It’s been a while since a certain Bushido promised the audience in his hit “Sunbed Flavor”: “I’ll fuck your friends.” Two decades later, Jassin admits in his song “Sonnenbankflavour” that although he steals drinks from the supermarket, he is not even allowed to smoke in the car of his girlfriend, who has just got her driving license.
No, there weren’t any such warm-talkers in German rap before. Guys for whom, in the first song on their first album, the mother is waiting with open arms, the father is smoking away “the last bit of his lungs,” and the sad hero is asking himself questions like this: “How can it be that at the age of 20 I’m already thinking about dying?” Jassin Awadallah from Lutherstadt Wittenberg cites arrest warrant as influences, as does Franz Kafka. You don’t have to attribute to him (yet) the same poetic power as these two giants of the German language, but Jassin actually manages to create a whole niche of his own between street slang and diary entries, between authenticity and imagination.
Is that still hip hop or already Reinhard Mey?
On his debut ARSENALPLATZ, whose title not coincidentally refers to the central location of Wittenberg’s old town, he delves into his upbringing as the son of an Egyptian father in Saxony-Anhalt (“Between”), talks about his self-doubt and the therapy it requires (“Arsenalplatz”) or flies through a summer love affair (“Simson S51”) on a very East German moped. You don’t really know: is this already wise or youthfully naive, is it still hip hop or is it already Reinhard Mey?
Because even if the kitsch is sometimes a bit close, even if Jassin sometimes raps as if his cheeks were full of cotton balls, even if the melancholy sometimes condenses into a pose, there is still someone who talks about intimate feelings in a very universal way with precise language and an eye for detail. So is this wimp rap for Gen Z or contemporary poetry? Probably both.
This review appears in Musikexpress 1/2026.