young and you hear the thing that moves you.

By the time they’d faded, hip-hop had become something else. Slicker, more self-conscious, more committed to its own mythology. Die Beginner never cared about that machinery. They were just there for a while, and then they weren’t, and now they’re back in small ways, between other lives and other projects.

So they’re working on an album. It’ll take time. People change, and you want the band that lived in your head at seventeen, but what you actually get is three men in their forties making music between everything else they’ve got going on. That’s usually the truer thing, if you’re honest about it. If the album comes out, fine. If it doesn’t, you already have what mattered.