Paris love and hip hop11/2/2023 They were built during the years of the post-second world war economic boom the French call Les Trente Glorieuses (The Glorious Thirty), when ex-colonial immigrants were imported into the republic as cheap labour for a country still rebuilding from the catastrophe of the war. I did know the symbol for that space: HLM, an acronym signifying a set of social-housing block towers grouped in pods of dreary urban sprawl. You glimpsed the banlieue from the train, on your way to the countryside or the airport its inhabitants lived there, trapped beyond the city walls, as though feudal relations had never really collapsed in the capital of the French Revolution. Nobody I knew had ever been that far off the map. The peripheral zone known as the cités or banlieues was terra incognita to me at that point. Money cushions social realities and creates a haze of similarity among peers until you get to around sixteen, the age in Paris when you start to roam the city alone, have your first real crush, and learn how to roll a cigarette while waiting for the Métro. On the other hand, as an expatriate American at an international school, I was moving in bourgeois circles. Declaring my Americanness, I soon learned, was necessary for avoiding a certain nastiness of tone specially reserved for the postcolonial subject. I was too light-skinned to be from Senegal, but dark enough to be from Algeria or Morocco. It was not going to be easy figuring out how to grow up as a black American in Paris. I was still a kid and spoke not a word of French. I arrived in France in 1992, the year the Maastricht treaty creating the European Union was signed and Disney opened its first European theme park just outside Paris. The difference between Sophie Marceau’s world and ours was the existence of the ghetto as an undeniable fact. Over an onslaught of breaks and scratches a voice shouted: “Who protects our rights? / Fuck the justice system / The last judge I saw was as bad as the dealer on my corner / Fuck the police / Fuck the police!” KRS-One samples collided with a looping of Édith Piaf’s Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien. Even without fully understanding everything on the record, the exhilaration of open rebellion was palpable. Caroline insisted she was impressed, but her body was limp, her eyes vacant. This turned out to be true, though I didn’t believe it at the time. How it was banned, and you could only find it “underground”. The owner of the tape was bragging about how he got it. The shock of hearing someone actually say “fuck the police” and repeat it again and again stunned me. The party came to a jarring halt as everyone looked at everyone else trying to figure out what to do. I was dancing with Caroline.Ī young dude interrupted Ace of Base and popped in a cassette he had brought in his jacket pocket. But I wasn’t dancing with Sophie Marceau. Sophie Marceau immortalised it as a mesmerising ingénue in the greatest French teen romance ever produced, La Boum. I was at a boum, slang for a teenage house party and a tradition of Parisian coming of age that involves a great deal of slow dancing and emotional espionage. I hadn’t yet seen the film La Haine, which made the song famous, and remains arguably the most important French film of the 90s. I was at a house party in a spacious bourgeois apartment somewhere in the 16th arrondissement when I first heard DJ Cut Killer’s track La Haine, better known by its infamous refrain “Nique la police” (Fuck the police). There were no labels, no official concerts or shows, and the only airplay was after midnight on Radio Nova, a station dedicated to underground and avant garde music, created and directed by French countercultural hero Jean-François Bizot. DJs played the breakbeats looped over jazzy horn riffs, cats sported Kangol hats and Cosby sweaters, and they tagged the walls of the city with their calling card: NTM, an acronym for “Nique Ta Mère” (Fuck Your Mother). They started crews and listened to Doug E Fresh, Masta Ace, Grandmaster Flash, and Marley Marl. One black, the other white, they shared a love and a talent for breakdancing and got together practising moves in bleak lots and house parties. JoeyStarr and Kool Shen were just two kids from Seine-Saint-Denis, the 93rd ward, a neglected tract of housing projects on the northern outskirts of Paris. In 1988, no one in France took the hip-hop movement seriously.
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