It is about words, of course. A cold, quiet midnight in Bobigny, late January and the thin ice in the slick black puddles reflects the yellow lights of the tower blocks. No sirens, no smashing glass. Just some muffled shouting and the hiss of the hydraulics of an empty bus drawing away from an empty stop. There is the sound of a plane high overhead. Paris is a dozen miles or 40 minutes on the metro away.
But inside a room in a low concrete building set in a patch of open space between the apartment blocks, the walls are streaked with condensation and the air thick with smoke. Tonight at Canal93, an arts centre, venue and studio built by the local Communist town hall, there is Rap Game, an open mic 'clash' organised by a local collective of amateur rappers. At the back of the packed hall are three judges on a platform, leaning back in chairs with studied nonchalance, in puffer jackets and oversized jeans. On the stage are two young men, both clutching microphones, two DJs, decks and a giant counter which counts down from 60, second by second. Between the judges and the stage are a couple of hundred teenagers, mainly young men, black, brown and white, fists in the air, still wearing their hooded parkas despite the heat, cheap jewellery on fingers and wrists. 'Make some noise, 9-3. Are you there, 9-3?' shouts the MC.
Nine three, very distinctly two words, not quatre-vingt-treize as correct French would demand but neuf trois . Nine Three. Easier, faster to say, and very definitely not what is approved by those who decide what is and what is not the French language. Nine three are, it is quickly apparent, very much there.
Nine Three means France's department 93, Seine Saint Denis, now synonymous with the riots which started there last November before spreading across the rest of the country. But Nine Three is a slogan as much as an administrative label. Nine Three means the banlieusards, those from the banlieues, the suburbs where it all kicked off back in October and November. Nine Three means racaille or rabble, as the minister of the interior, Nicolas Sarkozy, called the rioters as the cars went up in smoke in urban centres night after night. And, at least in Canal93 on this particular Saturday night, nine three means French hip hop, the music of the racaille
What is the music of the racaille? Hardcore 'gangsta' rap of course, representative of the dreams and the frustrations of repressed and resentful communities. A rap full of rage and violence and provocation. At least, that is the image. And it is an image that has brought three legal cases against rappers in the last six months, each backed by petitions signed by hundreds of members of parliament, each accusing rappers of inciting violence and immorality. One member of parliament, Francois Grosdidier, has done the round of talk shows arguing that French rap has promoted racial hatred. It is an image that is boosted by scores of reports in local and overseas media and by hundreds of lines of print penned by a host of commentators. And after listening to the finale of Rap Game, you might be excused for thinking that it is an image that reflects reality.
Through the evening three dozen aspirant young rappers have tried in their allotted minute to win over judges and crowd. We are now down to the last two, Difa, a small, lean 22-year-old, 'd'origine Arabe' in a battered leather jacket, and MekXS ( mec , slang for man, and XS, as in excess), a little older, tall, rangy, black, in a white woollen hat and white hoodie. It is their third time on stage that night and both explore the same themes as on their previous two turns, the same themes explored by everyone else over the evening so far life in la cite , unemployment, drugs, petty crime, cars, films, money, girls. One calls the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the ultra-right wing politician, a whore the other talks of 'the day when the banlieues exploded and the day, soon to come, when they will explode again'. Difa wins and then the judges and their friends, all in their late twenties and early thirties, take the stage. 'Fuck the pigs. Are you there 9-3? Fuck the pigs. Are you there Bobigny? Make Some Noise. Fuck, fuck, fuck the pigs.'
To most people in the UK, French rap means MC Solaar, the Senegal-born and 93-raised artist who recorded a couple of albums that just about penetrated the British market in the early Nineties, or perhaps bands such as NTM or IAM who were big a few years later. But that is about it. Whether because of the language difficulties or the influence of American rap, few in Britain have taken much notice of what has been happening across the channel. It has gone unnoticed for years, but France is the world's second biggest producer of rap.
One of the earliest pioneers of hip hop and rap in France is DJ Dee Nasty, who I find off the Rue Oberkampf in Paris's 11th arrondissement , preparing for an old-school hip hop night at the Nouveau Casino, a slightly shabby, well-known club that, a bit like French rap itself, has done very well and is apparently now just past its peak of popularity. DJ Dee Nasty is 45, chaotic, shambling, warm and enthusiastic.
'Hip hop came to France in 1982,' he tells me. 'It was dance to start with, like in London. French rappers started by trying to rap in English, which was a disaster, then with French translations of English lyrics, which wasn't much better, and then finally in French. And it was then, from about 1988 onwards, that rap began to really get going in the banlieues of Paris and in Marseille.'
The turning point was 1990, with a compilation of French hip hop acts called Rappitude . Within a couple of years, dozens of new acts came through. Bands such as NTM fused the raw anger of American giants NWA and Public Enemy with the funk of De La Soul and a very French tradition of politically engaged, socially conscious music. They included a strong hardcore element led by groups such as Assassin and Ministere Amer (Ministry of Bitterness). On my way back from Bobigny my taxi driver, a local, had spoken to me about famous anarchist French singers and of how, as a teenager, he had read Pierre Corneille, the great 17th-century French playwright at school, and listened to the new wave of rappers at night. I tell DJ Dee Nasty about the conversation. He nods.
'The aim was to show that rap could be sophisticated, in a literary way. The words were very important. Just being violent would have been too easy,' he says. 'MC Solaar was moderate, nice, humorous, conscious and a great entertainer, and he sold between half a million and a million records. Some of it was pretty commercial but not bad for all that.'
Solaar was one of the few black French rap artists to attract white fans and, with hip hop selling so well, it was natural that the major record companies became interested. Through the late Nineties, hundreds of hip hop acts were signed and, with the arrival of Skyrock, the first and only radio station to play rap in France, in 1996, the market exploded. The frenzy peaked at the end of the decade as scores of records went gold and platinum. But that, some say, was the end of French rap's golden years.
When did the harder lyrics start coming through, I ask, wondering whether they are a result of attempts to remedy poor sales or a reflection of the fact that French rappers have largely failed to cross over to the more white and middle-class audience that their British and American peers have reached. DJ Nasty thinks for a moment and then says that they have always been present, pointing out that the initials NTM stand for Nique Ta Mere - fuck your mother. There have been court cases against rappers before, he says. 'What's new is "fuck France". But,' he says quickly, 'it doesn't represent French rap.'
It's not a particularly healthy picture - and it's not one that everybody recognises. I go for a drink with Stephanie Binet, who writes on rap for the newspaper Liberation . We meet at the gig of a witty, political Senegalese rapper. 'Rap is a discipline,' she tells me. 'Hip hop is a culture. During the riots of last year both were completely caricatured in the press. You've got to go beyond the stereotype to understand French rap.' Olivier Cachin, who has written a book on French rap and a book on Eminem, tells me the same over a coffee near the Gare du Nord. 'There's a lot beyond the commercial mainstream,' he says.
Yet most of what I have so far seen, most of what I have heard and most of what I have read seems to show that the French rap market is, if not exclusively 'hardcore', then certainly dominated by a strong 'gangsta' element. Even new commercial acts such as the heavily muscled Booba (whose new album album is called Ouestside ) are very much in the 'gangsta' mode even if they are a fairly sanitised version of the more extreme fringe. A selection of the hardest lyrics that have set the members of parliament recently running for the law courts might include: 'I shout it loud, I fuck your nation,' from a group called 113 'I'm going to loot France... I dream of lodging a bullet from my glock in the head of a cop,' by Fabe or, perhaps most famously, Monsieur R's lines: 'France is a slapper. Don't forget to fuck her until she's exhausted. You've got to treat her like a bitch, man.'
DJ Nasty, perhaps full of nostalgia for the good old days, may say otherwise, so might Binet and Cachin but, from the outside anyway, French rap looks pretty gangsta, or at least, pretty racaille, to me. When I call Elodie Laloum, a young producer and promoter who looks after Canal93, she gets very annoyed when I keep asking about the court cases and the violent lyrics. 'Rap is much more than just that,' she tells me sharply. 'I'll prove it to you. Go to the Batofar on Monday night and talk to La Brigade.'
The Batofar is an old lightship moored on the Seine in the east of Paris, and La Brigade are one of France's best established rap groups. They are not in the first rank of star French rappers but are well known with a large following, having brought out three albums over a 10-year career. The night Elodie has sent me to is actually an evening being filmed for a French music cable channel and a host of French rappers are there. The MC is Lion Scott, a large man with long dreadlocks and a big belly whose chief attribute appears to be the fact that he is the brother of one of France's most famous rap artists. He tells me that French rap has been reduced to caricaturing itself and that half the rappers 'don't live what they talk about' and 'watch too many films'. French rap, he says, is running out of stream. When the night itself starts an American rapper attempts, with little success, to warm up the crowd by getting them to moronically chant 'get money, money, money... get cash, cash, cash'. The microphones don't work properly, which is a small mercy.
La Brigade are on relatively late and are waiting quietly and patiently in the bulwark behind the bar that serves as a dressing room. They are eight young men, all from the banlieues of Paris, all in their twenties, all earnest and articulate and, apparently, very socially and politically committed. They spend as much time in 'encounters' with teenagers in deprived bits of the country as they do promoting their new album. They are not stupid, not violent and nor are their lyrics, though their subject matter could be accurately described as 'gritty'. I can see why Elodie wanted me to meet them.
'Rap is a relay of information,' says John Deido, 24, one of the younger members of La Brigade. 'We relay, in an appropriate language, the claims and the demands of minorities who are excluded from mainstream media. Of course we do it in phrases and words that are comprehensible to our audience. It's no good using grand rhetoric when no one understands it. Rap is a subculture that can outflank the main media and provide a different discourse of power. The problem is that if you are young, stupid and badly behaved, they take you seriously. If you go beyond that stereotype, the media can't deal with it.'
Trust the French, I think briefly, to come up with a rapping critical theorist, or a critical theorising rapper. Deido is explaining how there is too much power concentrated in the major record companies and Skyrock, the radio station. La Brigade have produced their third album completely independently and it is selling well. Raoul, their manager, says that they are not bothered by pirating and illegal downloading. 'If the message gets across, that's the important thing,' he says. 'And the message reflects the reality.' They all give me their mobile numbers and then invite me to travel with them to the city of Rennes the next day where they are going to a debate on urban issues with local politicians and local community representatives.
What, I ask La Brigade, would they say to the members of parliament who have prosecuted the rappers for outraging morals and inciting hatred? 'We would ask them if they don't think they might be able to learn something from rap,' they answer and head for the stage.
'I think we can learn something from rap,' Francois Grosdidier, member of parliament and mayor for Woippy?, a small former industrial town in the far east of France, is saying as his traditional local ravioli steams in a bowl in front of him. After the riots of last year Grosdidier, who belongs to the right-wing UMP?, sought the public prosecution of the rapper Monsieur R for a song called 'FranSSe' which drew parallels between the country and Nazi Germany. Grosdidier is in his early forties with a fringe, a neat jacket, a brisk and friendly manner and a small pot belly. He won Woippy, split for years between the National Front and the communists, against all the odds in 2001 and has held it since. His views are an odd mix of the hardline - 'zero tolerance' for delinquents - and the progressive - he says France's strict laws on secularism need an overhaul to cope with seven million Muslim citizens. Like La Brigade, Grosdidier overturns a few stereotypes. 'The idea that immigrants are more likely to be criminals is disgusting,' he says, pointing out that a very substantial part of Woippy's population were not born in France, 'and scientifically false too.' As I expected all French rappers to be dumb, so I expected the honourable member for Woippy to be blind or deaf. Yet there are few conservative British politicians who can speak as eloquently about theories of urbanism, socialisation and the political language of popular music.
'I launched a case against these rappers because their language is utterly racist, against whites, and thus an incitement to racial violence,' Grosdidier says. 'It is language that reinforces racial prejudices. And from a pedagogical point of view, when there are young people in a very problematic social and cultural situation who listen continually to this kind of message, it can have a very real and very damaging effect very quickly.'
'Rap has much to teach us,' Grosdidier continues. 'It is an authentic language expressing authentic emotions and an authentic reality. But there are, of course, limits. When you are mayor of a town like this - poor, with very high unemployment, socially very fragile, with a large immigrant community - you see the consequences of words.'
A couple of days after Bobigny I go to the Just Us night at a club in central Paris. The night has been organised by a young promoter/ producer called Noella. She has just put together a compilation, and has hustled to get a venue for a launch gig. Tonight is free but by invitation only. Noella talks of 'jazzy rap', the 'true spirit of hip hop'. 'All the time you just hear - and hear about - hard rap, hard words. I'm trying to show that there is something else as well, something different,' she says.
A young MC called Seisme opens proceedings and provides just that, his rhymes and style very different from the standard gangster fare. 'I don't need to be hardcore for my tracks to stand out from the rest,' he says later. 'But violence sells very well. It's a vicious circle. There is public demand for that style of rap because it is the only style that is played on the radio and so the big record companies favour it and so there is public demand and so on and so on. Other styles of rap and hip hop barely get airtime even on Skyrock, let alone other stations.
'Look, I come from the banlieues too but I stay true to myself. I'm not going to give an image that is false just to succeed.'
Noella presses a CD and her phone number on me as I leave. 'We must talk more,' she says. 'The word rap is three letters but it's a big word and there's a lot contained within it.'
For a start, not all French rappers are men. One of the most commercially successful rappers is Diam's, a young French Cypriot whose recently released album, Dans ma bulle (In My Bubble), is currently doing well in the charts. Then there are rappers such as Princess Anies, who was one of the first acts on at the Batofar. 'Women have a different sensibility,' she tells me after the gig. 'There is less that is taboo for us. We can speak without shame about lots of things that men won't talk about. A girl can be a lot less gangster. She can talk about things other than dope, fighting and so on.' And there are artists such as Bams, a 32-year-old Parisian whose three albums draw as much from Afrobeat, Funkadelic, American neo-punk or Hendrix as they do from straight rap or hip hop.
'Rap's a musical movement like jazz or rock and as varied. It's just that the industry and the press likes people, particularly black or brown people, who fit the format,' says Bams. 'Rap's no more sexist than rock, where women have well-defined roles too,' she points out, not unfairly. 'Women in rock are always either fragile and in need of protection or wearing ripped clothes and sexual objects of desire. What I do is moderately successful but I am too adult and too intelligent for the industry.' And she's right.
Yet for every Bams or Princess Anies or La Brigade, who sadly are not anywhere near as popular as they were a few years ago, there is the opposite. I wonder where French rap is going.
DJs Xiao-Venom and Mani Peterson know where they are going. They are going to the top, as fast as their size-nine Nike-clad feet can carry them. So far the dynamic duo, both aged 23, have recorded 12 tracks for an album under the name of Blackara and secured a slightly less than prime-time slot on a free FM radio of slightly dubious provenance and funding at 4.30 to 6am on a Saturday morning. This doesn't distress them. When I turn up at the studio they, predictably, haven't slept. A whirlwind of energy, wisecracks and half-completed if astonishingly fluid raps, they run through their allotted 90 minutes sustained by sheer youthful buoyancy. Neither XV, born in the Congo, or MP, originally from Cameroon, have jobs both live in a run-down bit of northeastern Paris, both have been involved in rap and hip hop since leaving school five years ago and both are certain that they are going to reussir ou mourir (get rich or die trying).
The show over, they stride through the streets to the Metro, jump the ticket barriers, hand out flyers promoting the next broadcast while babbling into their mobile phones and head for a recording studio. It could be menacing but despite their hoods, baggy trousers, ranks of gold teeth and the patterns shaved into their hair the two young men's natural charm wins them indulgent smiles from almost everyone they come across. The album's name is going to be Superstar Local
The name that comes up again and again in
conversations with the rappers and critics is that of the radio station Skyrock. It is, apparently, the fount of all evil with its power and its aseptic rap. Laurent Bonneau, its 41-year-old founder and director, tells me that the station has four million listeners. His office is full of CDs, gold and platinum discs and ashtrays. He is wearing a sweatshirt and trainers and is unapologetic. 'If we have a monopoly it is because other people have given it to us by not broadcasting rap,' he says. I tell him of the criticism of the music on the station. 'I play what I like and people seem to like what I play,' he says. 'I don't play stuff for the underground.' And what Bonneau plays is popular. An album by Sniper sold 500,000 copies last year. The Fonky Family, mainstream rappers, entered the charts at number 7 in January. After only a few releases last year, there have been six major albums out in the first three months of this year. Bonneau points out that the market for rap is very young, mainly between 13 and 19. In the next five to 10 years hip hop will become the main musical movement of France in 10 or 20 years' time rap will dominate the musical scene for everyone under 50. 'Time is with us,' Bonneau says.
Another cold night out by the peripherique, the urban motorway that rings Paris, this time at a venue called Glaz'Art. Tonight's attraction is Noyau Dur (hard core), a collective of rappers who did well in the late Nineties and who comprise Arsenik, Neg' Marrons and Pit Baccardi. Their posturing is as parodic as their names. I have met them before and they were surly and precious then. They are again tonight, repeatedly postponing an interview until it is too late, posing unhappily for two minutes for a photograph. But when they play to a packed venue later in the evening, they are slick and exciting. It is cleverly pitched, hard enough to be attractive to the teenagers but not so extreme that the older or whiter listeners are put off. The chorus of one song runs: 'This is for Paris, the banlieues, and all the quartiers chauds (hot/violent/angry districts) this is for Paris, the banlieues and all the ghettoes,' after which Noyau Dur raise their hands, forefinger extended, in the shape of a gun and shout 'pow, pow,pow, pow'.
The truth about French rap is that there is a hard fringe that dominates reports in the media, a street mainstream that dominates the industry and then a vast range of artists, labels and fans who are following more diverse directions. Away from the politics and the mediatisation and the trials, it is like any musical movement anywhere. There are all the usual tensions between entertainment and social engagement, between commerce and artistic impression. Many rap lyrics fit with a long tradition of French politicised musical activism. Leaving Glaz'Art, I think back to Bobigny, that Saturday night at Canal93 a few weeks before. The 'fuck the police' bit was the exception, not the rule, that evening. There was no drunkenness, no vandalism, no animosity towards a journalist asking stupid questions. There was no violence, no real misogyny. In the end the evening was all about words. Which is what French rap is essentially about. Words and money and real issues, of course. But mainly, just about words.
