French rap sheds light on riots, violence

[FVZA_Colonel]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20051110/lf_afp/franceriotsmusic

French rap: a window on the suburbs Thu Nov 10,12:44 AM ET

LILLE, France (AFP) - French rap artists, perennially in the shadow of their more commercial US rivals overseas, have been using hip hop music as a medium to protest about conditions in France's tough suburbs since the early 1980s.

Now, after 13 nights of violence, the lyrics of songs forewarning violence and railing against discrimination have an eerie prescience.

References to police harassment, drugs, marginalisation, inequality, violence and "a day of reckoning" for the injustices of life litter songs by the most popular artists, predominantly blacks and North Africans such as NTM, 113, MC Solaar, or Marseille-based IAM and Fonky Family.

French rap artists like to think of themselves as chroniclers of modern life for the disadvantaged and less given to glorifying sex and guns than their US cousins.

[NoQuarter]

1. Not quite the same impression one gets

from David Brooks' (R-Nearest Sewage Treatment Facility) Nov. 10 NYT piece.

After 9/11, everyone knew there was going to be a debate about the future of Islam. We just didn't know the debate would be between Osama bin Laden and Tupac Shakur.

Yet those seem to be the lifestyle alternatives that are really on offer for poor young Muslim men in places like France, Britain and maybe even the world beyond. A few highly alienated and fanatical young men commit themselves to the radical Islam of bin Laden. But most find their self-respect by embracing the poses and worldview of American hip-hop and gangsta rap.

One of the striking things about the scenes from France is how thoroughly the rioters have assimilated hip-hop and rap culture. It's not only that they use the same hand gestures as American rappers, wear the same clothes and necklaces, play the same video games, and sit with the same sorts of car stereos at full blast. It's that they seem to have adopted the same poses of exaggerated manhood, the same attitudes about women, money and the police. They seem to have replicated the same sort of gang culture, the same romantic visions of gunslinging drug dealers.

In a globalized age it's perhaps inevitable that the culture of resistance gets globalized, too. What we are seeing is what Mark Lilla of the University of Chicago calls a universal culture of the wretched of the earth. The images, modes and attitudes of hip-hop and gangsta rap are so powerful they are having a hegemonic effect across the globe.

American ghetto life, at least as portrayed in rap videos, now defines for the young, poor and disaffected what it means to be oppressed. Gangsta resistance is the most compelling model for how to rebel against that oppression. If you want to stand up and fight The Man, the Notorious B.I.G. shows the way.

http://select.nytimes.com/2005/11/10/opinion/10brooks.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=print

This is a NYT Select item. (Could be a job for bugmenot.com)

(edited to emphasize more of the stupidity and racism - yes, I realize that is redundant - of Herr Brooks)

[La_Fourmi_Rouge]

2. French rap is more socially conscious.

See the great movie "La Haine" for an introduction.