Interview: Royal Bunker’s Staiger Helped Put Berlin Rap on the German Hip-hop Map

In the early days of German hip hop, the 344 square miles of Berlin were, for the most part, a blank spot. West German cities like Hamburg, Frankfurt and Stuttgart had the game on lock with their (mostly) family-friendly rappity rap. Rap from Berlin existed, but it wasn’t part of the conversation.

All that changed when Royal Bunker came around. The label founded by Marcus Staiger introduced a rough and rugged edge to German rap that was distinctly Berlin. Fuck what they’re doing, we’re the capital. Putting German battle rap on record for the first time, Royal Bunker grew out of an eponymous freestyle cypher night that brought together all the soon-to-be important names of Berlin rap. Artists like Kool Savas, Sido and Frauenarzt would go on to launch massive careers that saw them crossover into pop territory, but they all had their start in a small basement bar that smelled like rotten eggs.

Staiger’s label philosophy was just as much punk as it was hip hop. Royal Bunker’s early days were marked by a tape-only production process, self-distribution and a clear-cut refusal to co-operate with anyone with money. Underground was the name, underground was the game. Their releases spanned obscurities ranging from dusty boom bap to geo-terrorism, gory splatter tales and dada rap.

Even though the label waned after a few years of success, the decidedly West Berlin attitude and anarchic spirit set the foundation for what was to become the best-selling label in German rap history, Aggro Berlin. Aggro not only borrowed the tape-only distribution process for its beginning stages. Their artist roster was also composed of a cross-section of former RB-affiliates and local West Berlin hotshots. They went on to bring the sound of West Berlin – formed in the famed, run-down Royal Bunker café some years prior – to the mainstream.

The Staiger of today is at peace with the way things turned out. A well-respected arts section journalist, soon-to-be published novelist, video columnist and activist of sorts, his day job is that of an industrial climber. Staiger has always been one for the dirty work. At times, he didn’t realize the value of the rocks he dug up.

How did the Royal Bunker crowd form in the first place?

It just came together naturally, from hanging out together, working on tracks, joking around. At first the central hub was the hip hop house in Steglitz, where Kool Savas had a part-time supervisor position. It was a youth club that was specifically geared towards hip hop. All State-funded. Savas recorded “LMS” and “Schwule Rapper” in the little studio they had there. That was around ’95 and ’96, where we all met. It was a clash of completely different worlds. The Funkfüchse were from Zehlendorf, Savas and Taktlo$$ were from Kreuzberg. They would go on to form M.O.R. That was also where I stepped into the picture. I was doing college radio at the time and so I came from this sort of journalistic background. We would always see each other at the hip hop house jams. It was a very open scene. You got to know the protagonists that were rapping there pretty quickly.

How did the idea come about to form Royal Bunker?

Well, there would always be these freestyle cyphers at local youth clubs, but the environment just wasn’t funky. They were always pretty well-frequented and they were fun. But New York had the Lyricist Lounge and Los Angeles had the Good Life Café – even Stuttgart had an open mic night in a club called Red Dog. Savas had been to L.A. and had hung out with the Freestyle Fellowship dudes at Good Life Café and with the Living Legends dudes in Oakland. When he came back, he was chewing my ear off about how great it was and I thought we needed something like that. We needed a spot to have freestyle cyphers that wasn’t a youth club and where people would actually pay money to go see them. So I met this guy at some kind of random radio show and he told me about this Royal Bunker café. I worked out a deal with the Nigerian owner so that we could have weekly freestyle sessions there. It was all very unproblematic – besides the fact that the owner got into some sort of beef with some drug dealers and they sprayed butyric acid all over the place. So it was really smelly. But then it started. Sundays, 7PM. Royal Bunker, Mittenwalder Straße.

So how did that start off? How many people would come through at the beginning?

Five. [laughs] Ten, maybe fifteen.

But you didn’t give a crap?

It wasn’t like we didn’t give a crap. It was always a hustle. I always tried motivating people. It wasn’t like everyone flung their hands around my neck. They kind of hated it. The place was shit. Everyone was complaining at first. But somehow it was a start. In the end it didn’t even go on for that long – not even a year, maybe nine months. The café closed down because the owner wasn’t paying the rent, and we weren’t very helpful with the money we were bringing in.

What development did the night take in those nine months?

There were ups and downs. There were a couple of one-off events organized in conjunction with some folks from the Volksbühne theatre. They got a wind of what we were doing and somehow they were interested. So we linked up with them to organize a couple of bigger cyphers. Quite a lot of people showed up for those and then we had loads of new guests come in to Royal Bunker afterwards. In the end: we just did it. It wasn’t very well organized, but it existed. And the people who came in from the outside to witness it really thought it was interesting. At the time I didn’t even notice that very much. It was just a good vibe and pretty crazy. We had so many different people coming through. All the rappers who would go on to be important were there: Sido with Die Sekte, Frauenarzt, MC Bastard, MC Bogie, Savas, M.O.R., Taktlo$$ – only Bushido wasn’t there.

How did you get into recording?

Berlin didn’t have a label structure back then. There were plans, again and again, to build something big with major record labels. People had visions, but they never really came to fruition. Nobody knew how the record industry worked.

What did you do different?

I didn’t want to wait for some major label to come around and enable a CD- or vinyl-production. Why wait? If they don’t want to mess with Berlin and hang around Hamburg and Stuttgart and Frankfurt, and have no clue about Berlin rap anyway, why would I try and sell something to them? We don’t need that. We can release stuff ourselves. So I heard about this punk idea, where bands would just produce their own cassettes. There were DJs around who were doing tapes. There was a market for that. People bought mixtapes. So we decided to produce our own cassettes. We couldn’t afford CD, let alone vinyl. But cassettes were plausible. Recording was actually very complicated but you could also just record on a 4-track. So I called DJ Hype, who was making tapes at the time, and just asked him where he made his tapes. [laughs] I went and checked it out and thought to myself, “Yeah, this could work.”

What was the circulation at that time?

100 was the first circulation. 100 tapes for 260DM. We sold them ourselves at jams. The label was called Mikrokosmos then. But the name was changed pretty quickly because I found out that there already was a label called Mikrokosmos.

And then you just went along from pressing to pressing?

Yeah, I collected the money to fund the next pressing with bigger circulation. It worked. At some point Halil from Downstairs – who would later be involved with Aggro Berlin – approached me and said that they needed tapes. He said they needed a lot of them. So we went from pressings of 100 to pressings of 400 and 500. It turned into a real manufacturing process. We would package tapes for hours, copy the covers by hand, cut them out, fold them ourselves. At first we were just taking it step by step to see how it goes, but then we wanted more and also wanted to press records. Our first record was the NLP by M.O.R.

At what point did you realize that things had gotten much bigger than you initially could have imagined?

[long pause] There never really was a point like that. Our aspirations just kept growing. What really surprised me was the success of Aggro Berlin. They actually charted. That was worth something back then. We also charted, at like #65 or #66 with NLP. Even that was a big success. We sold about 15,000 or 20,000 copies in the first week. When I read that Spaiche (Aggro Berlin) said in an interview that they wanted to go Top 10 or else their project had failed, I thought he was crazy. I didn’t have that long-term vision that they had. Like I said, I didn’t even notice how far we had come and how big things were getting. I still suffer from that to a certain extent – having missed that, not having caught that wave.

Aggro went off into pop territory. How did things go on for you?

That’s around when the period of suffering set in for me and Royal Bunker. People on our side saw what was possible and began building up certain expectations. New people came on board, who hadn’t been around for the early years, the rough years. Savas earned his stripes. He went on tour for 500DM. We travelled around a lot through all of Germany, in a tiny car, without places to sleep. He was the catalyst for a lot of artists to start getting more shine. They in turn didn’t want to stoop back down to a lower level. The problem was that they were usually not as in-demand as he was. I tried driving the whole punk thing. Do it yourself, we’re all part of a community. Fuck the industry, fuck sponsorship deals. Who needs that shit anyway? The perceptions diverged. I had this grassroots thing in mind, wanting to keep Royal Bunker as a cooperative community. That ended up morphing back into a youth club thing. I was the self-sustained supervisor who tried keeping the money together and keep his friends employed. I had to clean up the office on Monday mornings just so that I could work properly again.

So it grew too big?

On the one hand it grew too big because the expectations grew too big. Then also you get things handed to you at the beginning, because people think you’re cool. You get free ad placements and when the success starts rolling in, the media partners expect a payback. Things started to disperse. On top of that, I’m no mercantile genius and I let myself be driven by my own enthusiasm. At one point, the money was just gone. Mistakes were made. And then there was Aggro, who started to be a thorn in my side. Artists started to look at them because they saw what was possible. They did it really big and Staiger didn’t do a thing.

Is Aggro Berlin, in a sense, the capitalist continuation of Royal Bunker?

They had a plan. Royal Bunker didn’t have a plan. That’s really the difference. Of course they had an amazing visual language through which Specter ingeniously crafted a brand. But yeah, Aggro Berlin started out as a one-to-one copy of Royal Bunker. They took on Sido and Die Sekte and they produced tapes in the beginning. It was virtually the same thing. They just had more of a plan and a vision. They had the ability to see that what they were doing was in demand, really in demand. And also to push that forward. Those are the points that I missed. I tried being a real label and grow it bigger and build on the coincidental success of M.O.R. We stumbled into it and it was great. When I started caring about marketing, I saw that I didn’t have a knack for that. I always let everyone do as they pleased. I was being too limp. So we had releases come out that were 120-minute tapes. All pretty crazy. I came up with my artists and so there was always the question of who owes whom. That they owe anything to me was never part of the discussion. I should be thankful. I took that on as a sort of inferiority complex. In general, I do think that labels should be thankful towards their artists. Because without artists there would be no labels.

But there’s always someone who has to do the dirty work.

Yeah, but the dudes doing the dirtiest of jobs don’t get paid the most. It’s clearly the other way around in the industry. The artist is put through the mill and is milked. When he doesn’t produce milk anymore, he’s out. And the label manager is the one going home with the check. But yeah, the way I see it today, the one wouldn’t have worked without the other. So everyone played their part in this story. In the end, it was an awesome time and I did it the way I wanted to do it. I couldn’t have done it any other way. What I always admired about Aggro was that they had three people behind their project: one for the artistic vision, one for the organization and one for the marketing. I recently heard this story about Walt Disney. He had three rooms for his work: one room for the dreamer, where he came up with the concept for a film that was maybe 300 hours long. Then there was the room of the critic, who would tell him the reasons for why no one would want to watch a movie like that. And then there was a room for the execution of the project. He actually sought out these rooms and separated these different parts of his working process. I was the project manager, art director, buddy, father, big brother, community worker and cleaning lady in one. That didn’t work out. I learned it all on the streets. [laughs] But it’s pretty awesome if you think about: we made German rap history and we didn’t even notice it.