The Road Back to the Tape

Long before anyone was buying wristbands to see Cro or Casper headline Splash!—Germany’s biggest hip-hop festival—the music was happening in basements and backyards, without documentation or distribution deals. In Heidelberg in the late 1980s, a collective called Advanced Chemistry, featuring rapper Toni-L, was recording German-language hip-hop at a moment when the consensus held that German couldn’t carry the rhythmic weight of the form. They proved that wrong in the most direct way possible: by making it work anyway.

The documentary Back to Tape tries to map that history by getting in a car and driving through it. Director Niko Hüls travels from Munich to Hamburg, stopping at places where something actually happened—the Glockenbachwerkstatt in Munich, the Stuttgart Hall of Fame, the Rödelheim district of Frankfurt where Moses Pelham’s Rödelheim Hartreim Projekt came to life in 1993. These are the coordinates of a culture that grew up sideways, borrowing from New York and translating it into something unmistakably German before anyone had decided whether that was allowed.

Along the way Hüls talks to people who shaped the scene and to those still living inside it—Namika, Curse, Roger, Scotty76, Duan Wasi, Falk Schacht, Beat Boy Delles, David P. He talks to Moses Pelham. He talks to Namika—Frankfurt-born, Moroccan roots—about how hip-hop with intercultural influence became something that crossed into mainstream pop without losing its backbone. Namika showed me how hip-hop with intercultural influences can become successful pop music, Hüls has said. And with Moses Pelham I went on a time trip back to where the Rödelheim Hartreim Projekt was born in 1993.

There’s something quietly significant about a documentary like this existing at all. German hip-hop spent a long time being treated as a regional curiosity—a lesser copy of something American. The Stuttgart walls, the Frankfurt basements, the Heidelberg collectives were building a tradition that now includes some of the most interesting rap in Europe. Back to Tape doesn’t argue that case. It just shows you the rooms where it happened and lets you feel the gap between then and now.