Features
French Hip Hop Narrates a Generation
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As US hip hop has been subject to proclamations of death by those who long for the “Golden Era”, French critics have made similar diagnoses at home. However, the purported transatlantic demise encompasses the once proud traditions of French culture as a whole. The French conservative government and commentators alike have vocally lamented the nations diminished presence as a cultural and linguistic power.
But what this deathbed declaration neglects, and some would argue intentionally, is the powerful contribution of hip hop to the contemporary cultural landscape of France. As the French youth has become characterized by the second and third generation sons and daughters of colonial immigrants, these young people have become more and more disillusioned with the aristocratic conventions of French culture. Hip hop has offered a lurid expressive mouthpiece for the frustrations and experiences of minorities, lower socioeconomic groups and those who feel isolated–physically and ideologically–by traditional French culture.
La Culture Française
Culture in France is a serious business. State subsidies, quotas and tax benefits do their best to celebrate everything French and glorify the country’s image as the birthplace of modern art, the continental home of romantic literature and the creative refuge for modern literature and philosophy. President Nicholas Sarkozy recently went as far to make the oxymoronic proposal for the democratization of “culture,” and this year commissioned an extensive committee analysis of what it means to be “French.”
French cultural production has suffered in the age of globalization, however, to a phenomenon French critics prefer to call “Americanization.” As of 2006, according to Time Magazine, US films account for half of cinema tickets in France, French authors are struggling to make an impact at home and overseas, while American authors like Paul Auster and Philip Roth have found growing audiences in France, and Paris is now a distant third, behind New York and London, in art auction sale numbers.
Conversely, this period of cultural decline has seen hip hop flourish in France. The shared propensity towards revolution of both hip hop and the French and the shared experience of an African diaspora has seen France become the world’s second largest hip hop market and producer.
L’Histoire du Hip Hop Française
Large economic development during the 1960s requiring a labor force resulted in mass immigration to France from North Africa. This left the immigrant and poorer labor groups concentrated in the outer suburbs of the major French towns, isolated and excluded.
Hip hop was the natural expressive choice for young citizens with social demographics and perceptions that would drastically diverge from any French generation before it.
DJ Cut Killer, a Moroccan born, Parisian raised French hip hop representative for more than 20 years, understood the power hip hop offered to those trapped in the societal fringes.
“It was really hard to live there. That’s why the young generation was really angry and when hip hop came we saw in this movement and this music how the United States, the urban people, the people of the streets, could manage this situation. This form of expression, the MCs the graffiti, all of this movement, and especially the dance, it was really huge for the urban people of France.
They were dancing in the streets, the graffiti was there to, how do you say “deranger” (to disturb), and to tell the people that they are angry. That’s why the young generation liked this movement, especially the MCs.”
French producer De La, who has worked with US artists like Blu, Talib Kweli and Elzhi as well as compatriots Les Nubians, described his eventual involvement in hip hop as inevitable. “It was everywhere in Paris and its suburbs in the 90s, so I guess it was only a matter of time before I got into it. It was the perfect music for our environment back then.”
L’Intersection du Hip Hop et La Culture Française
The brilliance of traditional French culture was always in protest to the academic and societal norms of the time. Impressionism and Cubism were distinct challenges to traditional schools of painting. Existentialism and absurdist literature challenged the most basic societal conceptions of human existence. And French literature has an especially close affinity with the suffering of those marginalized by the class distinctions of French society. However, the dissident power of these movements has been marginalized through its appropriation by the affluent and academics.
Now hip hop is the chosen expressive form for those disappointed and disillusioned by their French cultural and social experiences. Hip hop is the migration narrative of the African immigrants. Hip hop is the voice of second and third generation Franco-Africans who still experience the pains of displacement. Hip hop is the mode in which the immigrant populations of France have written their neglected stories into the pages of the rich French cultural canon. Ultimately hip hop has become the mouth piece of those who are excluded by the strict and conservative traditions of France.
Groups like IAM, the hip hop flag bearers for the southern city of Marseille, and La Rumeur, an act that combined music with multi-media activism, found an identity through hip hop while expressing their feelings of segregation in France. La Reumer, in offering politically educated street heat, specifically denies any ties to a genre labeled “French hip hop,” preferring to refer to their music as “rap by the sons of immigrants.” The acronym IAM takes a number of meanings, the most prominent being ‘Invasion Arrivée de Mars,’ (Invasion from Mars), Mars meaning Marseille. Situated on the Mediterranean, Marseille has a large African immigrant population and the persistent metaphor stressed is the multi-cultural group’s feeling of alienation in France. And becuase of this, the group finds identity in allusions to Africa, especially the ancient mythology of Egypt as they carve a fresh chapter into the French cultural canon.
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Simon is a regular contributor to Deft Magazine and active in the hip hop community in Paris. He earned his Bachelors of Law and Arts from New Zealand's University of Otago, Simon was also a DJ on Radio One Dunedin, in Otago, New Zealand.
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