To tell his story, Apsilon goes back more than 50 years in his family’s history. He starts with his grandparents, who came to Germany from Turkey in the 70s as so-called guest workers. He tells of the dreams and hopes they brought with them – and the harsh, hard-working reality they encountered. From there he leads the narrative arc through the life of his parents in Berlin, who were only brought back later, to himself and finds a kind of bitter peace with what has happened.
“Everything is as it should be,” he summarizes on the melodic “Outro,” sounding proud and resigned at the same time. In doing so, Apsilon follows in the footsteps of pioneers of German rap: Since Advanced Chemistry, no one has told the story of the so-called guest workers and made it tangible. A history lesson that couldn’t be more important given the ever-increasing shift to the right in Germany.
“My Baba has a strong back”
Central to the entire album is the song “Baba”, which was released almost a year before the release of “Haut wie Pelz” and attracted a lot of attention. Looking back, the song is also a kind of liberation for Apsilon – because it showed him what he could rap and sing about: “I think it simply gave me courage and self-confidence in what I could write about,” he says in the interview.
“Before that it was a lot about a racist, capitalist society and was emotionally very limited to anger and frustration. There wasn’t so much vulnerability, weakness, there wasn’t a wide range of emotions. And through Baba I think I got the courage “to show all of that too.” And so in the subtext of songs like “Baba” Apsilon also deals with transgenerational trauma and the attempt to break through the unconscious transmission of past injuries.
Family in the center
Apsilon’s family plays a central role not only in the songs on the album, but also in its creation: Apsilon’s younger brother Arman is the executive producer on “Haut wie Pelz”. Together with producer Bazzazian, who has produced for arrest warrant and Ms. Platnum in the past, and with the multi-instrumentalist Ralph Heidel, Arman creates the complex soundscapes for Apsilon’s lyrics: solemn ballads run alongside overdriven, distorting street rap, waving piano chords meet thumping bass . A wonderfully melancholic-angry sound world that reflects the spectrum of Apsilon’s emotions.
In the here and now
Like a chronicler, Apsilon delves into the immigration story of his grandparents and empathizes with what they experienced. Through their story of isolation and rejection by German society, he draws a link to the now when he raps about his own oppression and alienation in a homeland that is drifting to the right. He raps angrily about police officers who categorize people based on their appearance and about his friends who continue to make their money on the streets because there are no perspectives outside of it.
“BILD wants us out of the picture / Don’t fit into the picture / Total strangers in the country,” Apsilon raps on “Chest Circumference” with a clear reference to Advanced Chemistry. On songs like “So Easy” he also sings about the difficulty of loving yourself as you are when society obviously doesn’t love you either and explains what that ultimately leads to: “I have a very loving circle of friends . And on the other level, this feeling of not feeling loved by society or not feeling in the right place or not wanted. That is, I think, a very rational feeling in Germany as a foreigner or people with foreign roots.
Through this complexity, Apsilon summarizes the attitude to life of many migrant people in Germany: disappointed, hurt, but also angry and determined not to let themselves be defeated. That’s exactly what makes “Haut wie Pelz” the most important German rap album of the year.
Countercyclical masterpiece
Sure, “Haut wie Pelz” is not a happy and light album. But it’s not a sad, heavy one either. Although the 14 songs require everyone’s attention when listening, the deep stories and references cannot be absorbed casually. The album is therefore, to a certain extent, anti-cyclical in a time in which rap songs in particular are increasingly designed to be listenable. But “Skin Like Fur” doesn’t leave you feeling depressed, it’s also full of moments of pride, love, warmth and friendship. The common thread is a bittersweet melancholy: “I believe that together we can change something about the way the world is,” says Apsilon. “Maybe it also comes from my Turkish roots, because there’s always so much melancholy in there, but that doesn’t have to be something that’s depressing – it can also be something beautiful.”
