A finger exercise resulted in Tommy Vercetti’s best rap album to date. The benchmark for him is 50 cents. But the local music scene is also promising. A review of the year.
Preserving culture from political correctness has been the theme and mission of rapper Tommy Vercetti for a good twenty years.
Usually the media want to talk to him about money, about Marxism, about a change of system or about religion. Simon Küffer alias Tommy Vercetti, 41 years old, was a guest on the program “Kulturplatz” in January and on “Sternstunden Religion” in February. His role is that of the leftist conscience of the local hip-hop scene. But today, a few days after the release of his third album “Sympathie für Hyäne”, he doesn’t want to waste any more words about it: “It’s primarily about music,” he says. “Everything else is subordinate to her.”
Without a convincing interplay of text and music, the content is not worth a cent. If the tunes didn’t catch your ear, no one was listening. “But of course I would actually abolish the money if I could,” he says. And instead of citing any philosophers or religious scholars, he praises his role models when it comes to rap: “50 Cent is one of my absolute favorite rappers. What melodies he pulls out of a hat and what beats he chooses for them – simply incredible!»
The Berner shows similar enthusiasm for the group Outkast from Atlanta. In the track “East Point” he pays homage to them with six lines, each of which refers to one of their classics. Even the beats are part of the dense reference carpet on which Tommy Vercetti moves. Here, an uptempo beat references Eric B. & Rakim’s classic “Don’t Sweat the Technique” (“Oh Shit”), where he surfs like an American rapper of the Roc Marciano type on little more than one himself constantly repeated string passage («Mach ä Line drus»).
Reasonable suction cup
Listening to Tommy Vercetti always meant getting everything together: pathos and cross-references in all directions. Instead of capitalism on display – just the opposite. He moves between a battle rapper and a well-read social critic, between a voice of reason and an omnipotent sucker. “Isn’t Schnäbi just a beautiful word?” says Tommy. Incidentally, he borrowed his stage name from the computer game «Grand Theft Auto» half an eternity ago.
Now, after all the albums and mixtapes as a solo artist or with his crew Eldorado FM, the forced has fallen away from him and his voice isn’t that nasally nasal anymore. In 2010, he received the Canton of Bern Literature Prize for his first solo album, Seiltänzer, and the hip-hop scene for the current album. It sounds fresh, versatile, rich in subtleties, up to date – and gets the relevance quite easily from individual lines that catch your ear unexpectedly. “I only wrote to teach logical thanks,” he raps at the beginning of “Strategie als Hyäne”, the last track of the album.
He explains: “I became politicized through rap, I started to be interested in literature through rap.” Writing is his way of understanding the world – often only when he later reads the lines he has written down. Suddenly it says “we have changed what the fathers are warned about”. He has to figure it out.
In the case of Simon Küffer, this means: instead of a good job with a fixed salary and financial prosperity, a life in precarious, insecure circumstances. At the Küffers’ home, no one had the job of “part-time rapper” on their list. The fact that the trained graphic designer is still doing his doctorate in visual communication at the age of 41 is also not. And so he remains a hyena – is smiled at, lives on the fringes of society, somehow gets by and is enthusiastic about other hyenas.
For the two Wiedikers L Loko & Drini, for example, who pulled a hit out of a hat this year with «Will nomeh», tickling a mid-tempo ballad out of a reggaeton beat with somnambulistic certainty. Anyone who listens to their album “Made in Wiedikon” learns that they are just as much at home in rap as in the melody business. With SECTION Züri, they created a label that has talents like MC Hero and Jordan Parat under contract.
Infinitely layered sandwich
From the wealth of this year’s dialect rap releases, Vercetti also finds inspirational “Thron”, the joint album by Zurich-based Xen and EAZ, the majority of which work on it with a dark sound aesthetic. Xen once said on the hip-hop show “Bounce” that he builds his rhyme schemes in the style of an almost infinitely layered sandwich. At the same time, it is the breather, the regular and short pauses that make the frequently streamed tracks of the two chart toppers a listening experience.
Solothurn’s Pronto also shaped the hip-hop year. While his live performances still lack the necessary pressure and urgency, he conjures up hit after hit from his home studio. He even serves the South African Amapiano genre on his album «Luno V». And even if Pronto still has to prove himself as an album artist, his virtuosity can be felt in a number of his tracks from the first second. It’s mumble rap grooves to sink into.
“I strive for virtuosity,” says Tommy Vercetti repeatedly in the interview. Some Swiss rappers, including Berner Nativ, who will be sharing the Zurich Kaufleuten stage with Eldorado FM on Thursday evening, are well on their way there.