Reykjavík Grapevine - 26.09.2014, Blaðsíða 19

In a crumbling old building on the outskirts of central Reykjavík, a dust-covered, semi-
abandoned workspace is coming to life. In one corner, a makeup artist applies vivid lipstick
to a member of feminist rap collective Reykjavíkurdætur as photographer Axel Sigurðar-
son steadies his stepladder on the broken tiles underfoot. Heavily-tattooed young rapper
Emmsjé Gauti chats with Arnar from Úlfur Úlfur, trying on jackets from a clothes rail.
Cell7, aka Ragna Kjartansdóttir, enters the room to loud cheers, and is soon taking selfies
with friends in the throng.
Next to show up are Erpur Eyvindarson,
aka Blaz Roca, from Iceland’s biggest rap
group XXX Rottweilerhundar (known
today just as XXX Rottweiler), and Ses-
ar A, who released the first Icelandic-
language hip hop album in 2001 mere
days before Rottweiler’s début. The two
offer booming hellos and high fives to
their younger counterparts, and before
long the group are posing and throwing
hand gestures against the stark indus-
trial backdrop, as the flashbulbs crack
overhead. There seems to be a good spirit
between the various performers as they
playfully bustle for space, laughing and
swapping gear and props. This assembly
of big personalities, from the established
old-timers to the fresh young faces, is a
large chunk of Reykjavík’s thriving rap
scene.
The Real Reykjavík
On a dark, wind-whipped autumn night
in Reykjavík, the northernmost capital
city of the world can feel like a pretty far-
flung place to be a cradle for rap music.
But like the rest of the Western world,
hip hop influence is everywhere in Reyk-
javík. The city centre is a mini-maze of
tag-covered streets, lined with bars radi-
ating hip hop, house or techno; baseball
capped, longboarding tweens, teens and
twenty-somethings are a common sight,
rolling by in deck shoes and drop-crotch
pants. And while rap might not be what
first springs to mind when the outside
world thinks of the twinkly, dreamy “Ice-
landic music” brand, Arnar from young
rap-rock duo Úlfur Úlfur thinks it’s the
most relevant genre of today.
“Rap is most certainly the most di-
rect and on-point music when it comes
to painting a realistic picture of what it’s
like to be a young Icelander,” says Arnar.
“We’re rapping about what life is re-
ally like here, what it’s like to be young in
Reykjavík and trying to get it together.”
It’s a sentiment echoed by Blaz Roca,
a founder member of the platinum-sell-
ing Icelandic-language hip hop group
XXX Rottweiler, and the self-styled
‘papa of Icelandic hip hop’. “Hip hop
here definitely has a unique character,”
he says. “The rappers take rap and make
it their own. The kids love it, it connects,
they can relate to the lyrics.”
Roots & Manoeuvres
Erpur is also something of a historian of
the genre’s development in Iceland. “The
first time I heard rap in Icelandic was
around 1988,” he says. “The rave scene
was going off, and rappers were appear-
ing at parties. There was a kind of un-
noticed buzz about it, in underground
circles. At that time, the pop music was
mostly for drunkfests in the countryside.
But then came an urban scene, acts like
Quarashi and Subterranean, who both
rapped in English."
Ragna Kjartansdóttir, who now per-
forms as Cell7, was one of the founders
of Subterranean. “I was thirteen or four-
teen when I started listening to hip hop,”
Ragna says. “It was maybe 1994. The only
rap radio show was called Chronic. I’d
wait for it to air, once a week, with my
tape player ready to record it, and then
listen to that for a week until the next
show aired. We didn’t have no internet
yet.”
Things are very different today, with
the new generation of Icelandic rappers
leaping at the opportunities that the
internet’s connective culture provides,
both to find music and to broadcast their
own. Gauti Þeyr Másson, aka Emmsjé
Gauti, is a young rapper who’s taken
the scene by storm, using YouTube to
connect to an online audience. “I never
lived in a time before the internet,” he
explains. “It makes it so much easier to
release music and be noticed. I wouldn’t
be at the same place without it. One of my
biggest tracks has 200,000 views, mostly
from here in Iceland. You can see in the
analytics that there’s 30 people watching
in Denmark, and 50 people from Ukraine
or wherever.”
Another new face on the scene is rap-
per Gísli Pálmi, who releases videos onto
YouTube as his main means of distribu-
tion. “I think that what Gísli is doing is
really smart,” says Gauti, “because peo-
ple like to watch their music now. He is a
personality that people like, and want to
see. So, a video is the best way to get out
music today, if you want attention from
the younger crowd.”
Rap & Rímur
But Iceland has a vocal tradition that
reaches back many years before You-
Tube, or MTV for that matter. Perhaps
surprisingly, there’s a competitive poetry
style that dates all the way to the island’s
early settlers. Just as in the Bronx hous-
ing projects where hip hop was born, ear-
ly Icelanders endured gruelling poverty,
with no access to musical instruments
until much later. Their creativity spilled
out via the means at hand: in the case of
early hip hop, even poor homes had their
voices and a record player that could be
used to forge beats—in dirt-poor early
Iceland, people only had their voices. Ev-
eryman poets of the time would engage
in an improvised bat-
tle of wits and rhymes
that bears a striking
similarity to rap bat-
tling, with the victor
attaining material or
social superiority.
“Iceland has a po-
etic culture,” Erpur
says. “Ever since the
Sagas we read lots of
books and poetry, so
the poetic tradition
has a lot to do with
what we are doing now. Lots of rappers
don’t even think about it, but personally
I would explain it like this. When I talk
about my favourite rappers I also talk
about my favourite poets.”
This connection means people that
don’t necessarily like hip hop can still
connect to Erpur’s work. “I cherish that
connection,” he says. “I’m really into
language, I take it seriously and feel very
proud of it. It’s the main thing that makes
us Icelandic. Not race or religion—it’s the
language. I feel proud of using this lan-
guage.”
And figures from different areas of
the arts connect to modern Icelandic
rap accordingly. “When I use the Ice-
landic language, people notice,” Erpur
says. “People like Hilmar Örn Hilmars-
son—he’s a musician that was involved
with Killing Joke back in the ‘80s, and
also Björk and lots of the ‘80s new wave
and punk bands. He’s the front person
of the pagan movement here in Iceland.
We made a track together where I did the
rapping, he made the beats, and Steindór
Andersen, who has been touring the
world with Sigur Rós, was doing Icelan-
dic rímur. Now me and Hilmar Örn are
working on new stuff of me rapping the
texts of the sagas.”
Even the younger rappers on the
scene feel this connection, having been
taught the Icelandic rímur—chanted
traditional Icelandic rhymes—as kids.
“Before I started rapping when I was
four or five years old,
my granddad was al-
ways teaching me the
rímur,” says Gauti. “I
was actually studying
at school how they
work, and they have
the same basic roots
as hip hop. The first
line rhymes with the
third line. They have
these rules and all
these different kinds
of rímur. And what we
do, the flow, we’re just making new rules
that people will copy after us, or we have
copied from other people. Rhyming is
embedded in Icelandic culture and his-
tory.”
Kanye Vesturbær
The first iteration of the Icelandic rap
movement back in the mid 1990s was al-
most exclusively in the English language.
But When XXX Rottweiler came out
with an Icelandic-language rap record
that became a runaway success, they
changed the direction of the whole scene.
“We pioneered rapping in the Icelan-
dic language,” Erpur says. “Me, Sesar A
and XXX Rottweiler were the ones who
did that. It was tough to take the steering
wheel of the scene and to take it there, but
after the Sesar A and Rottweiler albums,
everyone started doing it. It was a revolu-
tion of hip hop in Iceland. It got a main-
Owning 19The Reykjavík GrapevineIssue 15 — 2014It
“Rap is most certainly
the most direct and
on-point music when
it comes to painting a
realistic picture of what
it’s like to be a young
Icelander. We’re rapping
about what life is really
like here.”
- Arnar, Úlfur Úlfur
Icelandic Rappers Stamp
Their Personality Onto Hip Hop
Words by John Rogers
Photos by Axel Sigurðarson