Deichkind HHV Records 17 Items

The children’s band called Deichkind

Long before the Hamburg group Deichkind conquered the German charts with absurdly funny tracks like Leider geil and established itself as a concert hall-filling electropunk band, the friends Philipp, Malte and Bartosch decided together with producer Sebastian to try their hand at rapping in the late 90s. With a style that didn’t fit in at all with the hip hop mainstream of the time, the three of them often caught boos at the beginning. In 1999, their track Kabeljau Inferno spread outside of Hamburg, and they didn‘t hold back about their career ambitions in their lyrics, albeit always with an ironic undertone: "Die coolen Typen von der Kinderband namens Deichkind / Wir machen solange weiter, bis wir derbe reich sind.“ At their concerts, they gathered hip hop fans and those who were interested in the genre with a critical distance, with their tour companion DJ Phono always responsible for the beats. The group really went through the roof a year later on the strength of the single Bon voyage: with a music video in a white studio that couldn’t look any more like 2000s hip hop, the name Deichkind spread throughout Germany, and the first long-player Bitte ziehen Sie durch was released.

Booze music and anarchistic excess

The record presented the band as a lyrically and musically diverse rap group – sometimes socially critical, sometimes ironically exaggerated, provided with radio play-like interludes and a large portion of Hamburg humor. This style continued with the 2002 album Noch fünf Minuten Mutti, on which the four immediately proclaimed: “Niemand stoppt die Crew vom Deich!” What followed can probably be described as a creative crisis: Malte left the band, and it remained quiet around the Crew vom Deich for years. The Bundesvision Song Contest 2005 marked their stage comeback and a stylistic turnaround never before seen in a rap group: with their album Aufstand im Schlaraffenland, Deichkind combined chaotic techno beats with danceable redneck lyrics, and at the same time their concerts became almost Dadaist stage performances, including self-made garbage costumes and the now iconic tetrahedron hat. Their hit Remmidemmi (Yippie Yippie Yeah) was born – and Deichkind irritated the hip hop world. On the 2008 record Arbeit nervt this trend continued, the band could now be located somewhere between booze music and anarchistic excess.

Into the concert halls and the feuilleton

But the electropunk collective only climbed to the top of the charts with their next album: Befehl von ganz unten made waves in the mainstream in 2012, the singles Bück dich hoch and Leider geil reached gold status, and the album was celebrated as a masterpiece between social criticism and absurdity. The songs were often as brutal as they were blackly humorous: “Kleine Kinderhände nähen schöne Schuhe / Meine neuen Sneakers sind: leider geil”. With their live shows, the group now attracts hundreds of thousands; somewhere between art and party, they dress in garbage bags and neon tubes, surf over the crowd on giant barrels and wear the familiar tetrahedron helmets. Deichkind is now more of a concept, less of a band. The album’s success carried over into 2015’s Niveau Weshalb Warum. In the process, the musicians also repeatedly positioned themselves politically, criticizing consumer society as well as nationalistic soccer fans and data-collecting large corporations. Deichkind thus made it into the biggest concert halls and the feuilleton, as it were. In the title song of their record Wer Sagt Denn Das, they talked about people who can’t be reached with facts: “We’re annoyed that questions are being asked today that have long since been answered.” That the whole thing is also written primarily for the stage can be guessed. Deichkind express themselves about their shows, however, rather modestly: “Our stage show must always be special. Different from others. Because we are bunglers. We can’t do anything. But the hoax hasn’t been busted yet.”