France is the second largest hip-hop market in the world. The U.S. has since the beginning of the 20th century had an important cultural influence over France and Europe in general. In the realm of music, it has started from jazz influences especially in the 1920s-1930s to the disco wave in the 1970s, passing by rock&roll in the 1950s. Hip-hop quickly crossed the globe from the U.S. to France in the 1980s along with punk, which gave birth to French and Francophone rap.The first recording of French rap occurred in 1982-1983 with the artist Fab Freddy, as he performed Change de Beat, simply meaning “Change the Beat”. A group that was successful in France was Chagrin d’Amour (1982). In Global Noise: Rap and Hip-hop Outside the USA, edited by Tony Mitchell, the author André J. M. Prévos details young rappers’ feelings towards the hip-hop expansion phenomenon:
“They were glad to see that rap, which they knew already, was gaining acceptance. But they were disconcerted because they feared that Chagrin d’Amour’s innocuous rhymes would be seen as a new norm and force them to modify their own lyrics. Other French popular artists of the early 1980s used rap techniques in their recordings but did not see themselves as the originators of a new style” (41)
Although rap content often differed from the U.S. discourse, since it French artists rarely mention firearms or drive-by shootings, the art could still refer to the ghetto lifestyle without necessarily the vulgar lyrics.Prévos reports that it is “by the early 1990s French rappers had truly covered most of the relevant styles found in the repertoires of their U.S. models, including more commercial styles and less vulgar lyrics, originally introduced by Chagrin d’Amour (…) and by French rap artists who, like Benny B. (1992), may be seen as having been inspired by popular U.S. styles such as those of MC Hammer” (44).It is important to notice that most French rappers were of Arabic origin and therefore “could not praise Africa” (46) like the traditional original hip-hop. It would inevitably create political controversies among the Left and the Right wing. Accordingly, the latter confirms why France had a sense of its own identity despite some of its extreme resemblance to the U.S. at a certain point.Since the French did not really have a gangsta style because there are few gangs in France, three major tendencies of rap existed: hardcore (crude and noisy), zulu (presented criticisms against the Western norms), and pharaohism, that the French group IAM invented. Prévos explains that it is “the clearest attempt so far at the creation of a new type of religious space, but not a church, at least in the sense that the word has come to be accepted by compilers of dictionaries” (49). In the cases of hardcore and zulu, both derived from U.S. models, while pharaohism is a pure French innovation.
