From the end of a damp wooden walkway, you look out into endless wetlands, indeterminate space, dark glassy water, and tall grass. Electronic soundscapes and rhythmic poetry would not immediately grace your consciousness, unless you were listening to it through your headphones, of course.
What could fuse these two worlds? Well, where is the poetry in the environment around us? And further, where is the vast wild expanse in synthesized soundscapes? Using the very elements described above, hip hop ventured to Estonia, almost without physical manifestation early on, and became popular as a compelling form of human expression.
The Estonian connection to music has been heavily expounded upon. The high number of choirs per capita and achievement of freedom through singing is double back-stitched into the journalistic press kit of what the rest of the world should know about Estonia. Yet, comparatively little has been said about the national context of a genre like hip hop.
Within the last five years, TOMM¥ €A$H (AKA Tomas Tammemets) has captured international attention for his performance art enveloped hip hop. His music videos, in particular, have divided popular opinion. They are marked as obscene, or at least shocking. What Tommy and other Estonian rappers have done recently, however, has adapted from the way artists documented life in 1970s New York City, when hip hop took off first. (Pikemalt Eesti Elu 8. veebr.2019 paberlehes)