Recently on the Berlin subway line 1 high above Kreuzberg. “OMG, there’s chicken house 36!” says a maybe 15-year-old to her younger sister. They both then demand from their parents: “Let Zahide eat the menu!” They stand there so perplexed that one can assume that they don’t know what their two daughters are demanding. Now Hühnerhaus 36 (“Crispy on the outside, juicy on the inside”) has actually been an institution for grilled chicken in Berlin for 30 years. The fact that teenage girls suddenly want to go there is due to a rapper of the same age who everyone in Germany with a TikTok account who was born after 2010 seems to know.
Zahide Kayaci aka Zah1de, also born in 2010, grows up in Berlin-Kreuzberg. As a child, she danced for hours in front of the mirror in the hallway. Her parents film her. At some point her mother asks if she wants to go to dance school? She ends up at Lunatix, a dance studio in Kreuzberg founded by a man named Serdar Boğatekin. Zah1de is dancing in 2023 Deja vu by Beyoncé and Jay-Z in a dressing room, the video loads TikTok high and quickly reaches half a million views. Or to put it in the words of their current record company Universal: “After that the algorithm goes completely stupid.”
More dance videos follow, including ones for songs that Zah1de lip-syncs, and finally the record deal with the major label. The 15-year-old is now up TikTok 8.5 million followers, almost the population of Austria. She is the youngest ever winner of the award, which is otherwise not particularly responsible for youth culture Bambi television and media award and a separate menu at Hühnerhaus 36 (Crispy Chicken Cheese Burger with fries and Capri Sun). And now she has a debut album titled Pretty privilegethat’s it, like the single Mona Lisa Motioncould now make it into the top ten of the German charts and break various streaming records on all platforms combined. So what does it sound like?
Purely in terms of content Pretty privilege about growing up in migrant Berlin, where hard work is followed by global fame, which then materializes with millions in pocket money, a tracksuit from Ferragamo or a ride through Paris in a sports car affectionately known as a “Rari”. As a fantasy of advancement, this is so close to the classic narrative motifs of rap that it is perhaps more interesting to ask: What is missing? On the one hand, there is the complete absence of insults, glorification of violence and sexism, which dominated German rap until recently.
With Zah1de there are also no references to drug trafficking and crime, which are, for example, in the songs of Zah1de, who also comes from Berlin-Kreuzberg Pashanim standing for a new generation of German rap appear. Rather, Zah1de seems to have internalized the German-style Protestant work ethic in such an exemplary manner that in the song Mona Lisa Motion to melancholy chirping guitar riffs, even the tax office adds a line: “Oh dear, Prada cups are so expensive / And my advance was tamambut I have to pay taxes.”
In the same tension between excess and decency, abundance and humility, demure and go stupid the song is also there Kotti d’Azurone of the most beautiful on the whole album. In it, Zah1de reinterprets the so-called social hotspot Kottbusser Tor, affectionately known as Kotti in Berlin, as a Côte d’Azur on the Spree. Lip gloss, low-waist Levi’s jeans, Prinzenbad: “I have to go to Hühnerhaus 36 because I swear I don’t feel any scampis.” The beat is heavy as the air, a plucked guitar sounds like sunset and Zah1de is still of school age: “I pull up to school, Uber Premium and no Bolt / Chanel ballerina, Bibi and Tina, I was already rapping in daycare.”
In the song Oof Ya Then it’s the Ferrari with which she ironically shows off low key” comes to school. While her parents sign “a million dollar deal” for her and in return she plays with the idea of buying her teacher “a Roli”. When you hear it like that, and above all, stop TikTok, Instagram or YouTube If you watch a 15-year-old rapping her way into the hearts of millions in a circle with her dance friends, completely without the usual self-sexualization, you are on the verge of regaining faith in the good in social media. For many male rappers in particular and men commenting online in general, it is almost unbearable.
What world do your haters actually live in?
Aging young professionals like the rapper Farid Bang, 39, some YouTubers and other rappers repeatedly accuse Zah1de: she is just a product of her management, can’t rap at all and belongs in school. Well, the pop singer Heintje was 12 years old when he became a star in 1967. Anyway, given all the rather sad trends on TikTok, you wonder what world yours is in did he actually live? The credits on her album indicate that Zah1de rarely writes the lyrics to her songs alone, but this is now the case with many rappers.
It’s musical Pretty privilege With tracks that rarely last longer than two and a half minutes for streaming purposes, and beats that are a little too often characterized by relatively generic monotony, it’s actually not a success artistically. But the numerous playful references to pop culture history show how much fun Zah1de’s songs can be. For example, if they are in Mona Lisa Motion Arrest warrant’s biggest hit refers to himself: “Chabos know who Zahide is”, the finalist for the youth word 2025 in the song speech with the rapper Benno! sets a monument, or in Shoot on silent the Rapper Xatar quoted who once said in an interview that has become a meme that the first thing he wants after his prison sentence “without saying much” is a “nice kofta skewer.”
The success of Zah1de shows that with the advent of social media, the relationship between the production and distribution spheres has also fundamentally changed in rap. The path to fame no longer just leads, as in the self-narrative of her colleagues, through years of rap or even battle experience in youth centers and clubs, but today also through the no less hard work of self-promotion in music, videos and trends on social media. Obviously, the aging rap guard, with its stubborn immobility, has worse cards than young artists like Ikkimel, Nina Chuba or Zah1de. Or like the latter in the song Shoot on silent to the point: “First you hated me / but then you imitated me.”
“Pretty Privilege” by Zah1de is released by Universal.
