HipHop ist im Haus: Cultural policy, community centres, and the making of hip-hop music in Germany

During the past 30 years, community centres and youth clubs have emerged all over Germany, providing spaces that challenge traditional forms of high culture. This paper explores the role of these spaces in the making of hip-hop music in East and West Germany. From the mid-1980s, community centres served as local testing grounds for DJs, rappers, graffiti writers and breakdancers. ‘Jams’ encouraged an exchange of ideas and styles, the refinement of skills in competitions, and the establishment of lasting social networks. Centres and clubs provided important ‘homebases’ and nodes, linking local scenes with a highly mobile national and trans-European hip-hop community. The paper argues that the production and consumption of hip-hop as a hybrid cultural form was shaped in part by the way these local spaces were created and organized. In the context of changing cultural policies, the sites’ historicities and their use as musical spaces are crucial for an understanding of the geographical constitution of hip-hop music in Germany.