"J'accuse":

Hip Hop's Postcolonial Politics in Paris

Repping "Aulnaywood": Hip Hop's Postcolonial Racial Politics

On March 21, 2007, I attended a hip hop concert and political rally sponsored by Ras L'Front (Fed Up with the Front), a self described "anti-fascist" political organization founded in direct opposition to the rightist anti-immigration Front National (FN) Party. The presidential election that the city was gearing up for was touted as the most important in a generation and cast as a referendum on France's strained social welfare system and the country's views on immigration and globalization. Represented in news accounts as a battle over the fate of France's future with Ségolène Royal on one side and Nicholas Sarkozy on the other, the field of candidates also included the FN's thenperennial candidate Jean Marie Le Pen, the moderate François Bayrou, and Ras L'Front's presumed favorite, the French Communist Party's Marie-George Buffet. Even more so than its American counterpart, French hip hop is at the center of debates about cultural and socioeconomic policy in minority communities, and outspoken MCs were in high demand to speak about social issues in the wake of the 2005 riots in the low-income Parisian banlieues (suburbs). Minority rappers appeared on national talk shows nightly to offer viewpoints differing from the otherwise all-white panels of politicians, analysts, and activists. In addition, in my two months in Paris during this, my first research trip to the city, I was able to attend three separate hip hop concerts presented by political organizations. I also had an opportunity to conduct an interview with one such political organization that had recently stopped presenting hip hop concerts in support of their cause.

In an interview at a café near the 19th arrondissement offices of SOS-Racisme, an antiracism NGO with ties to the French Socialist Party, an employee who wished to remain anonymous began by telling me that they had stopped organizing hip hop events because of the heightened security costs brought on by fears of rioting. However, as the conversation progressed, the organizer revealed that there was something else going on as well. The Socialist Party's official stance regards race to be a fiction and therefore opposes the idea of gathering demographic statistics on the ethnic makeup of the country or otherwise representing minorities as such. Following from the logic of that stance, the NGO began distancing itself from rappers who identified themselves as ethnic minorities in their music and lyrics. As the representative of the NGO explained, "the Socialist ideal that there are no minorities in France" was compromised by the increasing prominence of self-consciously "minority" rappers, and SOS-Racisme stopped using hip hop as a political tool altogether. SOS-Racisme was at the forefront of hip hop political organizing in the mid-1990s but, as the NGO rep explained, the organization had turned to stand-up comedy as its preferred method of cultural engagement as rappers became increasingly "racialized." Clearly, for SOS-Racisme racism was real, but race was too much of a hot-button issue.

Following the French ideal of laïcité (secularism) — the official government stance that there shall be no impingment of private religious beliefs or ethnic practices in public life — the idea of racial identity, and thus of racial solidarity, is eschewed in official public discourse. Indeed, the Enlightenment concept of laïcité and its private/public split has had profound impact on freedom of religious expression in France, as widely publicized in the oft-jingoistic headscarf and burkini debates of the last decades. Notably, this private/public binary also extends to the realm of artistic political expression, as exemplified by the nationwide hip hop and free speech debate surrounding "L'affaire NTM."

On Bastille Day, July 14, 1995, the Parisian rap group NTM was set to take the stage at the "Rendez-vous de la Liberté" music festival in the southeastern French town of La Seyne-sur-Mer. The festival, organized by SOS-Racisme, featured the multiracial hardcore rap group NTM, as well as MC Solaar, pop singer Patrick Bruel, and a host of politicians and intellectuals associated with the French Socialist Party. The concert's promoters arranged the Bastille Day festival to reassert the French doctrine of liberté, égalité, fraternité in the face of troubling developments in French ethno-nationalist politics. The nearby cities of Toulon and Orange had recently elected right-wing mayors who ran on the anti-immigration platform of the ultranationalist FN — a landmark early victory for a party that has seen a dramatic rise in the intervening decades. Although the promoters of the festival intended the artists and politicians to speak out against the FN's racist and xenophobic views, NTM's performance at the event far exceeded their goals, sparking a national debate on the place of free speech in French society.

About halfway through their set, NTM was getting the crowd psyched up for their controversial song, "Police," with a call and response of "nique la police" (fuck the police). The two members of NTM, Joey Star (Didier Morville) and Kool Shen (Bruno Lopes), had written the song two years earlier in response to the rampant police brutality they saw in their native banlieues. The police on duty at the event, offended by the verbal assaults, detained the rappers and filed a lawsuit against NTM. The verdict that was handed down more than a year later sentenced the two rappers to three months in jail in addition to a six-month performance ban and fines. Though NTM's performance at this festival celebrating French liberty was protected by freedom of expression laws, the statutes applied only to artistic expression, not political speech, as the police and the prosecution successfully argued NTM's "chants" were.

Though grassroots pressure ultimately led to the suspension of Joey Starr and Kool Shen's prison sentences, French law found NTM's statements to be legal as art but illegal as speech. As André Prévos explains: "They were condemned because they stepped out of their 'performer's domain'...