Was geht, homey?

>> Zentrifugal's Bastian Boettcher with the vier-eins-eins on hip hop auf Deutsch

By RUPERT BOTTENBERG

Bastian Boettcher doesn't just drop solid rhymes in the language of Goethe--he flat-out quotes him, which gives a clue to what puts Bremen native/Weimar resident Boettcher, Nuyorican Poetry Festival winner and the MC half of German hip hop unit Zentrifugal, at the forefront of the high end of Euro hip hop.

Mirror: The hip hop scene in Germany seems to be pretty happening right now...

Bastian Boettcher: We have a huge variety of different styles here at the moment, so we can consider ourselves lucky. When hip hop started in Germany, it was mostly copying Americans, but now we have bands who are trying to develop their own style, whether it's more comedy, or political, or poetic. Hamburg's a big city for hip hop, and so is Stuttgart, where the Fantastische Vier come from, and Afrob, who did a track with Flava Flav. You know, rap culture originated in NYC, so it's connected to the American language. We have to find our definition of rap. We can't just copy or translate--we have to redefine. I think that's more real, closer to what rap's about.

M: The way I see it, if American English is a blunt object, then German is a precision instrument.

BB: Not only is German very precise, it's also got words with a lot more syllables. A phrase like "check it out" has only one per word. German words are a lot more complex, so it's a challenge to make it sound smooth and... uh, flowey. And we have hard consonants--when you hear bands like Rammstein, this is what characterizes German. Hard, sharp consonants.

M: Do you think this is to your advantage, as an MC?

BB: It's a challenge. The moment you are understood here in Germany--as opposed to American bands, who aren't really understood--you have to really think about what you're saying, because people judge you by that.

M: I've seen the influence hip hop has had on English over the last two decades. Do you see the same thing happening to German?

BB: You might have heard the expression "was geht." It means nothing, it's like "check it out" or something. It was the Fantastische Vier who used it for the first time, and now it's common. I think it's fun to develop new expressions and sayings--like the poets in former times used to do. You know this expression "leck mich am Arsch?" (Note: that's German for "kiss my ass.") It's a quotation from Goethe. It's a nasty expression, but he used it for the first time, and then it became common. This isn't just a phenomenon of hip hop, but of everything which is lyrical, and public. It's a chance for us MCs, as artisans, to create sayings and make them common. Not in a bad way, like commercials, though. What I want to do as an MC is... not manipulate the language, but influence it, make people think about certain things. The moment you influence the way people speak, you influence the way they think. One shouldn't underestimate that. :

With Royal Hill and Rolex Philosoph at Lion D'Or on Thursday, February 17, 7:30pm, $10