Taktloss

The underground rap mystery Taktloss opens the festival by celebrating the art of the humorous insult.

Berlin artist Taktloss is one of the most influential figures in the German rap scene. In the late 1990s, he and his MC partner Kool Savas laid the groundwork for a newer, more direct form of German rap music with provocative battle rhymes that were antithetical to those of mainstream rap at the time. While Savas and successive gangster- and street rappers have made it into the mainstream, the self-described »last tight n*****« has solidified his reputation as an uncompromising defender of underground rap. In his schizoid rhymes, which he performs in staccato fashion over bumpy low-fi beats, he wittily exaggerates violence and obscenity to absurd levels, turning them into something more like Dadaist spoken- word art than any seemingly authentic expression of street culture. After his last Hamburg concert in 2014, his supposedly final concert in Berlin and a subsequent reincarnation as GOTT (with Frauenarzt), Taktloss is now playing one of his legendary solo shows for the opening of the International Summer Festival.