Cro (rapper)
| Cro | |
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Cro at the splash! Festival on July 5, 2012.
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| Background information | |
| Birth name | Carlo Waibel |
| Also known as | Cro |
| Born | 31 January 1990 |
| Origin | Aalen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany |
| Genres | Pop, hip hop |
| Occupation(s) | Rapper, singer, producer |
| Instruments | Piano, guitar |
| Years active | 2006–present |
| Labels | Chimperator Productions |
| Associated acts | Casper, Dajuan, Die Orsons, Max Herre |
| Website | cromusik |
Carlo Waibel, better known by his stage name Cro (born January 31, 1990), is a German rapper, singer, producer and designer, who is represented by Chimperator Productions. He describes his music as a mixture between pop and rap, which he calls "Raop".
Born Carlo Waibel on January 31, 1990, he attended the Realschule on the Galgenberg in Aalen, Germany, and later Johannes-Gutenberg-Schule, a vocational school in Stuttgart, Germany. He began recording music at the age of 13. He learned to play the piano and the guitar. In 2009, he released his first mixtape Trash. On February 11, 2011, his second mixtape Meine Musik was released. It was available for free download. Cro produced the entire mixtape by himself. Through the mixtape German hip-hop musician Kaas took notice of Cro. Besides his musical career, Cro is also active as a designer. Since 2010, he has been designing under his clothing label Vio Vio. After receiving his Mittlere Reife, he completed an apprenticeship as a media designer and worked for the Stuttgarter Zeitung as a cartoonist.
Through Kaas, Cro met Sebastian Andrej Schweizer, founder of the independent-label, Chimperator Productions, and Kodimey Awokou. At the end of September 2011, a "Making of" video for a new artist was published by the label leading to speculations about which artist had been actually signed. In October 2011, Schweizer announced that he had signed Cro.
In November 2011, the music video for Easy, which had been directed by Harris Hodovic and was announcing the upcoming mixtape, was released on tape.tv. A few days later, the video was released on YouTube, where it gained more than 500,000 views in the first two weeks. In the beginning of 2012, it had gained 12,000,000 views, mid-May, the views had risen to a number of more than 44,000,000. The American blog hypetrak.com also reported about the video and Cro. German hip hop and funk musician Jan Delay posted the video on his Facebook page and said, Cro was the "future of German rap." Besides "Easy", "Hi Kids" and "Kein Benz" were also released prior to the release of the mixtape. On December 1, 2011, Cro was a guest on the show NeoParadise by the channel ZDFneo, where he performed snippets of three songs from his mixtapes Meine Musik and Easy. One day later, Chimperator Productions released the mixtape Easy which is available for free download on their website.
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