Kanye Ost aka Karel Ott aka KO
Kanye Ost aka Karel Ott aka KO is born in East-Berlin (German Democratic Republic) in 1986. Rapper for Ostberlin Androgyn and singer and songwriter for Bistro Palme.
Looking at your musical journey, we see a striking transformation—from a “guitar guy” performing at reading circles to a rising rap star. What sparked this radical shift? Can you take us through the key moments that shaped your evolution as an artist?
As a small child, I loved singing, especially the “Biene Maja” title melody by Karel Gott in front of my family. I probably received too much positive feedback from my parents and my Schlager-music-loving grandmother for that – so even as a small child, I started to dream about being a singer. When I was 12, I bought my first guitar and started writing my first songs. Since I was 16, I have played in different rock bands, usually writing lyrics, singing, and playing guitar.
In 2010, my friends Sarah Bosetti, Daniel Hoth, Karsten Lampe, and I started the reading stage “Couchpoetos,” where my friends performed their newest poetry-slam texts, and I regularly performed my newest songs as the “guitar guy” once or twice a month.
In 2016, Daniel and I were chilling and smoking a lot, and we came up with the idea of performing two rap songs as “Ostberlin Androgyn” on our Couchpoetos stage. At first, it was just an easy-going idea for fun, but the audience’s reaction showed us clearly that the idea of an Ostberlin Androgyn rap crew was special and unique and that we could perform different parts of our artistic identities in a more radical way than before. The audience celebrated us and taught us to take ourselves seriously as Ostberlin Androgyn.
So, we decided to make it a real project and started recording our first EP. We released the EP in 2017, and by 2018, we already had a gig at Fusion Festival, everything happened very quickly back then.
You’ve described rap as a liberating force, a genre where you truly felt the flow and freedom. What was it about rap that resonated with you so deeply? How did things take off so quickly once you embraced it? And how did Ostberlin Androgyn come together as a project? Can you share the story behind the group’s vision and your role as Kanye Ost?
I’ve been listening to rap since I was 16, even though my main musical interests at the time were punk and rock. The German rap I listened to was pretty raw and intense—Westberlin Maskulin with Kool Savas and Taktloss, Aggro Berlin with Sido, B-Tight, Bushido and Fler, as well as MOR, Prinz Porno, and later KIZ. I was mainly into underground rap from West Berlin. I liked its roughness and direct messaging. The lyrical quality of late ‘90s West Berlin battle rap was much sharper and more intelligent than the more popular fun or conscious hip-hop coming out of Hamburg and Stuttgart at the time.
The only problem was the content. I didn’t feel comfortable sharing this music with my Antifa friends because of the often violent, sexist, and homophobic lyrics in West Berlin underground rap. Even though these artists aimed to provoke and used harsh street language as part of the battle aesthetic, sometimes ironically, it still reinforced problematic ideas. But despite that, I preferred this style of rap because of its street credibility, Berlin-style harshness, and underground appeal compared to other, more boring German rap.
We came up with the name Ostberlin Androgyn as a direct play on Westberlin Maskulin. Both Daniel and I grew up in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen, a Plattenbau neighborhood from the GDR era, so “Ostberlin” was an important part of our identity. Since we were both men, we couldn’t just flip “Maskulin” into “Feminin,” so we chose “Androgyn” instead, representing a softer and more fluid idea of masculinity.
Once we had Ostberlin Androgyn as our crew name, we started looking for fitting rapper alter egos. My name, Kanye Ost, came to me almost instantly—I liked Kanye West’s unique production and rap style, and the name followed the same reversal principle as our crew’s name (…and let’s not talk about today’s Kanye West, hehe). Daniel’s alter ego, Gregor Easy, was actually the result of a Freudian slip—a family member meant to mention DIE LINKE politician Gregor Gysi but accidentally left out a “G,” and Gregor Easy was born!
Even before writing our first rap lyrics, we had already chosen our crew name and alter egos. Content-wise, we focused on a post-historical perspective on our GDR identities. Gregor Easy’s father was a member of the GDR’s military, the Nationale Volksarmee (NVA), and drank himself to death after the fall of the Berlin Wall and West Germany’s takeover of the former GDR. My parents saw themselves as socialist pioneers when they moved to East Berlin. I was born in 1986 and grew up with a father who worked for the GDR secret service, the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Stasi), and a mother who studied Marxism-Leninism and Russian to become a teacher.
Many people from the former GDR had major difficulties finding orientation in a capitalist world they had to adapt to since 1990. These issues, along with some ironic and nostalgic views on our own history, are central points of our lyrics.
Another important aspect of our content is that we always wanted to be direct and “hard” without being toxic men – so we don’t use sexist or homophobic language and prefer to diss jerks, rich kids, and other annoying people instead of, for example, women or gay people.
Gregor Easy’s funny way of dissing assholes and my honest lyrics about my history of drug use gave us some street credibility, so that people could take us seriously as an underground rap crew.
When we released our first EP on vinyl in 2017, we produced a music video for our track “Takeover 2017,” and we asked our friend, the producer Spoke, to make it. During the shooting, we felt a strong connection and good vibes. Spoke was already producing beats back then, and afterward, Spoke joined our crew as a member and producer from 2018 to 2021.
Spoke organized a gig for us at Freilauf Festival in 2017, and there we met our future booker, Donna from eq:booking agency, who fell in love with our music and organized many gigs for us.
In the following years, we released some tapes and vinyl records (the last one, “Im Osten nichts Neues,” was released on Audiolith, a record label from Hamburg), and we went on tour, playing lots of gigs. Then the Corona pandemic came and devastated underground music and club culture in Germany (including us). These days, we are working on a new album again and hope to release it by the end of 2025.
Your other project, Bistro Palme, explores a completely different genre. What draws you to exist in two musical worlds? Do you feel a different creative energy in each, or do they feed into each other in unexpected ways?
As a listener, I have always been open to all styles of music, and as an artist, I have usually been involved in two or three different projects at the same time. So, for me, there isn’t really a division between separate musical worlds, there is just one big musical space where you can express different emotions through different styles.
As a person, you don’t wake up every day feeling the same way or listening to the same song over and over. People experience a range of emotions, go through different phases in life. Some days, you might feel like listening to death metal; other days, you might be in the mood for hyperpop. That doesn’t change who you are. As an artist, it’s the same for me: I have different emotions, and I can express myself through different musical styles, all as one and the same artist.
To be honest, this approach feels completely natural to me, so I don’t really struggle with the idea of being both a rapper in an underground crew and a singer in a playful rock big band at the same time.
When I started rapping at the age of 30, I was shocked by how free I felt on stage; without a guitar and without that typical “sad white guy with a guitar” image. At first, I really wanted to focus on Ostberlin Androgyn and was happy that I didn’t have to play the guitar. But composing songs on the guitar never really stopped for me, and Bistro Palme became the project where I could channel those songs. I started it with friends at almost the same time as Ostberlin Androgyn. However, since Bistro Palme consists of eight musicians (playing double bass, cello, violin, guitar, saxophone, flutes, drums, and keyboards), the production and release process takes much longer and requires more energy. As a result, Bistro Palme has had less output compared to Ostberlin Androgyn, but it has always existed. Just a little more “hidden” in the background. These days, my focus has shifted back towards Bistro Palme. We released our first album, Es geht vorab!, on vinyl in November 2024, and we’re playing live quite frequently.
In Ostberlin Androgyn, I am “Kanye Ost,” and in Bistro Palme, I am “Karel Ott”, so in both projects, I am still “KO.” There is a strong connection between these two personas, but of course, they are different on stage. Kanye Ost is a little more wild, chaotic, humorous, and self-destructive, while Karel Ott is a little more mature, reflective, and philosophical.
So, in the end, it’s not about different creative energies. It‘s all one and the same creative force that I put into both projects. The difference is more about the “mode” I am in at a given time or the particular focus I choose.
Another element that connects Ostberlin Androgyn and Bistro Palme is the use of radically honest lyrics. In pop music, there is often a tendency to sugarcoat life and the world we live in—there’s a lot of romanticizing and feel-good content. I like the idea of filling that kind of music with real-life struggles and true stories. For example, making a sweet, melodic song about depression and how even a crying face can have beauty, or writing a rap track about people who died at the Berlin Wall. Breaking taboos, addressing both personal and societal trauma, and talking about struggles that most people experience but rarely discuss, that’s what interests me as an artist… and as someone with some good therapy experience! 😀
East Berlin’s influence is unmistakable in your work—it’s woven into your artistic identity. How did growing up in East Berlin shape your music, your lyrics, and your creative vision?
First of all, there was always a huge gap between my personal childhood memories (as well as the mostly positive way my parents talk and think about socialism and life in the GDR) on the one hand, and what we had to read in school during my later (capitalist) childhood about the GDR and Stasi on the other hand. The GDR was presented as a totalitarian system similar to National Socialism. In movies and media, people who worked at the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit were usually portrayed as cold and inherently bad figures. Some members of my family worked for the Stasi, and I knew from my own experience that they were not the monsters that capitalist victory narratives described them as.
At the same time, from school, media, and contemporary witnesses, I learned that the overly positive view my family had of the GDR was also not super close to reality. I felt that the truth must be somewhere in between, and I have been searching for it my whole life. That search for truth has definitely shaped my artistic views – I have always felt that writing songs brings me closer to it than studying ever could.
I feel like my generation has a unique perspective on upheaval and the clash of different systems. We were born in East Berlin, spent our early childhood in the socialist German Democratic Republic, and then experienced “Die Wende” in 1990, which brought capitalism crashing into our society and radically changed everyone’s life. People lost their jobs and parts of their identities; many took their own lives because they could no longer understand the world around them. The generation before mine was fully shaped by a socialist mindset in a socialist world. The generation after mine grew up entirely in a capitalist world. But my generation experienced both, and we learned that a system can collapse, yet life still goes on. That knowledge—of resilience and survival—probably plays a central role in my art. For us, catastrophe and breakdown were normal, which may explain my tendency to explore uneasy topics.
After reunification, companies and individuals from West Germany easily took advantage of East Germans economically. Most people from the GDR had no real understanding of how the harsh “free” market worked—getting some Deutsche Marks always seemed like a good deal. Today, nearly all houses, businesses, and industrial structures in the former GDR are owned by Western companies or private individuals. Even in 2025, people in East Germany still earn around 15% less for the same work compared to those in the West. Being East German is still often associated with a sense of injustice and being positioned as the loser. Having less power and money than others, yet still trying to make my voice heard and reclaim space, is probably a major motivation for my art as well.
When I started school in 1993 in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen, my friends and I collected Coca-Cola cans with special Bundesliga logos and proudly displayed that capitalist trash on top of our bedroom wardrobes. In the GDR, we didn’t have much material wealth, so even Coca-Cola cans seemed valuable to us. Many things were scarce in the GDR, so if you had to repair your car, you had to improvise. That spirit of improvisation—of trial and error until you hopefully find a solution—is exactly how I make music. This is probably also why I produce different styles of music—there is no single way to find answers or solutions, so I try different approaches at the same time.
Migrant rappers, especially Turkish-German artists, have played a crucial role in shaping German rap as we know it today. Do you think German rap has always been intercultural, or was there a time when Turkish-German artists were on the fringes of the scene? Do you see a divide between the mainstream German rap scene and Turkish-German rap, or have those boundaries blurred over time?
As I mentioned before, when I first started listening to German rap, I was mainly drawn to battle rap from West Berlin, which was dominated by migrant rappers, including German-Turkish artist Kool Savas. Ironically, in my view, it was actually white German artists who were on the fringes of the scene and had to carve out their own place within the German battle rap bubble. In my eyes, German rap was primarily created and shaped by migrant artists.
The first German rap track I ever listened to was Fremd im eigenen Land (“Foreign in My Own Country”) by the Heidelberg-based crew Advanced Chemistry, released in 1992. In the song, Torch and Toni-L rap about their migrant backgrounds, highlighting how simply holding a German passport didn’t make them feel German, as they still faced discrimination for being migrants in Germany.
From a historical perspective, I believe German rap has always been driven by artists with migrant backgrounds. Over the years, the genre has evolved and diversified significantly to the point where today, anyone can become a rapper. In terms of success, having a migrant background no longer plays as decisive a role as it once did.
Many of the most successful German rap artists in recent years come from migrant backgrounds. Haftbefehl is Kurdish, Shirin David has Lithuanian and Iranian roots, Eko Fresh is of Turkish descent, Capital Bra is Ukrainian, and Bushido is German-Tunisian—the list goes on.
Hip-hop is probably the only music scene in Germany that authentically represents migrant perspectives and experiences, both in quality and quantity, in a way that truly reflects the realities of German society.
Interviewee: Kanye Ost aka Karel Ott aka KO
Instagram: @kanye.ost @bistropalme @ostberlin.androgyn
Interviewer: Tevfik Hürkan Urhan
