The Berlin Nobody Made a Movie About

Romano is a rapper from Berlin-Köpenick, the kind of artist who sounds like he’s telling you something in confidence even when he’s performing to a crowd. His second album, Copyshop, is about the years after the Wall came down in 1989—not the triumphant version of that story, not the official one with the candlelight and the strangers hugging at Checkpoint Charlie, but the version that came after, when East and West Germany were legally one country and practically two separate civilizations still figuring out whether they wanted to touch.

The track König der Hunde—King of the Dogs—runs over slow, dragging beats and describes exactly that texture: breaking into abandoned bunkers, ordering a sofa from a West German mail-order catalogue for the first time, mandatory retraining programs, the bus excursion trips that mostly existed to sell dubious merchandise to the newly unemployed. Goths, punks, and skinheads sharing the same streets with no rulebook for any of it. Romano was a kid in the middle of all of it, and he writes about it without heroics. Nobody’s standing on a cliff with their hair in the wind. It’s just 1990 and it’s strange and it hurts a little.

His braids have gotten longer since his first record. His lyrics have gotten denser. The beats are immaculate. There’s something almost shamanic about the way he works—less a rapper than a folk archivist who happens to rhyme, the kind of figure who treats the gutter as primary source material. Copyshop is a rough social portrait of a place and time most people outside Germany have never thought about, rendered by someone who was there and hasn’t cleaned it up for your comfort.