Music from Nairobi: Hippest Urban Hip-Hop
Rap in Kibera: German and Kenyan artists fire up the audience in east Africa’s largest slum (Photo: Adrian Storey)
27 November 2010
A house in Nairobi. For three weeks, it is a studio, hotel, canteen and meeting place where German electronic artists encounter Kenyan hip-hoppers. The result is a mixture of different musical cultures that will now also be heard for the first time in Berlin.
“It‘s a madhouse, the beats never stop, the MCs never go home.” Sasha Perera from the Berlin musician’s collective Jahcoozi is enthusiastic about the atmosphere at the studio house in Nairobi. Perera is part of an exchange programme that is like nothing ever before: Gebrüder Teichmann, Modeselektor and Jahcoozi – three successful projects from the world renowned the Berlin electronic music scene – travelled to Nairobi to take on a daring experiment together with MC Mr. Abbas, hip-hopper Nazizi, electro-pop group Just a Band and hip-hop collective Ukoo Flani: they aim to hot wire the different club cultures of the two capital cities.
For three weeks, the artists live together under one roof, get to know one another, open up to each other and finally reach a mutual musical consensus that will become known by the name BLNRB. And just as the two cities are merged together in the name of the project, eventually the music of the 20 participants also merges.
Still, it took a few days before they were able to drop all their habits, relates Johannes Hossfeld from the Goethe-Institut Nairobi: “The Kenyans first always had to prove how well they can copy their American role models, and it took some time until their own, far more interesting voice emerged from behind these masks. The Germans, too, brought along their own scene’s rules and had to cross the line and open themselves up to something new.”
Countering exotic safari postcard expectations
It began with two scenes that could not be more different: while Berlin’s electronic scene makes headlines around the world, Kenyan hip-hop is only locally successful – and as is often the case, the African scenes are not a part of international dialogue. But, BLNRB brought together the two music styles to take their separate strengths and create something new and different – the fusion of European audio aesthetics and African hip-hop culture. For initiator Hossfeld the project has not only an artistic aspect but also serves another purpose: “It gives us the chance to counter the exotic safari postcard and catastrophe clichés with hip, urban Nairobi life.”
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"Dirty Laundry" - Gebrüder Teichmann, Mr. Abbas, Lon Jon, Kimya is part of the soundtrack of Soul Boy, the film by Kenyan director Hawa Essuman.
Their first songs have already been released, like the track Dirty Laundry, which Gebrüder Teichmann recorded in Nairobi with a number of MCs and which was released as part of the soundtrack for the Kenyan feature film Soul Boy. Many more songs that have only been presented to the audience in Nairobi so far are now being produced for the spring 2011 album release. For the first and only time, all of the participants from Nairobi and Berlin will perform at the opening night of the 2010 Worldtronics Festival on 1 December at the House of World Cultures in Berlin and give the new tunes their best shot.
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