Germany-based rapper Jae Ghost talks about his youth in Ghana, American sound, the challenges of hip hop in a globalized world, and working with Jadakiss
By Katharina Moser
Sometimes the most exceptional talents are to be found in the most unusual of places. It is early afternoon in Koblenz, a middle-sized German town on the banks of the Rhine, some fresh snow glistening in the winter sun, and there stands Jae Ghost, with a wide grin on his face and a wine glass in his hand. One could picture the rapper with his masterminded lyricism and solid beats in the streets of New York or the corners of Compton, but Koblenz it is, and the location, that becomes clear over the course of our conversation, really does not matter anyway.
It is not only his international flair, but also his impressive body of work that makes Jae Ghost stand out in the European hip hop scene. Born in Germany, the rapper is of Ghanaian and Nigerian descent and spent most of his youth and young adulthood in Ghana. Hip hop is the one thing that ties his journey together. “I have to say I´m a late bloomer. I didn’t get into rap music until the late 90s. DMX and rappers like that pulled me in. I just became a fan without even thinking about making music myself”, Jae Ghost recalls. “I was fascinated by the kind of artform it is – to be able to express yourself within like 60 bars and let that impact people.” As a boy in Ghana, he would go to the internet café and print out the lyrics of his favorite songs. “I was a super nerd and would recite them as if they were my own. That was my thing. I sound like a dinosaur, but we used to burn CDs at the time”, Jae Ghost laughs. “It was just a way of life. My whole youth was engulfed by hip hop music and its culture. I wanted to be like them. I wanted to be as cool as the person I saw on the TV screen. And over time I adapted and it became a part of me.”
However, it took a long time for Jae Ghost to start pursuing a rap career professionally. “I had to see to finishing high school and university and at the time I couldn’t just go to my parents and say I´m gonna be a rapper. They wanted me to be an engineer, and would have asked, how is rapping even a career, are you gonna earn your pension by rapping?”, Jae says. It was a hobby, something he would do to clear his mind. “It was always books first, school first, work first. But I wasn’t happy because internally I didn’t want to do this mechanical engineering shit and learn all these equations”, Jae says with a smile. “I was practically forced into it, but you have to survive, and of course my family only wanted the best for me. I was torn, I had to go to school and get my degrees, but internally I was asking myself, how long am I going to do this for and feel miserable?” Jae Ghost actively decided to pursue rapping as a career after his return to Germany, when he met Nurhak Yildiz, label boss of the local music label Overtone Music in Koblenz, which Jae Ghost signed to a year later. Yildiz, whose artist name is Hareket, is producer and beatmaker as well and has produced several of Jae Ghost´s songs. Via Overtone, the rapper released the EP “Beautiful Chaos” in 2018 and his debut album “The Last Laugh” in 2019, followed by his sophomore album “All of a Sudden” in 2021, with guest appearances of household names like Jadakiss, 3D Natee, TEK of Smif-N-Wessun, Grandmaster Caz and more.
While his professional come-up is astonishing, his personal journey is a story worth telling, too. As a kid in Germany, young Jae Ghost was a “real headache” to his parents, as he says with a mischievous grin. At the age of twelve, his parents sent him to relatives in England as a “change of environment”, where he stayed for half a year. “It didn’t work out due to family issues, and they sent me back to Germany. The people I was surrounded with also didn’t help because they were bad kids too. I was glad to be back in Germany, thinking I could do some more bad shit, but my parents weren’t having it”, Jae Ghost recounts. When he was 13 years old, his father decided to send him to Ghana for his school education. “Actually, I was tricked into it. If they had told me, I wouldn’t have agreed. My dad said we´d do a two-week vacation in Ghana.” But then his parents told him to cut off his dreadlocks, and started looking for schools instead. “On the day we were supposed to fly back, I thought I was coming with them and started packing, but my dad told me he didn’t have a return ticket for me, and I was supposed to stay.” Today, Jae Ghost takes it with humor, and laughs about his shock back then. At the time, however, he was really unhappy about his father´s instructions to stay with his aunt and finish school in Ghana. “Imagine, I didn’t speak English very well. I considered myself a German kid. I was thinking, what do you want me to do, talk in sign language?”, Jae laughs heartily. “It was tough familiarizing myself with the culture and how people behave in the country. In the beginning it wasn’t easy for me. It’s a whole different world. You´re a foreigner, you don’t have friends. I felt alone”, Jae says. “As a kid, you´re not wise, you think everything that’s happening is bad. It took a long time for me to realize that the people I was living with were family, too, that they would protect me just as much as my parents would.”
There was some friction and a lot of disagreements. As Jae recalls, all these frustrations drove him to be a mean kid for a while. “Once I wrote a letter to my dad, promising him I wouldn’t do anything bad no more and telling him to get me. My auntie found the letter, and she said, I´m your family too, and you have to respect your dad´s decision.” Frustrated, young Jae went to his room and destroyed his cousin´s belongings. “My auntie was a tough woman, she ruled with an iron fist. She was a disciplinarian, she wanted so see good grades, a plan for life. That day she told me, if I keep misbehaving, she is going to burn my passport and I would have to stay in Ghana forever. I was scared because I didn’t know you could just issue a new one”, Jae smiles. “In a nutshell, it was tough. There was a lot of discipline in the house and the way to my auntie´s heart was good grades. But it shapes you as a person, it builds character”, Jae is convinced. “If I hadn’t been disciplined that way, I don’t know how I would’ve turned out. Her ways were harsh, but it turned out for the better for me. It made me an upright person, prioritizing the right things in life.”
It is his moved and complex past that is the source for the stories and verses Jae Ghost presents in his songs, giving him something to say, something worth telling to a wider audience. “The music I grew up on was heavily lyric-based, so that influenced me already. It was about the metaphors and punchlines”, Jae ponders. “But it is my surroundings that inspire me. In Ghana, I had a lot going on personally, with family, the people I came across, my education… I guess that is where I pull a lot of the lyrics from. The verses come from that place, all the shit that you go through”, Jae thinks. “I don’t want to come across like my life is so hard. It was hard, but what are you gonna make out of it? I use rap as therapy as well. I´m not a talkative person in the first place. I use my music to talk.” His multicultural identity and multiple experiences in different parts of the world surely offer a rich background to take from. “It´s not only my stories, but also my people´s stories. I can use them as a muse to offer perspective. Just life, right?”
Multicultural identity, of course, also allows Jae Ghost to craft music rich in styles, sounds and music traditions. “I pick from all those avenues. I like Afrobeats a lot. Sometimes I can´t even listen to my own rap, there is so many words, so much thinking. I need to cool off sometimes, so I listen to R&B and Afrobeats, which is easier on the brain”, Jae Ghost explains. “I like how they write the beat and play with it. And because I listen to it so much, I pick a little bit from it and apply it to my own beats, to bring in the flow”, says Jae. “But I´m a rap artist through and through, I cherish the lyricism, the cleverness in it, and my music definitely sounds American. At the end of the day, that is just me expressing myself.” This, Overtone label manager Hareket confirms, is at the same time an opportunity and a challenge for the rapper: to write American-style rap music, with the horizon of experience of an African man, based in Germany. “Jae grew up in Africa, sounds American, and lives in Germany”, Hareket says. “Sometimes we feel like the German audience does not even understand what Jae talks about in his songs.”
Jae Ghost may operate in the German industry, but he places himself completely apart from it stylistically. And although Jae Ghost is based in Germany, he and his team do not have an interest in the German music market. “We do have to maneuver the German market place a little bit, but we are more interested in the broader scale. I make international music. Most of my listeners are in the US”, Jae says. Being an internationally oriented, but American-influenced artist opens up further complexities in the cultural and historic landscape of hip hop music. American hip hop is reflective of an American identity and an American reality of marginalized communities fighting their way up from the bottom of society. Jae Ghost´s rap is at home in the American hip hop world stylistically and sound-wise, but what sociopolitical and cultural reality does it reflect? “Because I´m African, I guess it goes back to dealing with issues that pertain to Africa – even though my music sounds American stylistically. Those are the things I talk about: hardships as an African kid, socioeconomic issues relating to Africa, and also my day-to-day experience as a Black man in Germany. I can talk from the perspective of an African, Black man living in Germany”, Jae thinks. With that, he may well be the cutting edge of a new generation of hip hop that has escaped the boundaries of a localized cultural experienced and stepped over geographical boundaries into a globalized experience translated through hip hop music.
Although that, of course, also brings its challenges and difficulties within the music business. “The German music industry, for example, doesn’t seem to relate to me. Less so because of my skin color, more so because of my style of music. The respect I get mostly comes from the outside, from legends like Jadakiss or TEK”, Jae says. Jae Ghost did a song together with TEK, and when he attended a TEK concert in Berlin he was pulled on stage to perform, with TEK paying him respect. “And there, it did not matter where I was from or based in. I can see that making an impact globally is harder, but it also is a gratifying feeling when you get recognition from people from the outside.” For Jae, it is about the universality of it.
One of the accolades Jae Ghost has received comes from the highest of places: the rap legend Jadakiss himself. As Jae recalls, he idolized and adored Jadakiss since he was a boy. “In terms of rap, Jadakiss is a god to me. It is amazing how someone can craft words like this. It is an art to say something so impactful yet simple. It is mind-blowing to see how somebody uses just the right words. And never in a million years did I think that I would get in contact with this guy”, Jae says happily. During the pandemic, Jadakiss released a new album which included the song “Hunting Season”. Jadakiss then initiated an open competition on social media for rappers to freestyle on the song, announcing to repost the best candidates. “About 4000 rappers took part. What are the odds? When he reposted me, I almost threw my phone away. I couldn’t believe it”, Jae recalls with a big smile. After this first success, he contacted Jadakiss directly and indeed, Jadakiss was impressed by Jae Ghost´s rap skills – so much so, that he featured on tracks in Jae Ghost´s new album. “It was such a confidence boost. A lot of people are sleeping on my music, and suddenly this giant in the rap game is giving me respect!”, Jae says. Being recognized and honored by one of the best rappers in the game means more than Spotify statistics ever could. And Jadakiss is not the only one to think so: In March 2023, Jae Ghost released the single “If I ever” – featuring no other than the legendary Westcoast rapper The Game.
Jae Ghost now has big plans for the future. His third album will be released this year, and as both Jae Ghost and his label colleagues on Overtone are convinced, it is going to be “the best independent rap album coming out of Europe”. “On the first two albums we worked hard, but this one is real progress. The production more refined, and it is immaculate rapping”, Jae says.
So who is Jae Ghost, a rapper that is at home in so many corners of the world, and who might just as well revolutionize hip hop with his intricate multifaceted, yet clear approach to hip hop? “I guess I´m a person who is open-minded, and I never play with people I really care about. Once I let you into my world, I take you seriously like that. If you´re with me, as friends or family, I´ll be there for you. I don’t know everything in this life. Life is a never-ending journey of lessons. But I try to do what is right by the people I care about”, Jae says thoughtfully.
“Jae is a really loyal person. And in the studio, he knows exactly how to work, when to listen, how to implement advice and create something”, Hareket confirms. Jae´s family, too, is proud of the person and artist he has come to be: “My mama is proud, but it took her along time. Because she needed to see proof that I´m not just talking, but there is actually something substantial coming out of it. With my dad, if he was alive, it maybe would have taken longer for him to realize”, Jae thinks. “But overall, they are proud. At the beginning they didn’t take me seriously. Now they do.”
Where does Jae Ghost see himself in a few years? “At the top. Wherever that is”, Jae says without hesitation, and grins. “It’s a grind, it’s a mountain. With every day and every project we keep climbing. As long as we stay dedicated and determined, and have a vision, we´re gonna be at the top of the mountain”, Jae says. “And one day we will be saying, what a nice view, man. What a journey.”
The Wrapper 