In the 20th century, French-language poetry was often influenced by American music. Guillaume Apollinaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Boris Vian innovatively mined jazz and blues music for their own modern poetry. In much the same way, French rap musicians have carved out a poetic tradition of their own based on American rap.
Rap first reached French shores in 1982, thanks to the efforts of two Frenchmen living in New York. Bernard Zekri and Jean Karakos recorded the first rap song in French, titled Change de Beat (“Change of Beat”), and organized the New York City Rap Tour in Europe. The daily newspaper Libération further legitimized rap’s presence in France when it printed a series of articles about New York rap in 1982 (Cannon 152).
In the early years, rap found an eager audience in young immigrants from the Caribbean living in Paris. The first DJ to learn the spinning techniques of Jamaican and U.S. disc jockeys was Dee Nasty, who broadcast rap each Sunday on the Radio Nova channel. In response to his rejection by major labels, he began to produce and sell rap records independently in the streets in 1984 (Cannon 157).
Political changes in France helped to popularize rap. When François Mitterrand became president of France in 1981, he legalized “free radio” stations on the FM band for the first time. A station named Carbone 14 began to play rap day and night. Jack Lang’s appointment to the Ministry of Culture in 1982 further legitimized rap, along with the street arts of le tag (graffiti) and le smurf (break dancing). Lang sponsored music festivals and invited rappers to perform at official functions, such as the garden party for the National Assembly (Gross et al. 15).
Matthieu Kassovitz’s film La Haine (Hate, 1985) further awakened the mainstream to rap’s powerful urban protest. Featuring the ideological rap of IAM and NTM, La Haine was the first film to depict life in the Parisian banlieues (the suburbs where many immigrant communities are located).
In the 1990s, rap became increasingly diverse and popular. The anthology Rapattitudes (1991) introduced a wide variety of styles and groups, including MC Solaar, IAM, and the female rapper Saliha. In 1991, MC Solaar produced his first 12-inch 45-rpm record, Bouge de là (Get Outta Here), followed by the album Qui sème le vent récolte le tempo (He Who Sows the Wind Shall Reap the Beat, 1992). Subsequent albums featured Solaar’s poetry rap style, discussed below.
Regional rap also emerged in the 1990s. While rappers from Toulouse and Lyon were popular, Marseilles became the main stage for the emergence of rap in southern France, due to the success of groups like Massilia Sound System, Fonky Family, and IAM. With the albums De la planète Mars (From the Planet Mars, 1991) and Ombre est lumière (Shadow Is Light, 1993), the Marseilles group IAM embraced the city, elevating it in their lyrics to the mythical status of ancient Egypt.
Today IAM’s members are still involved in the rap industry; former lead singer Akhenaton, or Philippe Fragione, launched a successful solo career in 1995 and created his own record label, Côté Obscur, to help young recording artists (Radio France Internationale).
French rap has also become the favorite genre of the Francophone, or French-speaking, worlds of Africa and the Caribbean. In the former French colony of Senegal, for example, at least 6,000 rap groups exist today. The best-known of these groups, Daara J, is from Senegal. Daara J’s style of Sene rap (rap from Senegal) incorporates Cuban rumba, soul, and ragamuffin music into its unique style (Cornwell).
It may well be French rap’s banlieue ideology, or belief system, that sets it apart from American rap. French youths have adapted urban, American hip-hop culture—rap, graffiti, and break dancing—to voice their frustration with the unjust treatment of immigrants and minorities in the cités (projects). French rap thus has become one tool in resisting racism, oppression, and alienation in France’s banlieues. These themes are epitomized in the music of Suprême NTM, whose members were imprisoned in 1996 for police defamation. Even though French rappers are inspired by the Black Power discourse in U.S. rap, they are also well known for promoting positive ways of transcending their social circumstances through self-awareness, affirmation, and education.
Unlike American rappers, French rap artists come from diverse ethnic origins, and primarily from former French colonies in Africa and the Caribbean. While groups like Suprême NTM are white and Caribbean, Saliha is Arab and Italian, and Dee Nasty is a white artist from the Parisian banlieues. In spite of their distinct origins, these poet-singers share a search for an ethnic voice apart from the French majority and outside the French republican model of integration (Cannon 162). Perhaps for this reason, rap has replaced traditional music in much of the North African community in France, allowing immigrant youths to stay connected with Arab heritage as well as the hip counterculture (Gross et al. 14).
In France, rap is often called “the true poetry of the people” and commonly considered part of a classical poetry lineage (Caffari and Villette 96). It relies heavily on rhetorical devices such as onomatopoeia, acronym, aphorism, assonance, neologism, alliteration, and rhyme. Repetition and fluidity are created through tightly interwoven sound and meaning (Caffari and Villette 101–102). Solaar illustrates how poetry and banlieue ideology can work in harmony, making fun of people who call him a “capitalist” by breaking down the French word capitaliste into separate French syllables, then repeating them to create a kind of baby talk: “Ce monde est caca, pipi, cacapipi-taliste” (What is this world? This capisstalist shitstem) (Cannon 163).
MC Solaar
MC Solaar, like most French rappers, carries the heavy burden of showing both continuity with and rupture from linguistic norms and poetic conventions. The French rapper also follows the American rap tradition of cutting up and reassembling music of all genres or dialogue into fragments through mixing, scratching, and sampling. The rapper employs a variety of techniques, including versatile syntax, wordplay, and borrowing from multiple registers such as vernacular, street slang, and literary diction. Often the slang is a product of verlan, which involves cutting the original word in two or three parts and putting the last syllable first and first syllable last. Other rap lyrics are imported from the Arabic or African speech patterns of artists’ immigrant families. Rap’s jazz and blues dialogue also recalls the traditions of the African griot (oral historian from a family of musicians), as well as the French paroleur (storyteller).
The rap style of MC Solaar, born Claude M’Barali in Senegal in 1969, is poetic and popular. His fans appreciated the intelligent humor and lyrical poetry of his first album, Bouge de là (Get Out of My Way, 1991) and Prose Combat (1994), which features the hit “Nouveau Western.” This rewrite of French singer Serge Gainsbourg’s classic “Bonnie and Clyde” cleverly bridges canonical and popular lyric traditions. Solaar’s songs generally abound in reference to literary figures like Umberto Eco and Raymond Queneau, as well as Western films and urban culture (Caffari and Villette 102).
While some rap fans believe that Solaar belongs to and enriches the French poetic tradition, he is accused by some of betraying rap’s basic ideology in the name of fame. Solaar has said that in spite of his membership on the Cannes Festival jury in 1998, he is committed to helping his community and erasing stereotypes. In 1995, he founded his own label, Sentinel Nord, to encourage and finance the work of young rap artists. In the same year, he held three writing workshops for aspiring young rap artists in the city of Marseilles alone (Sberna 186).
Bibliography
Caffari, Marie, and Agnès Villette. “Le rap français: évaluation de textes contemporains.” In Black, Blanc, Beur: Youth Language and Identity in France, edited by Farid Aitsiselmi, 95–112. Bradford, West Yorkshire, U.K.: Department of Modern Languages, University of Bradford, 2000.
Cannon, Steve. “Paname City Rapping: B-boys in the banlieues and beyond.” In Post-Colonial Cultures in France, edited by Alec G. Hargreaves and Mark McKinney, 150–166. London: Routledge, 1997.
Cornwell, Jane. “Rap around the World.” The Weekend Australian, February 5, 2005. p. B18.
Durand, Alain-Philippe, ed. Black, Blanc, Beur: Rap Music and Hip-hop Culture in the Francophone World. Oxford: Scarecrow, 2002.
Gross, Jean, David McMurray, and Ted Swedenburg. “Rai, Rap and Ramadan Nights: Franco-Maghribi Cultural Identities.” Middle East Report 178 (Sept.–Oct. 1992): 11–24.
Hughes, Alex, and Keith Reader, eds. Encyclopedia of Contemporary French Culture. London: Routledge, 2001.
Radio France Internationale. Available online. URL: http://www.rfimusique.com. Accessed on June 10, 2025.
Sberna, Béatrice. Une Sociologie du rap à Marseille: Identité marginale et immigrée. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001.
Discography
Compilations
Rapattitude, 1990. Virgin; 1995, Delabel. La haine: musiques inspirées du film.
IAM
1991. De la planète mars, Delabel.
1993. Ombre est lumière, Delabel.
MC Solaar
1991. Qui sème le vent récolte le tempo, Polydor.
1994. Prose combat, Polydor.
Suprême NTM
1991. Authentik, Epik/Sony.
Categories: French Literature, Literature, Music Criticism
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