"This is a repair on ourselves": Interview with the Antilopen Gang

Right. Ton Steine Scherben anticipated punk in a way. And I believe "Everything must be repaired" was at least for me also a bit of a compulsive neurotic reflex – that if I make punk, I want to be punk in punk and say: Of course, nothing is being destroyed here, but everything must be repaired because it would be way too conformist to destroy everything now.

It's also just a nice universal slogan that can be applied to everything. It was and is directly so catchy. I mean: The fact that the state of the world needs some kind of repair here and there is obvious. But repairing fits us well as a band. We don't want to keep repeating ourselves and only stick to proven concepts. In this respect, having a title like this was also about reinventing ourselves a bit. Potentially also as a punk band. It's kind of a repair on ourselves that has taken place within this album. Within the hip-hop scene, we were always kind of aliens – because many people there perceived us more as a punk band. Punk has always somehow been part of our stage show and our albums. And now was the moment when we said: Now we really want to write a whole punk rock album completely from scratch. And that led to a very wild and very uplifting songwriting process.

We all noticed again how much fun that is – especially in contrast to writing rap lyrics.

In punk, in contrast to rap, you have much fewer lines per verse. Usually, a rap verse with us has 16 lines – and you can make two punk songs out of that. The moment you make rock music, a short line simply carries an entire song. What I also find great about punk rock: You don’t have to pay attention to whether a rhyme is particularly good and multisyllabic and so on. I definitely thought: Wow, suddenly there are completely different possibilities, a whole new world opens up!

It's much easier. And I think that was much more fun for all of us. It went much faster than writing ten hip-hop tracks that we eventually find good. Because for that, we have to create 30 sketches each time. And then sort them out again. But with the punk album, it was simply about twelve songs that we think are good. We wrote them – and that was it.

By approaching this punk record so carefree and somewhat naively, we were actually able to create a similar state to back then. When we started making rap 20 years ago.

That's where we met, got a crate of beer – and then just wrote some random texts, laughed our heads off, recorded it. And then the album was finished. It wasn't overthought or anything. And now making this punk record reminded us of that. On the other hand, with the rap record, we mostly worked the whole day in a super strenuous and exhausting manner on the songs and barely managed to get them done. So: That sounds really negative now. But I am actually also completely satisfied with the new rap record. But it was indeed a long, distant, hard road. Therefore, in the evening, for distraction and to think about something else, we said: "Come on, let's bang out another punk song!" And then we just went for half an hour and had fun, and then the song was already finished.

I believe that this is still not entirely foreseeable. But the idea of writing another rap album sometime in my life, after having written this punk album now, I find quite terrible.

If there ever was a contradiction between punk and rap, it simply resolved itself at some point. There are bands like us, when you look down from the stage and see what the people in the audience are wearing, you see shirts from a lot of punk bands. From Feine Sahne Fischfilet to Knochenfabrik. Or you see some political shirts. But you won't see anyone wearing a Kollegah shirt. What I mean is: I believe that in the end, it’s not just about the music genre. It's about a certain attitude and something that goes beyond the music.

We have always made an effort to distance ourselves from such things. But at a certain point, you become at least a projection surface. And I believe the song that made us known to a wider audience was "Beate Zschäpe hears U2." That was a political song, a song against Nazis and anti-Semites. And then we were considered a political band. But we are simply a rap crew, or a punk band if you like – not a political party with a fundamental program, and we also do not use music as a vehicle to agitate people.

I think that at the moment when we write, do, or publish something, we do not see ourselves as political activists. But: When I look back at 15 years of Antilopen history and want to explain or tell what kind of band this is, what development it has gone through, then what has happened in those years is indeed a very political story. But for me, it's not just about songs, but also about political events. Stories like the one where we went to Freital when the Nazis were standing in front of the home with refugees and wanted to lynch people. We stood there and showed solidarity. These are the kind of actions that are extremely important for me to explain the history of the Antilopen Gang. And in that sense, I sometimes feel that we are a very political group – even though we never saw ourselves that way at the moment we did something of this kind.

I believe because there is always the idea of a band that chants slogans at their concerts – and the audience then roars along. Everyone agrees and pats each other on the back and says: "Yes, cool, we all share the same opinion." This is far removed from the claim we have as a band. On the one hand. But on the other hand, I do understand that we are perceived as a band of the left spectrum. I'm not shocked by that.

There were a few times when we released certain songs in specific social situations. And in those moments, we were somehow the only ones who made such songs. And then this gap led to our attitude being so visible and striking. We wrote "October in Europe" after October 7, 2023, in a situation where the worst massacre of Jews since 1945 had occurred, followed by a huge global wave of antisemitism. But almost all artists and musicians, who usually comment on every nonsense and pretend to be engaged, kept their mouths shut. We felt almost compelled to make this song. We had no other choice. This probably also had something to do with our expectations of ourselves.