Xatar fortune

Short introduction

Xatar (main name: Giwar Hajabi, born on December 24, 1981 in Kuh-e Qala, Kurdistan Province, Iran) is a German rapper of Kurdish origin. The artist name “Xatar” means danger in Kurdish.

Early life

His father is the music professor Eghbal Hajabi. In the early 1980s, his parents fled with him to nearby Iraq. At that time, the first Gulf War broke out between the two Middle East countries. After Saddam Hussein’s regime attacked the Kurdish minority in Iraq, his parents were also tortured and detained. He was held near Baghdad for three months.

Career

At the end of the nineties, Hajabi began rapping and producing beats in the recording room of a youth center under the pseudonym Xatar, the Kurdish term for “danger”. In 2007 he founded the label Alles or Nix Records, which signed a distribution contract with Groove Attack. The first artists he signed were Samy and SSIO. His first album, Alles oder nix, was released at the end of November 2008. In addition to his label colleagues Samy and SSIO, other guest contributions can be seen.

In 2011, Alles or Nix Records signed the rapper Schwesta Ewa. He also worked on his second album, played instrumental music in the evenings and dictated his lyrics on a dictation machine. He then mailed the tapes to his studio. Although Hajabi was eventually caught in solitary confinement and detained, the album was completed and supplemented by guest contributions from rappers such as Farid Bang, Nate57, Celo & Abdi, Capo and Eko Fresh and released on his label in April 2012. Album No. 415, named after his prisoner number, entered the German album charts at number 19. It reached number 23 in Switzerland and number 52 in Austria. In addition to No. 415, Alles or Nix Records also published the albums Spezial Material and BB.UM.SS.N by SSIO, during Xatar’s detention.

A month after its release, he released Schwesta Ewa’s debut album Kurwa through his label. At the same time he started the production of his third album, for which he was again able to win a number of well-known guests. In May 2015, Baba of all Babas came out and reached number 1 in the German charts. It reached number 3 in Austria and Switzerland. In the same year, Xatar opened the hookah bar Bar Noon in Cologne together with SSIO together with SSIO and two other friends. On October 12, 2015, he published his autobiography Alles oder Nix (The Everything or Nothing) at riva Verlag: We say the world is yours. Xatar presented the book at the Frankfurt Book Fair and on television. He also founded Kopfticker Records, a second label for rappers who are not suitable for anything or nothing. The first artist was a plus maker with his album harvest.

Career highlights

In early 2016, Xatar appeared as part of the The Voice Of The Voiceless benefit campaign in the Columbia Hall in Berlin to finance an orphanage in northern Iraq. In May 2016, Xatar and Haftbefehl announced their joint album The Holland Job with an advertising campaign as part of the TV show Studio Amani. The Berlin label Four Music released it on August 12, 2016. The collaborative album was number 1 on the charts in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

Xatar’s debut album accused him of endangering young people. Everything or nothing has been on List A of the indexed media since February 26, 2010. Seven songs were classified by the Federal Office for Media Harmful to Young Persons as “harmful to young people”. The songs seem “brutal” and evoke “violence”. From the Review Board’s point of view, Xatar presents the “use of violence as worthy of imitation”. The first person perspective gives it a “model character for young recipients”. The “rather descriptive, partly socially critical texts of the other songs cannot create a general context that would be suitable for taking up the index-relevant statements and giving them a different meaning.”