OthenticO aka O-Jay was born on 17 October 1992 in Munich. Thanks to his fathers Irish roots he was lucky to grow up bilingually. Nickolodeon & MTV did the rest.
Because of his family and especially his elder brother OthenticO came into contact with Hip-Hop at an early age. At the beginning O was only passively exposed because his parents always tried to keep their little one away from the influence of the urban subculture.
As many know this did quite the opposite HipHop just got all the more interesting. Time and again, O got his hands on the record arsenal of his big brother or sat quietly behind the door while the big brother and friends (among them DMC Champion M-Tech) blew the fuses in their home studio.
At the tender age of eight, O got his first chance to use a mike during one of these sessions. M-Tech recall: We were pretty flabbergasted when the little kid improvised a hot freestyle on one of our freshly produced beats.
Two years later, in 2003, and just out of a whim his brother registered O to contest in the TV-show Star Search. Cant do any harm, he thought, And if it does work out the little guy will get the whiff of real stage air. Just as things turned out, OthenticO won his way into the show and rapped for a nationwide audience right into the semi-final. At the end he got kicked out because the image of a rapper didnt quite fit into the concept of a family TV programme.
At this point many eyes and ears in the music business had become aware of the little golden nugget. A few short-term productions were slapped up with OthenticO who gained some more experience and his first golden disc.
In the summer of 2004 OthenticOs first single appeared in coproduction with old-timer, DJ Tomekk. The music video for the single which also featured Sido from the Crew Aggroberlin was only shown on MTV2 because the programme editors thought that a song which needed a parental advisory note was not the right thing for a twelve year old. Most radio stations refused to play the record for the same reason. Despite the odds, the record got into the German Top 100, and stayed there for eight weeks, coming at its peak within the Top 40.
OthenticO gathered all the experience he could: he saw the PR machinery of the labels and TV-stations; he had live appearances in front of more than 10,000 screaming fans and got together with some of the greats, like Kanye West.
OthenticO has been working with Stuttgart producer Ben Thursfield since. He has already completed new English tracks and a few tracks in German which shows that OthenticO is able to burn like a virtuoso in his mother tongue!
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