Haiyti On Television

I keep rewatching the Haiyti performance from television. Webcamgirl was the song, and I don’t even know why I’m this obsessed with it. She’s a Hamburg rapper, mid-twenties, and for the last few years she’s basically taken apart everything German rap thought it knew. The agreement about boundaries—street versus avant-garde, gangsta versus art, underground versus pop—she either broke through them or they were never as real as everyone wanted to believe.

She releases constantly, mostly DIY stuff at this rapid pace, and that nonstop output became the voice of a generation that doesn’t care about rules. Dendemann got into her work. Haftbefehl. Deichkind. Suddenly everyone’s paying attention, from underground to mainstream, and it’s because the music actually holds something genuine inside it—something dark and emotional built out of trap drums and dancehall and German electronic fragments, all moving through this voice that doesn’t perform anything.

On television she performed with an orchestra behind her, which shouldn’t have worked. The song is bleak and strained, not made for television. But the orchestra worked anyway, not by making anything prettier, just by being honest about the pressure that was already there. Another layer of weight on weight.

I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with how much I care about this. Watching someone that young just refuse to play that dominance game, in a genre run on exactly that—something about it hits.