Massive Töne

In the early 1990s, friends Schowi (Jean-Christoph Ritter) and Ju (João dos Santos) formed the German hip-hop group Massive Töne after taking cues from the Beastie Boys, Public Enemy, and the Ultramagnetic MC's and choosing to rap themselves. Wasi (Wasi Ntuanoglu) and DJ 5ter Ton (Alexander Scheffel) soon came aboard, and the crew started playing shows in their Stuttgart base while refining a style that mixed socially aware themes with party-driven beats and rhymes. Their first releases, Dichter in Stuttgart in 1995 and Kopfnicker the following year, led to a deal with Warner affiliate East West Records, which put out the group's biggest success, Überfall, in 1999. Wasi departed Massive Töne a year later, leaving the remaining members as a trio that resurfaced only in 2002 with the album MT3. Zurück in die Zukunft followed three years after that.