The title song of the series is a short version of warrant Frankfurt's anthem "069". In the original track of 2015, the artist had boldly starred as a criminal hip-hop entrepreneur who provided the city with rap and drugs - the heroin corpses on the street as well as the coke junkies on the upper floors of the banks towers. At the same time, arrest warrants, bourgeois Aykut Anhan, spread antisemitic stereotypes at one point on the original racetrack ("Rothschild Theory"). The passage is deleted from the production version; The rich analogy to Frankfurt as a city of banks and the sick has remained.
Even in the short opening credits of the gangster rap-panorama "Skylines" a contradiction of distancing and embrace is built in. That's a good thing, because the basic question behind such a serial project must be: How do I plunge into the cosmos of hip-hop, without completely going to the glue of the self-stagings of the actors? How do I film through Weed Clouds or rap combat cascades without losing the clear, cool view of the situation?
For the main protagonist, a hip-hop star was the godfather who mastered the self-staging of Gangsterrap like no other in Germany: arrest warrant. In "Skylines" warrant (abbreviated: "Hafti") carries the name Kalifa (short: "Kalle"). The actor and ex-rapper Murathan Muslu wears the picturesque undercut pony of the role model, otherwise is smart enough to avoid cheap imitations.
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Netflix series: arrest warrant is now called KalifaThe basic biographical data of the serial character and the real rapper but are the same: criminal past in Offenbach, hip-hop entrepreneurship in Frankfurt, relapses into the old gangster behavior by the brothers of yore.
Coke in the studio cupboard, noise in the executive suite
The serial Rapstar Kalifa is triggered by his relapses by his older brother Ardan (Erdal Yildiz). He had once financed with money from drug trafficking and burglaries, the first recordings of Kalle in Offenbach and now demands something in return: He wants to pack in Kale's hip-hop company Skyline Records in the studio coke, while the brother eight floors higher with the boardrooms of the music industry negotiated.
The small Kokspäckchen and the large plate deal, turf wars and business plans, all in "Skylines" together. In a parallel montage, one sees a young producer signing a well-endowed contract, while next door a dealer is smashed with a hammer. The manager tries Kalifa, the - as he is called in the radio - "King of Krankfurt" to point out the conditions: "We are not on the street here!" The gangsterrap millionaire countered: "That's what we are: street on the eighth floor."
Netflix; Frank Hoensch / Getty Images
Fiction and reality: Serial rapper Kalifa (left), warrant
"Skylines" showrunner Dennis Schanz manages to show the often paradoxical attraction dynamics of rap and money. There are the managers who long for realness in their art worlds on the 10th or 20th floor; there are the settlement children who dream of carrying their tracks in penthouses.
Hip-hop, the big promotion promise
The series is slim and smart filmed; she misses the banking city from the bottom up and so brings the phenomenon Deutschrap pretty well on the point. Hip-Hop is the only genre of music (besides Schlager) that makes a lot of money in this country. Hip-Hop is the only music genre that can make the claim to be wrested from real life worlds in this country - even if that often only sales folklore may be. These authenticity and advancement promises are present every moment in Frankfurt in the vertical-tracing series.
The second central character of "Skylines" is not from the street, but from rich home: Jinn (Edin Hasanovic) is the son of an investor and dreams of a career as a hip-hop producer. Whether at his job as a night porter or when he can not sleep again, because the sister, with whom he lives, has brought a loud lover - constantly jinned Jinn on the next beat for a friendly MC. Then Skyline Records knocks on the door.
"Skylines" works as a kind of loyalty carousel, which is kept up to speed by a variety of dependencies: Jinn has to dump his MC buddy to be allowed to get involved in Skyline; Kalifa risks his business because he helps his criminal brother; a record company wants to bring out skyline big, but calls for it to take the tough guys out of the program. That sounds like this: "Our supervisory board must first get used to the fact that a guy, whom they only know as a gangster rapper from the media, can be a responsible business partner who simply does not feel like making threats."
Granted, there are some musicbiz stamps, but the series also shows under what complex conditions rap is created and marketed. Advisory Warrant Producer Ben Bazzazian was on hand, he also built all the beats of the serial character Jinn. The rap lyrics of Kalifa, however, come from Azzi Memo, which is published on the warrant label Azzlacks. There are also appearances by scene greats like Nura or MC Bogy, all of which look much more convincing than the appearances of the real rap greats in the second season of "4 Blocks".
What also has to do with the fact that here the emergence of hip-hop is decidedly put into the picture. One of the strongest scenes is when producer Jinn teaches a violent Kurdish drug dealer in a bomber jacket (Carol Schuler) how to transform her aggression into battle elegance. First, the young woman cascades texts in which she threatens to mow down all the people around her with the Uzi, then she finds in recourse to old Kurdish songs a very unique verbal melody to carry their anger into the world.
For this one must necessarily like the series: You succeed in blasting violence and business pure rap happiness.
"Skylines", from Friday at Netflix
