23 Banlieue: Postcolonial noise: How did French rap (re)invent ‘the banlieue’? Christina Horvath French rap emerged in the early 1980s and by the turn of the new millennium it has become one of the best-selling musical industries in the Hexagon. Its adoption belongs to along tradition of US musical influence in France like the discovery of jazz in the 1920s and 1930s, the arrival of rock and roll in the 1950s and the Disco wave of the 1970s (Prévos 2001: 40). Rap rose to popularity simultaneously with French rock and rai, a stereotypically exotic musical genre primarily produced by Algerian immigrants and visitors. Yet, unlike the colourful rai, which was able to ‘cross over’ and seduce Parisian middle and upper- class world-music devotees (Swedenburg 2015: 110), rap has been since its beginnings associated with the urban margins, in particular with the bleak post-industrial housing estates or cités in working-class suburbs known as banlieues. Since the 1980s, these multi ethnic neighbourhoods in the urban periphery have been constructed in the media as places of irreconcilable otherness and home to the new dangerous classes, France's postcolonial ethnic minorities. French rap seems to have capitalized on this reputation by ‘turning the banlieues into its symbolic territory, in the same way as US rap appropriated and commoditized the Afro-American ghettos ‘This chapter aims to critically examine the general belief that French rap is naturally rooted in, emanates from and gives voice to the working-class suburban housing estates. It will investigate the privileged links between rap artists and the urban periphery to explore whether rap is actually a product of the banlieue or its (re)inventor. After a short historical overview retracing how France has become the country with the second-largest hip-hop industry to date (Cannon 2003: 191), I will examine how rap has shaped the banlieue as a symbolic space of exclusion, exploited its vernacular language for innovation and stylistic distinction and used the periphery as a place of enunciation from which to challenge hegemonic concepts of French identity. I will argue that, by appropriating the post-industrial urban margins, rappers have attempted to hijack the myth of the banliewe292 The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music, Space and Place constructed in media-political discourses since the 1980s, not only to disrupt hegemonic narratives but also to sell albums. The emergence of a distinctively French rap In Black Noise (1994: 1), Tricia Rose describes rap as a protest music, a ‘confusing and noisy clement of American popular culture’ that prioritizes Black voices from the urban margins and criticizes American society for its perpetuation of racial and economic discrimination. Hip-hop culture brings together complex social, cultural and political issues in dialogue. It reimagines the experiences of life on the margins and ‘symbolically appropriates urban space through sampling, attitude, dance, style, and sound effects’ (1994: 22). The post- industrial urban context is central to its emergence and is inscribed in its sound, lyrics and themes. In the America of the 1970s, hip-hop attempted to negotiate ‘marginalization, brutally truncated opportunity, and oppression within the cultural imperatives of African American and Caribbean history, identity, and community’ (1994: 21). In France it was adopted in a similar economic context in France when, in the early 1980s, a neoliberal turn announced the end of the welfare state and the decline of working-class cohesion, giving way to ‘a territorialisation associated with the ethnicisation of social relations (Bazin 1995: 90-1). Unlike its American models, however, French hip-hop was not born in the street but was established by mostly white music professionals and DJs (Lapassade and Rousselot 1996:10; Provot 2007: 148) such as Sidney (Patrick Duteil), Lionel D (Lionel Eguienta), Phil Barney or Dee Nasty (Daniel Bigault). Rap music was first broadcast via the independent private radio stations that were legalized by President Mitterrand’s Socialist government in 1981 ‘The very first French artists to experiment with hip-hop were musicians of the mainstream, like pop duo Chagrin dAmour or singer Annie Cordy (Hammou 2012: 31). In 1982, a gtoup of US rappers toured Europe and in the same year the first French-speaking rap recording, ‘Change the Beat’ by Fab Freddy, was issued in New York City. Two years later, Afrika Bambaataa established a faction of Zulu Nation in the Parisian suburbs, introducing. suburban youths to US hip-hop culture. ‘The television programme H.I.P-H.O.P, presented by Sydney on the national TV channel TF1 in 1984-5, and the success of the anthology Rapattitudes, produced by Virgin Record’s Labelle Noir in 1990, greatly contributed to legitimizing rap as a popular genre in France. ‘he first French rap formations from banlieues, Supréme NIM, Assassin and Ministére A.M.E.R, emerged in the late 1980s, inspired by American groups NWA and Public Enemy. Their appearance was less an example of globalization and uniformization than an act of ‘cultural reterritorialisation’ in so far as cultural products were ‘reinscribed. with meaning, adapted and reworked to relate to local contexts’ (Cannon 2003: 193) Most of the first generation of hard-core rappers developed strong local or regional identities entrenched in the urban periphery. ‘They used rap music as a platform to voice discrimination, racism, police brutality and unemployment among other issuesBanlieue: Postcolonial Noise and were frequently criticized by authorities and the media for their outspoken and controversial lyrics. In 1995, the group Supréme NTM was sentenced for orally abusing the security forces present while performing their song ‘Police’ in La Seyne-sur-Mer. In. 1997, members of Ministére A.M.E.R. were found guilty of ‘provocation to murder’ for their song ‘Sacrifice de poulet’ (a double entendre of ‘chicken sacrifice’ and ‘cop killing) and after the 2005 banlieue uprising, further seven groups were accused of promoting incivility (Silverstein 2018: 131). In the early 1990s, French hip-hop became increasingly diversified. A new, less political trend appeared with artists like MC Solaar, Doc Gyneco, Ménélik or Alliance Ethnik whose well-crafted wordplays and highly poetic lyrics were closer to the traditions of French chanson and poetry. Embraced by mainstream media and audiences beyond the banlieues, they helped establish rap music as a widely accepted genre and a blockbusting industry. In the late 1990s, the French rap scene exploded with the emergence of new artists and powerful labels. ‘The number of albums released in France increased sharply: ‘one album was produced in 1984, three in 1988, [...] nine in 1992 [..] twenty-three in 1995, fifty-three in 1996" (Prévos 2002: 14). The genre increasingly distanced itself from its American models and found its own personality with artists like La Cliqua, 113, Oxmo Puccino, Booba, La Rumeur, Rocé, Le Ministére des AMlaires populaires, Casey, Kery James, Arsenik, Sinik, Sniper or Abd Al Malik publishing highly acclaimed albums and marking {generations of listeners (Ghio 2016: 13). Various attempts have been made to classify this fast-growing production divided by issues of authenticity, co-optation and identity politics like its US counterpart. Bestselling artists known for their sophisticated lyrics and frequent borrowing from French chanson like MC Solaar in the 1980s (Prévos 2002: 6) or Abd Al Malik in the 2000s (Bourderionnet 2011; Silverstein 2018) have often been criticized by rappers with angrier and more subversive messages who have been backed less by non-specialist or elite media. Yet the distinction hardcore vs. gangsta styles seems less relevant in France where armed conflicts are exceptional and gangsta influences remain limited to poses and album cover art. Another key difference with the United States is that French rappers and their audiences do not belong to a homogeneous ethno-racial group. French rap formations often bring logether artists of different ethnic, mostly North- and sub-Saharan African but also Turkish, Italian or Caribbean origins. According to Isabelle Marc Martinez: What ties this multi-ethnic community together is the fact that they are aware of their different backgrounds because they have not been assimilated into the French mainstream even if they were born French. ‘Their marginalised place in society is epitomised by the cités where they live or that they recreate in their texts (2011: 4) Speaking from these concrete but also symbolic margins, French rappers undertake to construct a new identity based upon socio-economic, ideological and historical rather than ethnic bonds, to which all audiences who feel socially or culturally dispossessed, can relate. 293294 The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music, Space and Place Inventing a territory ‘Tricia Rose explains the territorial rooting of US hip-hop by three key factors. Firstly, born from the New York urban terrain in the 1970s, hip-hop was an answer to stigmatizing representations which depicted black and Hispanic inner-city communities as a backdrop for crime, deviance and barbarism. It proposed Afro-American youths from dilapidated inner-city neighbourhoods an aesthetic experience which helped them build an alternative identity in relation to their environment. Secondly, it provided black and Hispanic communities with a means to appropriate public space in the increasingly divided postindustrial city where ‘shrinking federal funds and affordable housing, shifts in the occupational structure [...] meant that new immigrant populations and the city’s poorest residents paid the highest price for desindustrialisation and economic restructuring’ (1994: )bourhoods in Brooklyn, Queens 30). New York’s poorest areas, the South Bronx and n and Harlem, featured in media, popular culture and films as negative local colour and were depicted as ‘drained of life, energy and vitality’ (1994: 33). Rap songs and videos opposed these stigmatizing representations of everyday life acknowledged and celebrated in rap music. Thus favourite street corners, playgrounds, parking lots, school yards or rooftops from black inner-city locations were brought into public consciousness as a ‘local turf” occupied by rappers and their crew or posse. ‘They were claimed as places of enunciation from which the young, mostly male rappers spoke for themselves and their community. Finally, local turf scenes simultaneously became a ‘model of “authenticity” and hipness’ in rap music and satisfied ‘national fantasies about the violence and danger that purportedly consume the poorest and the most economically fragile communities of color’ (1994: 11) ‘These predominant uses of marginal urban places have their equivalents in France also Ghio (2016: 67-8) notes that references to working-class suburbs have been omnipresent in the universe of French rap since its consecration in the 1980s. Place names and postcodes appearing in titles, group names, music videos and cover art have stood simultaneously for appropriation of space and belonging, alternative identity formation and self-authentication. Numerous artists have developed identities with strong local ties like Ministére A.M.E.R. in Sarcelles, IAM in Marseille, 113 in Vitry-sur-Seine, NTM in Seine-Saint-Denis, Assassin in Paris’ 18th district and NAP in the Neuhofarea of Strasbourg. According to Ghio, mentions of these concrete neighbourhoods, cities or departments coexist with references to the banliewe as.a concept or ‘total territory’ (2016: 68). Pierre Marti also confirms that in many rap songs the banlieue is fashioned as a broader, dematerialized territory equated with ‘marginalization and exclusion. He concludes that ‘if not all rappers are banlicusards strictly speaking, all of them are vociferous inhabitants of an imaginary banlieue which haunts the national consciousness by gathering within its phantasmagorical space the Republic’ pariahs’ (Marti 2005: 97). The production of this symbolic space of belonging enables hip-hop artists to become the voices of an imagined community brought together by the shared experience of exclusion and stigmatization, and conversely, it allows audiences to identify with rap’s political acts of speech independently from whether they are actually from banlieues or not.Banlieue: Postcolonial Noise Silverstein sees in French hip-hop artists’ appropriation of images from African- American popular culture an endeavour to draw on a transcendent ghetto heritage. Rappers convert a local belonging into a common banlieue culture overwriting racial, ethnic or national identification and promoting a transnational solidarity across ghetto spaces (Silverstein 2018: 132). They express this ghetto heritage by using a kinship idiom addressing audiences as ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ and the large community ~ whether a housing project, or the entire postcolonial France, as their ‘family’ (Silverstein 2018: 135). By adopting a ‘ghettocentrie’ subject position, rappers constitute the French banlieue as a site for postcolonial hip-hop interventions. They borrow figures of street lore from US gangsta rap, such as the pimp, the drug dealer or the thug and refer to these types through self-presentation, dress, pose, boasts, gestures, images and sounds of violence in their songs, videos and covers. By broadening the caillera (backslang for ‘racaille or thug) personae to a proto-political figure and reinventing and re-aesthetizing everyday life in the cités, they politicize the banlieue as a site for collective action and individual fulfilment In recent years, however, critics have been cautioning against taking French rap’ ‘ghetto centric’ imagery at face value asa realistic depiction of banlieues. Takinga literary approach to rap, which she considers as part of French urban literature, Bettina Ghio explains that instead of faithfully reproducing banlieue life, rappers make aesthetic choices about rhetoric figures and non-standard lexis they use. These choices are only understandable when considered from an aesthetic rather than a purely social-science perspective (Silverstein 2018: 69). She affirms that the banlieue itselfis a topos composed of aset of themes, situations and particular motives which are recurrent in the literary genre of banlieue narrative. ‘Through a range of examples drawn from rap lyrics, Ghio illustrates how rappers evoke banlieues using metonymy (ie. when they depict suburban housing estates by naming the construction materials used to build them), metaphors (i.e. when they equate banlieues to prisons) or hyperboles (the most salient example of this is the emotionally charged term ‘ghetto, used as a warning and a reference to US models rather than a factual description).! Like literary banlieue narratives, rap songs prioritize stereotypical narrative postures, among others those of the first-person witness-narrator (95) and the angry youth narrator (89) and also tend to engage in intertextualilty/intermediality with other discourses such as political speeches, films or other cultural forms. By personifying marginal neighbourhoods opposed to state institutions and proposing alternative narratives about them, first-person. narratives successfully subvert hegemonic discourses about banlieues (Germes et al. 2012). Creating a language Language in rap music fulfils multiple functions. It allows performers to show off their verbal dexterity and creativity, influence mainstream society and the dictionary, communicate with peers and the public, create personal styles and models of identification and express their identity and belonging. Rappers engage in different relationships with the addressees of their utterances depending on whether these belong to their in-group (family, crew or posse, networks of peers, the artists’ imagined community) or to their 295,296 The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music, Space and Place out-group (middle-class listeners and ‘the-greatest-possible-number-of-people who constitute their broader audience) (Pecqueux 2001: 34). While the lexicon and prosody of Afro-American communities constitute an obvious linguistic resource for US rappers, French rap’s primary audiences do not share a homogeneous ethnic background and a shared dialect. As a result, French artists had to rely on stereotypical and stigmatized varieties of French mostly spoken in multi-ethnic working-class suburbs. In his dictionary of urban slang, Comment tu tchatches? (How do you talk?) (1998), Jean-Pierre Goudaillier named this vernacular ‘francais contemporain des cités’ (Contemporary Banlieue French) or FCC. He inventoried a series of borrowings from English, Arabic, Berber, Gipsy, sub- Saharan African languages and regional dialects that co-exist in FCC and are used by rap artists as an important resource for non-standard language (NSL). ‘Martin Verbeke's (2017) lexicographic analysis shows that rappers often deviate from the rules of standard language. He affirms that individual artists ‘face the need to stand out and be recognized by their peers and the audience. [...] Some artists will attempt to do so by “appropriating” certain NSL words and developing this type of language further’ (288). Non-standard language shows significant changes over time and is indicative of the scope of rappers linguistic capabilities and influence. Unlike standard language (SL) that is broadly used for communication in public spheres, NSL is made up of colloquial, vulgar and slang words including verlan (backslang), colloquialisms, foreign borrowings and abbreviations. According to Verbeke, the amount of NSI. used by rappers is not only regionally and diachronically motivated but it has also significantly increased since rap achieved a higher level of legitimation beyond banlieue neighbourhoods and the generalization of Internet has established more regular contact between remote networks of artists and listeners. Prominent events bringing banlieue subculture to the forefront also impact on the evolution of NSL use. This was namely the case after the 2005 revolts which prompted a sharp increase in the amount of vulgarisms, vernacular lexis and non-standard tonality used in rap lyrics. As Fagyal suggests, such intensifications of NSL use may be interpreted as ‘momentary acts of identity signalling the artists’ solidarity and symbolic belonging’ (2007: 135). Since NSL eventually loses its value by becoming accepted by mainstream populations, original users tend to adopt or invent new words or ‘use this language in a more complex manner to mark their own use as different from the rest of the society’ (Verbeke 2017: 290). Finally, throughout their careers the same artists can deliberately choose to resort more or les NSL language, depending on their changing relation to social norms and their desire to achieve upward or downward social mobility, for example to look more or less hard-core. Recent research in sociolinguistics has also nuanced our understanding of how rap artists influence the linguistic practices of (mostly teenage) speakers living in multi-ethnic banlieues. Fagyal (2007) has demonstrated that, by establishing and promoting linguistic styles, French rappers may prompt changes not only in vocabulary but also in prosody, for example a shift from the last syllable to another one. Fagyal and Stewart (2011) suggest that the strategic use of tonal patterns associated with multi-ethnic banlieue youth vernacular and rap is not only determined by speakers’ socio-ethnic and geographic origins but primarily depends on their deliberate choice as well as their roles and conversational ‘moves in particular exchanges. In other words, language associated with banlieues is an toBanlieue: Postcolonial Noise important stylistic resource which rap artists do not only borrow from but which they also continue to enrich by producing new NSL terms and disseminating linguistic styles both in banlieues and beyond. Making political claims... while also selling albums Finally, we have to consider the general belief according to which rap is the privileged expression of post-colonial banlieue youth. Rap is known for being provocative, challenging, preconceptions and denouncing social injustice. This is also true in France where hip-hop artists! ‘avowed distance from a sense of unified French identity is intricately interwoven with French colonial history, as well as the construction of laicité and its careful delineation of a religious subject’ (Dotson-Renta 2015: 355). Yet aggressive display of counter-presence, voice and resistance to hegemonic narratives are also characteristic in US rap, we can therefore consider these as consubstantial to the genre. Overlapping themes such as Afro-centrism or colonial history are nonetheless articulated differently by French artists for whom Africa is often a familiar rather than an idealized remote location, and the history of the French ‘empire is just as important part of colonial legacy as transatlantic slavery (Béru 2008: 63). Scholars have inventoried a high number of postcolonial themes in French rap. ‘These include among others institutional racism, in particular in the form of police brutality, which. is denounced by artists like Supréme NTM or Ministére A.M.E.R. as a direct consequence of slavery and colonialism. Assassin, Médine and Youssoupha also tackle French colonial history, deploring its absence from public debate and schools books; IAM discuss socio- economical marginality and geographic segregation, and Muslim rappers Kery James, Abd Al Malik or Médine challenge Republican secularism or laicité represented in official discourses as the only legitime avenue to Frenchness (Jouili 2014: 75). Lara Dotson-Renta suggests that French rappers claim banlieue identity as an affirmative identity marker and by perpetuating the traditions of literary engagement they attempt to refashion national imagery, reshape the concept of community and disrupt the silence of postcolonial amnesia. As she observes: What these artists undertake is the creation of an alternative space, highlighting a geography of ‘Other’ dans la marge of the French political and social landscape that nevertheless belies constant encounters and negotiations with the established national identity tropes. (2015: 356) For Dotson-Renta, the complex space of the French urban periphery provides a ‘fertile landscape in which to enunciate an evolving and hybrid French identity’ (2015: 355). By mapping out new geographies of belonging, French rap may be seen as a narrative that collaborates closely with literature in creating new spaces of discourse. A similar claim is formulated by Bettina Ghio (2010) who considers rap as an essentially literary expression that responds to the narrative urgency of banlieue youth by voicing the social exclusion 297298 The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music, Space and Place and spatial segregation they experience. As a counter-narrative, rap tends to react to media-political discourses, often by directly referring to politicians’ speeches. ‘These is the case namely of Sadek, who quotes Chirac infamous speech about the ‘noise and smell” of postcolonial immigrants, or Keny Arkana or X Kalibur and Blood, who comment on Sarkozy's boastful claim of cleaning the cités with a pressure-cleaner. But are rappers able to reverse the hegemonic discourses consolidated by politicians and media about the banlieues? While there seems to be a consensus about rap’ ability to challenge narratives of urban marginalization and stigmatization and open up new, less conventional avenues to Frenchness than the ones recognized as legitimate, it can be objected that by selling their records to the largest possible audiences contributes to a commodification of postcolonial alienation and exclusion, Silverstein (2018) also suggests that, while rap racializes banlieue spaces, it also spatializes French racial otherness. By validating politicians, media's and urban planners’ representation of the banlieue asa space of alterity, it consolidates a stereotypical opposition between the secular, Euro-centric and civilized Republic and its multicultural margins marked by the rise of Islam and various forms of violence and incivilities. As Germes et al. (2012) note, the simplifying binaries used by rappers such as ‘banlieue vs. France’ or a revolted ‘us’ pitched against a hegemonic ‘them, may jeopardize their very denunciation ofa sharp divide between the banlieues and mainstream society, all the more so as their popularity with middle-class concert audiences reveals the fragility of these constructs. Pecqueux (2007) also reminds us that rap is not just a text but a complex practice rooted simultaneously in the musical industry, cultural and aesthetic practices and public policies. ‘Thus no truth or message can be extracted from the songs to inform urban policies seeking. to prevent urban violence or to control suburban youth. Drawing on Pecqueux’s findings, Hammou (2015) highlights the shortcomings of studies that only focused on lyrics, form, ‘message and content, He questions dominant interpretation of rap being the expression of French banlieue youth and denounces an exoticizing trend in earlier approaches which discussed rap predominantly in terms of its resistance, moral eflects or aesthetics while its context, audiences, participation in cultural policies and industries remain largely ignored. To conclude, by appropriating the urban margin as its symbolic territory, rap helped construct the banlieue as a homogeneous space of exclusion and inscribe it into a series of simplifying binaries opposing it to mainstream French society. Through ils use of banlieue vernacular, it contributed to renewing linguistic practices both in the cités and beyond and by voicing diverse peripheral, postcolonial or Muslim identities, rap artists continue to produce and circulate alternatives to hegemonic concepts of Frenchness prescribed by political elites. However, rap songs are also designed to entertain and address the largest. possible audience and therefore cannot be reduced to their ‘message’ and dissociated from the artists’ participation in the music industry whose ultimate aim isto sell records, As the rapper Booba said in a 2008 interview with Le Journal du dimanche: ‘I make music, not politics. My only mission is to entertain young people with good sound’ (Pecqueux 2009: 91). Itis therefore justified to affirm that rap is as much a key producer/reproducer as one of the principal consumers and beneficiaries of the strongly exaggerated media-political myth that depicts banlieues not only as places of cultural and symbolic otherness, situated.Banlieue: Postcolonial Noise 299 at the margins of the French Republic, but also embodying its exact opposite in a binary system of characteristics and values. Note 1 A direct reference to Grandmaster Flash’s 1982 song ‘The Message, which was widely popular when rap first arrived to the banlieues. References Bazin, H. (1995), La Culture hip-hop, Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, Béru, L. (2008), ‘Le rap francais, un produit musical postcolonial?" Voume! La Revue des ‘Musiques populaires, 6 (1): 61-79 Bourderionnet (2011), “A Picture-Perfect” Banlieue Artist: Abd al Malik or the Perils of a Conciliatory Rap Discourse, French Cultural Studies, 22 (2): 156-61. ‘Cannon, S. 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(2002), ‘Two Decades of Rap in France: Emergence, Development, Prospects, in AP Durand (ed), Black, Blanc, Beur: Rap Music and Hip-Hop Culture in the Francophone World, 1-21, Lanham, MD; Oxford: Scarecrow. Provot, K. M. (2007), La France Est Sa Barlliewe: L'Identité Francaise et Sa Périphérie Urbaine 4 Travers le Cinéma, les Médias et la Musique [Doctoral dissertation, University of Cincinnati]. OhioLINK Electronic ‘Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink. edu/etde/view2acc_num=ucin 184688497 (accessed 24 December 2018. Rose, T. (1994), Black Noise, Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press. ilverstein, P. (2018), Postcolonial France: Race, Islam and the Future of the Republic, London: Pluto Press. Swedenburg, T. (2015), ‘Beur/Maghribi Musical Interventions in France: Rai and Rap; The Journal of North African Studies, 20 (1): 109-26. & Verbeke, M. (2017), ‘Rapping through Time: An Analysis of Non-Standard Language Use in French Rap; Modern and Contemporary France, 25 (3): 281-98. Christina Horvath is Senior Lecturer in French Literature and Politics at the University of Bath. Her research addresses urban representations in literature and film, with emphasis on artistic expressions of advanced marginality such as contemporary French ‘banlieue narratives’ and favela literature in Brazil. She has published widely on contemporary French and Francophone literature, banlieues and postcolonial France. Since 2014, she works on the conceptualization of ‘Co-Creation’ defined as an art-based method to promote social justice in disadvantaged urban areas.