French hip-hop
In November 1982 the New York City Rap Tour traveled around France and to London featuring Afrika Bambaataa, Grandmixer DST, Fab 5 Freddy, Mr Freeze and the Rock Steady Crew.
The cases include the notorious Ministère AMER's "Sacrifice de poulet", NTM's "Police" and later Lunatic's "Le crime paie".
Columnist David Brooks wrote that "ghetto life, at least as portrayed in rap videos, now defines for the young, poor and disaffected what it means to be oppressed.
He argued that the gangster image of American hip hop appeals to mostly young & impoverished immigrant minorities in France, as a means to oppose the racism and oppression they experience.
[7] This makes up one quarter of the radio's top 100, ten percent of local music production and has sold hundreds of thousands of CDs.
[9] Themes in French hip hop include opposition to the social order, humor and puns, as well as ethnic and cultural identity.
With the rise of IAM's pharaoism, or allusions to ancient Egyptian pharaohs, the French hip hop artists are seen attempting to negotiate and create a space for themselves in a social scene rife with discrimination and racist ideologies.
In the north, however, content tends to be more straightforward, with rappers typically talking about the drug trade, gang wars, ghetto life and clashes with the police, etc.
Many of the French hip hop artists come from the poor urban areas on the outskirts of large cities known as banlieues ("suburbs").
Paris, Marseille, Lyon, Nantes, Lille, Strasbourg, Rennes, Caen, Le Havre, Rouen, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Grenoble and Nice have produced various French hip hop artists.
The political and social status of the minority immigrant groups living in France have a direct influence on French hip hop.
France required manpower to sustain its newly booming industries and the governmental solution was the mass immigration of peoples from regions of past French colonial empire to fill the gaps caused by shortage in personnel.
[10] When hip-hop reached the European continent in the 1980s Afrika Bambaataa was an early pioneer, and when he came to France he was overwhelmed by the great importance of African culture coming from Africa and the Caribbean.
First, explicitly praising Africa would have been offensive to the many immigrants who fled Algeria and other North African countries because of the economic adversity they faced there, and many rappers probably had parents who had done so.
Many other French hip hop artists made similar statements through their music, by collaborating to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in France in 1998.
In order to mark the anniversary of the abolition of slavery in Martinique (which is an overseas department of France in the Caribbean), on May 22, Paris's Olympia theater hosted a concert that opened with "drummers chained together" and featured performances from "rappers of African descent such as Doc Gyneco, Stomy Bugsy, Arsenik, and Hamed Daye.
Today, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and it's global diaspora, especially in Belgium and France has brought about some of the largest and fastest growing French-language rap singers.
[20] The purpose of the lyrics, no matter the language, is "to popularize and vent the anger and frustrations of many disadvantaged and sometimes mistreated individuals, and to defend the cause of the poorest and least socially integrated segment of French society".
[18] French hip hop stands out for its "flowing, expressive tones of the language [that] give it a clear identity within the rap world.
Even though it is difficult at times to understand completely the lyrics that are being said rappers still get the heat for causing violence and disturbance within society because of their intense message of rebelling against the system.
However, his position was attacked by Jody Rosen in his article which debunks Brooks's belief that the French hip hop scene is no more than a carbon copy of earlier American work.
More precisely, a hip hop built of French language lyrics laid on top of traditional break beats and samples.
[11] The image of the banlieue, comparable to what in the United States would be called one's "hood", has propagated itself into French pop culture in the form of clothing, accessories, attitude and of course the hip-hop music it yields.
This action/martial arts film depicts a somewhat exaggerated view of what one of the worst suburbs (which is what banlieue means, roughly translated) would be like 6 years in the future.
The aforementioned traits contained the sub-plots of Menace II Society, Juice, Boyz n the Hood, Belly and New Jack City among other movies considered pivotal to gangsta rap culture.
the glorification of the banlieue also reminds us that there will always be a consumerist market of people, not in the struggle, who will take advantage of the allure of the image without totally understanding it.
