The Hessian Berliner LIZ doesn’t deal with an in-your-face attitude, but also with empowerment.
“After an event, a guy suddenly stood in front of me and said that his daughter was really into my music. But since she couldn’t be here, he asked if it was okay to take a photo for them together. Yeah, sure – and when he sends it out I’m like, ‘How old is your daughter?’ He answers: ‘Thirteen’. I swallowed for a moment because the language of my music isn’t exactly, um… gentle.”
LIZ grins at this point in her anecdote. Yes, yes, “not exactly gentle” my ass… The sawtooth lyrics of the 25-year-old rapper from Frankfurt make even the Kanaksprak dealer stories of the early arrest warrant sound like Walter von der Vogelweide. But first, let’s continue to listen to what this story that LIZ is currently telling is about: “The father then tells me that a man recently came too close to his daughter at a bus stop – but she dared to raise her voice. She shouted for him to fuck off. He said she got the courage to do it through my music. Open your mouth, don’t put up with anything… That really touched me, I didn’t even have that look at my pieces – but at that moment I thought: ‘You can do more than just insult the microphone. You’re helping girls empower themselves.’”
From the curb to the feature pages
The fact that for LIZ the empowerment from this bus stop anecdote is a significant part of her offensive rap persona should not reduce the story of the Berliner by choice to social worker prose. Like: “The former dealer who – in the language of the street – gives the kids new courage again.” Absolutely not. We’re not here at the union, at communion classes or at breakfast television; In addition, LIZ is too complex for such a shortening and its story is too unique. And she doesn’t come without a dramatic backstory: LIZ grew up in Frankfurt’s Ostend, is a divorcee and latchkey child, her father was absent for much of her youth, and she’s in prison. LIZ herself sells and takes drugs, commits burglaries, and spends time in the closed ward of a juvenile psychiatric hospital. Crashed CV, existing in difficulties, in great difficulties.
But during the Corona years, LIZ took hip hop’s self-empowerment slogans at their word. In 2021 she will release her first EP, STAY ECHT, which has already received a lot of attention – from the curb to the features section. From now on, the rapper with an Azerbaijani-Turkish migration background seems to be unstoppable; another EP “Liz Taylor” and the long-play debut MONA LIZA will be released in a very short time, as well as various featurings with acts like Prinz Pi and Bozza. The second album is already in the starting blocks, it will bear the title AMY WINEHOUZE – and represents the first major musical turning point in this breathless fast-forward career.
Because LIZ breaks up the brutal street ‘n’ stress rap of her previous releases and dares to expand her repertoire to include self-therapeutic inner perspectives. What is of course part of an emotional concept for the average singer/songwriter represents a risk for the musician in her genre. In the interview you can tell that it makes her quite nervous to step out from behind the bulletproof gangsta armor and also weaknesses in the lyrics to negotiate. After all, it’s not for nothing that the album reminds us of one of the most tragic figures in the music industry, Amy Winehouse.
“I don’t want to end up like Amy Winehouse”
“Amy Winehouse is an incredibly inspiring woman for me,” says LIZ, “but her departure shows me how I don’t want to end up. Especially because I know how quickly this can happen in an environment that ultimately only consists of drugs and alcohol. I always found myself in her songs, but especially in her attempts to self-medicate with music. There’s this one video from one of the last performances where she totally shits on stage, that touches me very much and is also a warning to me. I don’t want to end up like her – what I do want is to be able to inspire others the way she did.”
Despite all the inwardness of the angry artist, one should not leave out a certain content warning: LIZ’s soon-to-be-released second album will function as a teacher’s fright despite the thoughtful lines. AMY WINEHOUZE is an intense and heavy record. In many places it’s still about violence, drugs, the streets – or even sex positivity: “I have a vagina made of gold / even without a cock I’m king”.
The sledgehammer has just become more variable both musically and in terms of content. He still leaves shards behind. On “Main Grau” LIZ looks melancholy at the loved-hated Frankfurt of her youth – and the present. In general, this place plays a major role in her work. While other rappers act emphatically Berlin after moving to the capital and assiduously blur out their less cool places or cities of origin, LIZ is all too happy to weave local Hessian color into their stories. The new record doesn’t change that, “Main Grau” was one of the first pieces she went out with. It doesn’t talk about how LIZ asserts herself on the street, but rather how she feels about all the madness: “Everything here is too colorful / I miss Main Grau / They say: ‘What doesn’t kill you / Eats you up’.”
More self-evident
This personal approach – emotional and local – makes the LIZ phenomenon seem even more authentic; behind all the knife-edge splatter horror there is an interesting person. So this isn’t just a 18+ hip-hop comic, rather this woman from Frankfurt is the first female gangsta rapper who isn’t stuck in the eternal gender category. LIZ does not represent the genre in any “women’s league”, her equality with all the Haftis, Capital Bras or 187s is not questioned even in the testosterone hell of hip hop. A long path that has been paved by so many pioneers now seems to have finally been fulfilled. Empowerment, but at the same time self-evident.
LIZ is happy to be asked about this; she doesn’t need to act as if her acceptance in the rap scene fell from heaven. Without wanting to define herself in a particularly feminist way, she is very aware of the topic of role models and, remember her opening anecdote, represents great value for her.
The circle could even have come full circle to perhaps the first major female gangsta rap character in the local game. Like LIZ, this comes from the Hessian banking metropolis and disturbed earlier generations of chanting with pithy threats like “Run lollipop, run!” LIZ also had the idea of creating a joint track with the icon Sabrina Setlur: “I totally celebrate this ‘young generation / old generation’ thing!” she says and seems a little disillusioned that Sabrina Setlur is responsible for this The offer was not to be excited about. The team-up of the year really slipped through the hands of the German-speaking hip-hop world spirit. But LIZ can see it in a sporty way: “Still… I’m proud that she also comes from Frankfurt. I’m pretty local patriotic.” The last sentence wasn’t needed, because you can understand that LIZ is the criminal on-beat version of Badesalz even without the cider and green sauce background.
The ICE route Frankfurt – Berlin and back is by no means the entire horizon for LIZ. She doesn’t have much choice when it comes to the question of when she’ll recover from this tough year in which she wrote almost 40(!) new pieces. She’s much more likely to have concrete plans that even extend beyond the country’s borders: “My family’s roots are in Azerbaijan and Turkey – and I would really like to get a taste of the Turkish market, I’ve already finished three songs in Turkish. When the AMY WINEHOUZE tour is over next year, I would like to dive in there. As a German citizen, I have more opportunities to express myself in Turkey. I don’t mean that I want to appear totally political, but I can definitely contribute something when it comes to women’s rights.”
LIZ in Turkey? Sounds more than exciting, that would really be a thing of the future that one can be curious about. But that shouldn’t distract from album number two, which will be released on February 16th. In front of the Bosporus, the sky from Main to the Spree should burn.
LIZ’s three-dimensional gangsta design between knives and mental health spreads at least as much fascination as it does terror – and represents nothing less than a paradigm shift. Today it can also be called the gangsta and not just the gangsta. The difference is hereby abolished. LIZ is the powerful proof.