Folgen Sie dem weißen Kaninchen: DIE FANTASTICHEN VIER APPRECIETION POST

Hey :B

So there's another awesome German band that ~someone~ showed me LOL

Die Fantastischen Vier (The Fantastic Four), also known as Fanta 4, is a German hip hop group from Stuttgart, Germany. The members are Michael Bernd Schmidt alias Smudo, Andreas Rieke alias And.Ypsilon, Thomas Dürr alias Hausmeister (janitor) Thomas D and Michael 'Michi' Beck alias Dee Jot Hausmarke. They were among the first groups to rap in German.Towards the end of the 1980s, Rieke and Schmidt formed the "Terminal Team", Dürr and Beck joined in 1989. Under the new name Die Fantastischen Vier(The Fantastic Four), they made German hip hop, or Deutschen Sprechgesang (German spoken-song) as they called it, popular in Germany. Although there were German hip-hop artists prior to them, it was Die Fantastischen Vier who registered the first chart hit with their 1992 single "Die da?!" from the album 4 Gewinnt, hitting #2 in Germany and #1 in Austria and Switzerland.After traveling to LA in the 1980s, the group realized the lack of connection between the struggles of "the poor Blacks in the U.S. and middle-class Whites in Germany," and made a conscious effort to move away from the typical and cliché American gangster rap (they did it :B), reacting with tongue-in-cheek humor to verbal attacks of alleged German gangsta rappers. In thefollowing albuns, they progressed to a more serious and philosophic style. The band was extremely successful in the 1990s, when they released their hit single Die Da?! (Her?! The One Over There?!) in 1992.Thomas D, Hausmarke and Ypsilon also produced successful solo albums and the four had their own weekly show Die 4. Dimension, named after their third album, which aired on the German pay TV channel Premiere in 1993/1994. the group's 7th album 4:99 was released on their own label (Four Music), with 4 singles from the album following. After the #2 hit "MfG", three singles were released at the same time, a first in German music business and each one of the singles can be associated with one of the rappers. On April 7, 2007, Fornika was released, preceded by the single "Ernten was wir säen", which was released as a download for Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock in December 2007 and was recently covered by Oomph!.

(info from wikipedia)