Award for rap duo with anti-Jewish lyrics sparks fury

BERLIN: In Germany’s hugely popular hiphop music scene, one of the biggest albums of the past year was from two trash-talking rappers who rhymed about their prowess in bed and in the weight room and about violently dominating their opponents.

The album has racked up sales, but has also attracted a different sort of attention. In one song, the pair boasts about how their bodies are “more defined than Auschwitz prisoners”. In another, they vow to “make another Holocaust, show up with a Molotov”.

Widespread condemnation followed, turned into an uproar since the rappers, Farid Bang and Kollegah, won the Echo award for best hip-hop album at Germany’s equivalent of the Grammys on April 12.

The lead singer of the country’s pre-eminent punk rock band objected to the award from the same stage that night. “In principle I consider provocation is a good thing,” Campino, the lead singer of Die Toten Hosen, said. “But we need to differentiate between art as a stylistic device, or a form of provocation that only serves to destroy and ostracise others.” Other winners have said they are returning their prizes.

“Anti-Semitic provocations do not deserve awards, they are simply disgusting,” Heiko Maas, Germany’s foreign minister, wrote on Twitter in German.

He also noted the timing of the ceremony. April 12 is a day of worldwide solemnity. “That such a prize was handed out on Holocaust Remembrance Day is shameful,” he wrote.

The country’s recording industry association had criticized the lyrics but defended its choice in the name of artistic freedom. Nominations are based on popularity and rankings on music charts, not artistic quality — a process the association has pledged to re-examine after the outcry.

But beyond the resentment over the award, the episode has also provoked soulsearching about incitement in art, and the extent of anti-Jewish sentiment in German hip-hop in particular.

And most troubling, many believe, is what it says about the rise in anti-Semitism among young people, and the millions of impressionable rap fans who are generations removed from the horrors of Nazi rule.

The objectionable lyrics in the winning album, titled Young, Brutal, Good Looking 3, do not explicitly deny the mass slaughter of some 6 million Jews by the Nazis.

The rappers did not respond to requests for comment.