Hang the MC

Illustration by Sam Weber.

III. Paris is burning: rap and rioting dans la banlieue

Soccer is a global sport because all you need to play is a ball and somewhere to kick it. Rap, invented in the Bronx in the 1970s, became global music because all you need to make it is a beat and something to rhyme about. Hip hop emigrated to France at the turn of the ’80s, when a Parisian DJ and record collector named Sidney laid his ears on the Sugarhill Gang’s Rapper’s Delight (1979), and knew that he’d heard the future.

In 1981, incoming French president François Mitterand loosened state control of radio waves. Hundreds of private stations received licences; radios libres was born. French-language requirements created instant, enormous demand for domestic music. “Hip hop was something that could be slotted into free radio because it could easily be made in French,” says Maria McMath, a Princeton anthropology student who spent most of the last two years living in Paris, collecting research for her graduate dissertation on France’s hip-hop culture.

Sidney became a tireless hip-hop promoter, spinning rap jams on his radio show, Rapper Dapper Snapper. Later he hosted his own TV series, Hip Hop, on France’s premier network. “Many [French] artists today, if you ask them how they came to hip hop, they will say, ‘I saw Sidney’s show and it changed my life.’ He’s considered the father of French hip hop,” McMath says. After building on Sidney’s beginnings, France is now the world’s No. 2 hip-hop market, trailing only the United States. The last quarter-century has witnessed a slew of homegrown stars: MC Solaar, Alliance Ethnik, Assassin, IAM, Disiz la Peste, Fonky Family, to name but a few.

French rap has always sounded similar to American rap, particularly within its hardcore camp. The reason is environmental. Social conditions in the low-income banlieues (suburbs) that ring Paris and other French cities mirror those within U.S. ghettos, which are renowned for incubating hip hop. Vast immigrant populations live in communes, crumbling Lego stacks of public-housing developments. Poverty is rampant, unemployment is severe, illicit drugs abound. Dans la banlieue (les banlieues is grammatically correct; la banlieue is what the locals say), people of colour are made to feel marginalized from mainstream society, citizens in paperwork only.

“La banlieue has more than a geographic meaning. It is also a matter of mentality. We feel cut off from the rest of French society. When we look for a job and we send our CVs, employers don’t want to hire us because we come from the suburbs, because we have African names, because we are black. What they always forget is that we are French citizens,” says Paris’s Matt Moerdock, a Congo-born, banlieue-raised MC whose real name is Benyamin Tshisekedi. He took his moniker from Matt Murdock, the secret identity of American superhero Daredevil — “The Man Without Fear.” The title of D’Art de Ville, his critically adored 2005 debut, means “art of the city.” It’s almost pronounced “dare devil.”

Like Moerdock, many French MCs are immigrants from North African or Arab countries. Growing up in la banlieue, where a gaggle of languages compete for attention, they developed their own special perversions of French vocabulary. “We have le verlan and argot,” Moerdock tells me. “The word verlan means l’envers, which means reverse. For table, which is the same word in French and English, we would say, ‘ble-ta.’ Argot is not so simple, because it takes words from other languages. If we want to say, ‘This girl is ugly,’ we say, ‘Cette go est cheum.’ The word go is taken from the Ivory Coast, where it means girl; cheum is verlan for [the French word] moche, which means ugly. So in a short sentence like this, you have three languages: French, argot and verlan.”

Since at least the early ’90s, lyrics by hardcore French rappers have teemed with anti-government rages. Le verlan and argot hide layers of secret meanings, although there are enough overt sneers — like, say, the lyric “France is a bitch and we’ve been betrayed,” by the Parisian group Sniper — to attract the ire of authorities.

French rapper Joey Starr (right) meets with Muhittin Altun (left), who survived electrocution at a power substation in Paris's Clichy-sous-Bois. Two of Altun's friends died in that incident, sparking widespread suburban rioting in October and November 2005. (Photo Getty Images/AFP/Jack Guez)

France passed robust legislation against hate speech in 1972. A decade ago, MCs Joey Starr and Kool Shen, from the chart-topping group Suprême NTM (short for Nique Ta Mère, or F--- Your Mother), became the country’s first rappers to be convicted of “committing an offense against public authorities.” Their crime came during a concert in the south of France, when they unleashed a furious rant against the local constabulary. Next, they performed their song Police (aka Nique la Police).

As punishment, Starr and Shen were sentenced to three months in prison — later commuted to a fine on appeal — and banned from performing in public for six months. The episode emboldened prosecutors, who’ve spent the years since censuring rappers who are overly critical of France’s preferred national identity of cafés and couture on the (white) Riviera — nothing like life in la (multi-ethnic) banlieue. “They say you can express yourself [as a French artist], but when you point the finger where it hurts, they want you to shut up,” Moerdock says. “The problem is that they do not want to face the truth. They created a situation that makes us feel angry and oppressed.”

In 1995, Parisian actor-filmmaker Mathieu Kassovitz explored his country’s suburban frustrations in La Haine (Hate), a portrait of an anti-government riot. To begin, Bob Marley’s Burnin’ and Lootin’ accompanies a montage of riot police battling outraged crowds: “This morning I woke up in a curfew / Oh God, I was a prisoner too.” (Kassovitz assembled his fictional scene from real-life footage, cut and pasted from the evening news.) The violence, a newsreader explains, was sparked by the police beating of a local youth, Abdel, who now lies in a coma.

For the rest of the movie, three of Abdel’s friends roam their city, mulling revenge for his attack. Vinz (Vincent Cassel) is Jewish, Saïd (Saïd Taghmaoui) is Arabic, Hubert (Hubert Kounde) is black. Vinz and Saïd are unemployed. Hubert is a minor-league hash dealer whose boxing gym was trashed in the riots. “I feel like an ant lost in intergalactic space,” Vinz says in one scene; a DJ blares NTM’s Police in another. The trio’s march towards fresh violence feels cruel and inevitable. It brings no relief when it comes.

Alain Juppé, France’s prime minister in 1995, was reported to have ordered his entire cabinet to watch La Haine. The movie won a best director award at Cannes for Kassovitz — then made him seem like a prophet last fall, when la banlieue erupted in 20 nights of rioting that had striking similarities to the movie.

On Oct. 25, French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy visited Argenteuil, a low-income suburb west of Paris. “Sarko” is a controversial figure in France. Last summer, he infamously vowed to “Karcherize” — i.e. sandblast — la banlieue’s criminal elements. At Argenteuil, he was greeted by a hailstorm of stones and bottles. The minister dismissed his attackers as “rapaille,” a word that’s often translated to English as “scum,” though “rabble” comes closer. Either way, the fuse was lit.

Two days later in Clichy-sous-Bois, another Parisian banlieue, three teenagers were electrocuted as they tried to evade police. (The cops were searching for break-in suspects, and had wanted to inspect their identification. The boys, who’d been playing soccer at the time, fled inside a power substation to avoid questioning. Police have denied chasing after them.) Two of the boys died, the third was hospitalized. “[Clichy-sous-Bois] has three principal communities, the Arabs, the Turks and the blacks,” one of their friends told reporters. “The three victims each represented one community.”

Policemen stand guard in Toulouse, France, watching fires set by rioters in November 2005. (Photo Getty Images/AFP/Georges Gobet)

Civil unrest began that night, first in Clichy-sous-Bois and other Parisian banlieues, next spreading to communes in all 15 of France’s major cities and eventually spilling into nearby countries including Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Spain and Switzerland. French President Jacques Chirac declared a state of emergency on Nov. 8. It hardly mattered. For another week, rioters burned cars, schools, day-care centres and churches. By the end, nearly 9,000 vehicles had been torched, 126 police officers had been injured and close to 2,900 people had been arrested.

Scores of politicians pointed a blaming finger at hip hop. More than 200 French MPs and senators, almost exclusively from Chirac’s conservative Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) party, pushed the country’s justice ministry to prosecute seven hip-hop acts for their lyrical content. “Sexism, racism and anti-Semitism are no more acceptable in lyrics than in written or spoken words. This is one of the factors that led to the violence in the suburbs,” MP François Grosdidier told reporters. Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin disagreed, denying any link between rap and the riots. Nonetheless, the issue remains unsettled.

Grosdidier’s fellow MP Daniel Mach is leading the charge against France’s most controversial MC, Monsieur R. Born in the Congo as Richard Makela, R has come under fire for his song FranSSe, from his album Politikment Incorrekt. Its lyrics liken France’s government to Germany’s Third Reich, among other things:

France is a bitch, don’t forget to f--- her to exhaustion
You have to treat her like a whore, man!...
I am not at home and I don’t give a damn
And besides the state can go f--- itself
I piss on Napoleon and on General de Gaulle

“I feel assaulted by these insults. They are a real attack on the dignity of France and of the state. I want to grab society’s attention, to show it that everything could just explode when an audience that is already fragile listens to such songs,” Mach explained in the riots’ aftermath, as R was charged with committing an “outrage to social decency.”

If convicted, R faces up to three years in prison and a hefty fine. “Whenever la banlieue goes up in flames, they start looking for a scapegoat,” he has said of the case. “There are plenty of songs that are part of this country’s artistic heritage and every bit as virulently anti-France, and nobody complains.”

R and his peers contend that they are speaking truth to power, a lesson learned from the American old-school. U.S. hip-hop culture has a tradition of polemic lyricism that stretches back to Grandmaster Flash’s The Message (1982), and continues through the hard-hitting narratives of Public Enemy, KRS-One and the Coup. For the last decade, though, obsessions with luxury and gangsterism have pushed political rap to the backbenches on this side of the Atlantic. Eminem made waves with his Mosh video in 2004, but, more often than not, talented MCs who focus on politics barely blip on our mainstream radar. By obsessing over the faults of their leaders — as opposed to, say, the risks of running drugs — French MCs can be praised for keeping it real.

“What drives the artists is the need to speak. For someone like [ex-Lunatic] Ali, who raps about Palestine, there is an urgency that comes out through his cadence and his voice. Even if you don’t speak a lick of French, you would have to acknowledge that there’s something in the tone of his voice, that he’s pressed to get a message across,” says Maria McMath. She describes Le Micro Brise Le Silence, an Algerian-born group who live in Paris, and rap about the woes of their war-torn homeland. “The inside of their album cover says, ‘White walls mean death.’ They’re talking about writing graffiti on [blank] walls, and that if you do not speak, you are already dead.”

Matthew McKinnon writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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