This choice could have fostered a discourse of unity and changed this national atmosphere marked – in the midst of the presidential election campaign – by narratives of hatred and division. However, it had the opposite effect. Youssoupha’s election was instrumentalized by extreme right-wing politicians and by the media that used the traditional rhetoric of the anti-French and anti-white rapper to criticize his selection.<\/p>\n
Although rappers are now the most listened to artists in France, their popular successes are not yet synonymous with legitimacy. In fact, rap is still instrumentalized and linked to a mainly black and Arab subversive population, generally living in the suburbs of large urban agglomerations. These simplistic, racist and essentialist views make the choice of a rapper – even more so when it is a racialized person, like Youssoupha – to write and sing a national anthem disturbing to France’s conservative population.<\/p>\n
The golden palm for the most disgusting reaction goes once again to Nadine Morano, Member of the European Parliament, who declared on a television program \u201cthat he should go back to his country\u201d.<\/p>\n
This eagerness to investigate the past, gestures and words of rap artists to justify their exclusion from the public space does not exist when a white singer who does not rap is chosen. How to explain this asymmetry of media treatment and this obsession with presenting the rapper as an “enemy of the nation”?<\/p>\n
What is rap?<\/h3>\n
Rap (rhythm and poetry<\/em>) was born in the 1970s in the context of the ghettos of New York, mainly in the Bronx, in the wake of the hip-hop movement. The MCs (\u201cMaster of ceremony\u201d) began to multiply in all the popular neighborhoods of the United States, starting with the East Coast, with New York as the focal point.<\/p>\n In the beginning, rhythm, music and dance were the main objectives of the DJ and the MC. \u201cin its origin, rap was an alternative type of disco music<\/em>\u201d[1]<\/a> as Akhenaton, a member of the Marseille group IAM, explains in an interview.<\/p>\n However, in a context of racism and social tension, many rappers began to tell their daily lives and, in this way, their texts gradually became politicized, as they became the voice of a marginalized reality. This change marked the beginning of a type of rap that we will call \u201cconscious rap<\/strong>\u201d.<\/p>\n The hip-hop and rap movement arrived in France in the early 1980s, and really took off towards the end of the decade through three legendary groups: one from Marseille, IAM<\/strong>, and two from Paris, NTM<\/strong> and Assassin<\/strong>. However, one cannot understand the development and role of rap and its actors without knowing the socio-political and economic context of this period in France.<\/p>\n The 1980s and 1990s were a major turning point in French society, during which we left the utopia and frenzy of the 1960s and 80s to enter a period of mass unemployment, the rise of the extreme right, the failures of urban policies and the gradual withdrawal of the welfare state.<\/p>\n In other words, the first French rappers arrived at the end of the so-called \u201cthirty glorious years<\/strong>\u201d (1950-1980) and at the beginning of an era marked by numerous political, economic and social crises.<\/p>\n During the \u201cthirty glorious years\u201d, many neighborhoods were built on the outskirts of large cities in France to accommodate people who came to seek opportunities during this period of economic boom. However, these working-class neighborhoods have gradually undergone spatial, social and political segregation, while the cities have experienced a progressive process of gentrification.<\/p>\n Suburbs in the North of Marseille. (Parc Kalliste)<\/p><\/div>\n This proliferation of inequalities, exclusion from social and political space and the growing link between these neighborhoods (and diversity in general) and crime and insecurity were the triggers that led many French rappers to politicize their texts from the 1990s onwards.<\/p>\n These contemporary poets began to write songs denouncing both the lack of equal opportunities and the rise of racism, as well as the inequalities between the countries of the North and the South:<\/p>\n \u201cWestern Europe, the United States, Canada and Australia \/ Control 80% of the resources vital to human survival \/ At the same time 100 million Africans are starving to death in the South.\u201d[2]<\/strong><\/a> <\/em>Guerre Nord-Sud<\/a> (1995) Assassin.<\/p>\n Thus, while the public authorities turn their backs on the young people of the outskirts of the big cities, the lyrics of rap songs resonate with their realities and their aspirations in life. This is the case of the distinguished IAM group’s song “Demain c’est loin (Tomorrow is far away)”:<\/p>\nFrench rap, the mirror of a society plagued by inequalities<\/h3>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/twistislamophobia.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/Marseille-banlieu.jpg\")
<\/a>The development of conscious rap in France<\/h3>\n
Conscious rap: a popular and grassroots expression<\/h3>\n