This is how we kick it in ESL class: Sido vs. MC Sniper

It struck me that it'd been a while since I did a post featuring video in other languages, so I decided to remedy that situation. Here it is, all hip-hop, all foreign.

The Battle

In the red corner, from Berlin. Germany, the German demon spawn of Necro, Eminem and MF Doom, SIDO!

German hip-hop got it's start in the mid-1980s when kids in Hamburg and Stuttgart starting aping the American rap they heard on the American Forces Network, the radio station produced by the US Military for forces stationed overseas.

For years, the biggest German hip-hop groups, most notably Die Fantastichen Vier, were all pretty much on some "throw your hands in the air," Fresh Prince-type party rhymes. Deep, heavy subject matter was off the table.

This started to change in the '90s when a group called Advanced Chemistry released a track called "Fremd in eigenem Land" ("Foreign in your own country"), the first German hip-hop song to seriously talk about racism and immigrant bashing in post-unification Germany.

At the turn of the last millennium, a separate, much angrier hip-hop scene started to develop in primarily Turkish housing projects of Berlin. The Berliners weren't interested in directing their rage at the system like the groups of the '90s. They just wanted to fuck shit up.

The leader of the pack is Sido, who isn't just a rapper, he's also the CEO of Aggro-Berlin Records, the label that helped fuel much of the fury.

Here's some fun facts about Sido:

He usually wears a gold skull mask.

He once talked shit about fellow Berlin rapper Azad's mother in a TV interview. He later apologized.

He had the good taste to tell Mike Shinoda that Fort Minor sucks, and that Linkin Park sucks more, live on MTV Germany's version of TRL.

Here's the clip for "Strassenjunge" ("Streetkid") off of 2006's Eine Hand wäscht die andere (One Hand Washes the Other).




The Competition

In the blue corner, from Seoul, South Korea, MC SNIPER!

OK, on the real, my internet research has yielded very little information on MC Sniper. I know he's from Korea, he used to run a hip-hop club in Seoul called The South Side, he's had his songs banned from Korea's commercial airwaves, and his blood type is B. No really, that's on a website.

What's really important is that his fourth album, How Bad Do U Want It?, featured an epic posse cut called "Better Than Yesterday." This song has a beat that sounds like crazy Asian superhero music and guest vocals from a dude named Outsider who holds the world record for most syllables-per-minute in a rap song.