Hip hop with a hand up its ass

The rascally rap of Berlin’s Puppetmastaz

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

For all the talk of “keeping it real,” too many hip hop artists come off contrived and, well, fake. Given this, one can appreciate a hip hop act that is completely fabricated from square one. And I mean fabricated, as in stitched together from chunks of foam rubber and scraps of cloth. Puppetmastaz, a horde of rapping puppets hailing from Berlin, fit that bill, and have a CV that leaves countless flesh and blood MCs in their dust. Their discography includes 2003’s debut album Creature Funk and a number of 12-inches, they’ve made countless TV appearances and toured most of Europe and into Russia—North Americans get their first taste of Puppetmastery at MEG Montreal this year. Coming down the pipeline is their follow-up album Creature Shock Radio, due out here in early ’06, a possible DVD and maybe even a TV show. In the meantime, the Mirror got a hold of Snuggles, the bunny in the track suit, for the 411.

Mirror: I understand you puppets first appeared in 1996, for a show involving slides and a science-fiction fairy tale, and have been performing hip hop as Puppetmastaz since 1999. Were you originally intended for a hip hop project?

Snuggles: No, we arrived there naturally. We’d always been into hip hop in a sub-mainstream context but when, in the ’90s, the world launched all that nuclear mainstream shit, we thought real puppets better speak up before it’s too late, before the world is taken over by fake puppets, as opposed to real ones like us.

M: What types of materials were used to make you?

S: What is the human gene? Will words help us decode the sheer mysticism of life itself, or will it merely put a biological stamp on it? Latex and shark blood mostly, though.

M: Puppetmastaz have performed at all the coolest clubs and spaces in Berlin—WMF, Tacheles, Cookies, Bastard, Maria, Kulturbrauerie and so on. Is there a club in Berlin, or perhaps elsewhere, where you feel most at home?

S: Born we were, as Yoda would say, in Bastard on Kastanienallee, but we have a spiritual mobile home in this world. As long as the mics are up and the peeploids get down, we be there.

M: Beyond your own performances, you puppets have also interviewed other artists, such as DJ Vadim and Gonzales. Do the interview subjects react well to being questioned by puppets?

S: Depends. You can always judge people’s sense of reality by how they react to being interviewed by puppets. Some think it’s silly, some think it’s cool. Do you think it’s fun to be answered by a puppet? I think you just need to imagine the reversed vibe and you’ll have a better answer than I can give.

With Peanut Butter Wolf and J-Rocc at SAT
on Saturday, Oct. 22, 9 p.m., $25

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