“Das ist unsere Party.” HipHop in der DDR by Leonard Schmieding (review)

In “Das ist unsere Party.” HipHop in der DDR, the historian and hip-hop scholar Leonard Schmieding examines how the art form’s performance practices, lyrical and sonic rhetoric, and material cultures provided East German youth with tools to alternately engage, subvert, and refigure official state ideologies. Through examinations of hip-hop film, dance, graffiti, fashion, rapping, and DJing—as appropriated and localized in the GDR during the 1980s—Schmieding addresses national questions of ideology and subjectivity as well as more universal questions of agency, reception, and the fluidity of meaning in so-called “popular culture”—or “mass culture,” depending on your persuasion. The ultimate strength of the study is Schmieding’s ability to provide a nuanced reading of the interplay between local and global forces through a framework balancing methods from historical and cultural studies.

Schmieding sets up the ambivalent power of hip-hop through a close analysis and reception history of the 1984 film Beat Street in the GDR. Central to his analysis is the East German Culture Ministry’s question of whether hip-hop was, at its core, a commercial product of the Western culture industry or the vernacular expression of a proletarian underclass. This paradox remains a central focus in hip-hop studies, which struggles with the contradictions of a genre vilified for its gangsta bling just as it is celebrated for its political consciousness; and Schmieding’s expert archival and analytical work has provided us with a fascinating test case. In the historical narrative that emerges, state officials ultimately allowed for the national distribution of the widely influential film, citing the central role of Beat Street’s producer, iconic civil rights leader and outspoken leftist, Harry Belafonte. As one state film agency representative, Siegrid Geerdts, recalled about the approval process: Belafonte’s production “was thus of particular interest, and of course the film—of his entire history, of what he represents—also fit into the image of what the GDR wanted to convey about America” (66). By putting official documents and interviews in dialogue with local hip-hop voices, however, Schmieding shows how burgeoning hip-hop fans reconfigured the Culture Ministry’s preferred readings to suit specific—often individualizing—needs and desires.

Schmieding tracks the ways that the state adopted, adapted, and policed hip-hop art forms as a delivery system for GDR ideologies. He examines the archival evidence of registered East German hip-hop workers who DJed at community club nights and led state-sponsored hip-hop dance workshops, looking not only at how individual artists gamed the system but how the Stasi monitored and corrected such fluidities. We see how, by employing and disciplining hip-hop culture workers and controlling the spaces of performance, hip-hop was simultaneously embraced as proletarian vernacular culture and policed as a potentially commercializing threat.

In the latter sections of the book, Schmieding turns from an analysis of the state actors and the official mechanisms for incorporating hip-hop into GDR ideologies to a collection of local case studies that examine the unofficial practices of hip-hop’s underground from Leipzig and Rostock to Stralsund, Dessau, and Dresden. In some of the book’s most telling vignettes, we learn of the ways that hip-hop circulated as a sometimes illicit and contraband, but more often youthfully creative do-it-yourself material culture. Schmieding’s evidence ranges from the material history of graffiti’s visual traces and breakdance’s performance spaces to the homemade Puma knock-offs of young Dessauers and the homespun English rap lyrics of the Dresden MC, TJ Big Blaster Electric Boogie: “All the people of the nation / Listen up 2 this demonstration / of putting together the best 2 make it better / leaving narrow tradition 4 a higher mission” (195). Schmieding tracks the ways that these cultural practices and performances, despite their seemingly figurative or literal inauthenticities, captured a performative truth about hip hop—that, as the aphorism goes, hip...