Beauty Comes from Outside
If there’s a Cheshire Cat in Berlin rap, it’s MC Fitti—always behind the same sunglasses and baseball cap, grinning through songs about sleeping on trains and helicopters made of ROFLs. He aims squarely at the bedroom of someone’s younger brother and knows it and leans into it with the conviction of a man who has decided that sincerity is overrated as a strategy.
I sat down with him for an interview that was going pleasantly enough until I noticed he was methodically weaving sponsor names into every third answer. Philips appeared twice, Volkswagen once, and the price for shaving his beard was two to three ocean containers of Neff merchandise plus a razor subscription. The beard’s origin remains a genuine mystery. I always say something different,
he told me when I asked how long he’d had it. Though that might also be a lie.
His account of the Fusion Festival—the annual utopian free party in the Mecklenburg lake district—involved lying in a hammock with elves and squirrels, playing Kniffel without any Kniffel equipment, and Orko from He-Man turning up with elvish bread. When he described the music video he’d just shot in Dubai, Bangkok, and Nairobi—proper film crew, lighting technicians, set builders, runners—his critical assessment was super wild!
The locals everywhere were cool and hadn’t understood a word. This tracks.
Someone asked whether people have sex more easily to Je t’aime or Sexy Chick. Both, on loop,
he said immediately. When presented with the scenario of giving different massages to the Vengaboys, Olli Schulz, and Mickey Mouse, he answered with the composure of a man who had considered this before: the Vengaboys get Max Don’t Have Sex with Your Ex through headphones on indefinite loop; Olli Schulz gets a sumo massage to sharpen his wrestling; Mickey Mouse gets to watch and jerk off. He still has things to accomplish,
Fitti explained.
The Geilon album had just landed in a limited box with a t-shirt, patches, a sticker collection, a poster to color yourself, 22 tracks plus instrumentals, and a picture vinyl with proper artwork on both sides. He seemed genuinely pleased about the vinyl. Roughly ten festivals left that year and around forty more concerts, with bookings still coming in.
His final tip for staying fit and sexy: Best tip: be fit and sexy. Beauty comes from outside.
It inverts the German cliché—the one that insists beauty comes from within—with the air of someone who spent no time arriving at this conclusion and still got it right. That’s the whole MC Fitti thing: the gag that turns out not to be entirely wrong.