Jewish gangsta rapper soars in Germany
As anti-semitism rises, so does hip-hop artist
ESSEN, Germany — A yellow star of David — the sort the Nazis forced Jews to wear — on the sleeve of a white sweatshirt appears near the start of the rapper Sun Diego’s “Yellow Bar Mitzvah” video. Seconds later, a scene shows a yellow Lamborghini in the middle of a neon Star of David. Jets of flame from a massive gold menorah punctuate rapid-fire rhymes about guns, drugs and money.
“Yellow Bar Mitzvah”, released last year, is a rare German gangsta rap recording in which Hebrew features prominently in the lyrics.
And while videos mixing menorahs and yellow Stars of David with guns, sports cars and bikini-clad women pushing wheelbarrows full of cocaine would raise eyebrows anywhere, in today’s Germany, they are particularly notable: Elements of the country’s booming rap and hiphop scene have been criticized as anti-Semitic in recent weeks.
Sun Diego, meanwhile, has succeeded while proudly proclaiming his Jewish identity. The rapper, born Dimitrij Chpakov, has 272,000 Instagram followers, and “Yellow Bar Mitzvah”, released last year, has racked up more than 9.7 million views on YouTube. Another track, “Eloah,” is closing in on 6 million views. Sun Diego’s autobiography, Yellow Bar Mitzvah: The Seven Portals From Moloch to Fame, co-authored with the German journalist Dennis Sand, spent weeks at the top of German bestseller lists.
In his recent take on the 1980s Falco hit “Rock Me Amadeus,” he boasts in a lyric that “a Jew is making a new German wave.”
Sun Diego’s popularity shows that “You can’t pigeonhole German rap fans,” a Berlin-based hip-hop critic, Viola Funk, said. “Fans aren’t just interested in the art, but in the person behind it — that’s why it’s such a great thing when there is an unbelievably popular Jewish rapper.”
Though he is not particularly religious, he said his Jewish identity has always played a role in his life. “I came to Germany with a whole community of people, all of whom knew who I was and where I came from,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if you’re observant or not. I learned as a kid my mother is Jewish, my grandmother is Jewish, my great-grandmother was Jewish — I’m Jewish by blood. I have no choice.”
As a teenager, Chpakov ran with a rough crowd, dealing marijuana and running petty scams on the streets of Osnabrück, his Ruhr Valley hometown, where he still lives. After an arrest at 15 for theft and fraud, he was sentenced to 400 hours of community service at the city zoo. He dropped out of school not long afterward, working on construction crews while self-producing rap music under the jokey childhood nickname Sun Diego.
By 2011, he had built up a modest career as a rapper and producer — until fans turned on him for being too dance-club friendly. In 2013, he decided to reinvent himself. He donned a SpongeBob SquarePants costume he ordered on Amazon and entered rap battle competitions under the pseudonym SpongeBOZZ.
Delivering profane insults, violent threats and outrageous boasts while dressed as a children’s cartoon character turned out to be a perfect recipe for YouTube success. His videos were a sensation among young rap fans, and a 2015 album, The Planktonweed Tapes, briefly topped the German charts.
But the costume was also stifling. Chpakov started thinking about the next act, one that would allow him to scrap the sponge suit. Surveying the German rap scene, he started thinking about a part of his identity he had not engaged with since his childhood.
“Kids have lots of Muslim, Christian, German, Turkish, American, Lebanese or Kurdish role models,” he wrote in his autobiography. “But so far there hasn’t been a Jew people could identify with in the German rap scene. I thought it was time to make an intentional statement.”
Yet incorporating his Jewish identity into his new persona seemed to intrigue fans, rather than repel them. “When I put out the book and the videos, it was like I had been resurrected,” he says.