The Swede Who Invented Hip Hop

The thing about Nazis is they’re loudest in a crowd. Put one in a room full of like-minded skinheads and the beer flows, the slogans fly, and everyone is very brave about what should happen to foreigners. Pull one out of the group, sit him down alone in front of a camera, and watch what happens: he fumbles. Ausländer aren’t so terrible after all—especially not the one currently looking him in the eye with a microphone.

Naomi El-Hassan did exactly that for Jäger & Sammler, a show that’s part of funk—the youth-programming venture Germany’s public broadcasters ARD and ZDF launched to finally, desperately, make something a person under forty might actually choose to watch. Most observers found this hilarious. State television going youth. But funk hired actual people: the Rocketbeans gaming collective, YouTuber LeFloid, and Naomi, who drew the assignment of sitting through Nazi rap so the rest of us don’t have to.

The centerpiece is the rapper’s theory that hip hop was not invented by Black Americans. A Swede, he explains, pioneered the spoken-word form in the 1920s—therefore hip hop belongs to Europe. The logic collapses under the weight of the first follow-up question, but that’s the point. These arguments are built for crowds, for call-and-response, for audiences already convinced. One-on-one, alone with a camera, they evaporate.

There’s something almost tedious about how reliably this happens. Confront the ideology directly and it folds. What’s less tedious is watching Naomi stay completely level through all of it—through the nonsense history, through the bad-faith pivots, through the moment where the subject becomes suddenly very interested in not seeming racist to the person he’s been screaming about in rhyming couplets. She doesn’t perform outrage. She just keeps asking questions. That’s harder than it looks.