Webcamgirl, With Strings

Die ZEIT called her Falco, sounding like Nina Hagen, and declared a pop revolution in progress. That might be the most accurate thing a German newspaper has written about music in years. Haiyti—rapper, singer, one-woman demolition crew from Hamburg-St. Pauli—spent the last two years dismantling every tired certainty German hip-hop had built up about itself. The wall between street credibility and avant-garde ambition, between Gangsta posturing and actual art, between underground and pop: she knocked all of it down herself, releasing music at a pace that felt almost compulsive, as a solo act in an industry that has never been shy about its contempt for women.

The collision inside the music is what makes it so hard to file away. Trap and dancehall and something cold from the Deutsche Welle era, radical party nihilism pressed up against something that sounds like genuine feeling, and hooks so immediate they almost feel unfair. Dendemann, Haftbefehl, Deichkind—all fans. JUICE put her on the cover. Rock am Ring lost its collective mind. That spread isn’t crossover appeal in the industry sense; it’s proof that something real is happening. Her language, her voice, the specific way she moves through a song—there’s nobody else doing what she does in German right now.

She performed Webcamgirl on Jan Böhmermann’s Neo Magazin Royale on ZDF, backed by the Rundfunk-Tanzorchester Ehrenfeld—the house band responsible for some of the best live television moments in recent German memory. The staging was strange and committed, the kind of performance that makes you put your phone down. The track won’t convert everyone. I was completely gone for it. German rap keeps getting stranger and more interesting the more women show up and simply refuse to behave.