MARSEILLE HIP-HOP: FULL OF RAGE, BUT WITHOUT THE VIOLENCE
By Michael Kimmelman
International Herald Tribune
Dec 18 2007
France
MARSEILLE: The other day, a dozen or so teenage rappers in baggy
jeans and hoodies gathered outside a community arts center called Le
Mille-Patte in Noailles, a poor immigrant neighborhood here, hard by
the old port.
One of this city’s most successful hip-hop artists, M’Roumbaba Said,
who calls himself Soprano, lately wrote a track called "Melancholic
Anonymous": "I can’t help it, expressing my feelings, my melancholy
in my lyrics," he rapped. "I can laugh at my sadness. It helps."
When the slums outside Paris, Lyon, Toulouse and Strasbourg exploded
last month, repeating the violence that erupted two years ago, here
in Marseille, France’s second-largest city, it remained calm. Back
in July, in one of this city’s impoverished northern neighborhoods,
a 14-year-old boy named Nelson Lobry-Gazelle was killed by a police
car. Four hundred people peacefully demonstrated, so the incident
barely made headlines.
As it happens, it was also a police car that killed two teenagers in
Villiers-le-Bel, a destitute suburb north of Paris, and sparked the
trouble that broke out across France in November.
Marseillais have plenty of explanations for this disparity, aside
from the obvious one that the poor areas here are not segregated on
the city outskirts, as they are in Paris – but it is hip-hop, as much
a source of local pride as the town’s soccer team, that turns out to
be the perfect prism to grasp why this city did not burn.
Melancholy is the word often used to describe the local rap style.
Melancholy as a reflective state of mind. Contrary to the city’s sun
and sea context, melancholy actually suits a lot of its culture. A
Marseille novelist, Jean-Claude Izzo, who died just a few years
ago, became famous in France for writing grim, pessimistic detective
stories. Robert Guediguian, also from Marseille, is a filmmaker whose
reputation is based on dark movies.
Rappers in Marseille, some of the most original and distinctive ones
anyway, compose sad odes to their local neighborhoods and hymns to
the whole melting pot city. The sound of Paris hip-hop, slicker and
more aggressive, adopts much from American gangsta rap, as Marseille
hip-hop does, too, but Marseille boasts a groovier style. It mixes
in blues, flamenco, Jamaican ragga.
The song that a decade or more ago helped fixed IAM, the Marseille
group, on the French charts, borrows from George Benson to lay down
a mellow beat.
"Belsunce Breakdown," about one of the city’s city-center
neighborhoods, by Bouga, a rapper from there, begins with a hypnotic
piano riff, jazzily syncopated – a little Steve Reich crossed with
50 Cent.
Here the basic interconnectedness of all modern music expresses a
local truth about the city’s cultural identity. An ancient, gritty
seaport, Marseille flaunts its history as an immigrant magnet. Its
population of 820,000 includes 200,000 Muslims; 80,000 North African
Jews; and 80,000 Armenians. One of the largest immigrant groups are
Muslims from the Comoro Islands, near Madagascar. Three of the four
musicians in PSY4 de la Rime, Soprano’s band, are Comorians who grew up
in the northern part of Marseille where Lobry-Gazelle died. The fourth
member of the band, a Moroccan, DJ Sya Styles (born Rachid Ait Baar),
like many of the teenagers at Le Mille-Patte, comes from Noailles.
Marseille lyrics can be full of rage, but they are not violent,
the way some Paris bands are. Two years ago, 152 conservatives in
Parliament sued seven rap groups, but notably none from Marseille,
for fostering hatred and racism against whites and for what one
politician called "anti-French" sentiments.
PSY4, by contrast, wrote a song not long ago called "Justicier":
"I know all the cops are not that bad, but why do you always ask me
for my ID? To your violence I prefer responding with my lyrics. Can’t
we have a proper dialogue?" The other evening PSY4 occupied a recording
studio in Grottes Loubières, just northeast of the city. During a break
they talked about the way rappers help each other here, and success
comes not from landing studio contracts but from earning respect,
ground up. "Rap’s not a business here, the way it is in Paris," Baar
said during a break. "It’s not like Paris, where the suburbs are just
concrete. Here you first have to prove yourself in the neighborhoods."
"Paris is more hard-core," is how Stephane Gallard put it. He is
the quiet, suave young man in charge of music programming for the
nonprofit Radio Grenouille, the city’s most popular hip-hop station.
"The fact that hip-hop artists sell their music on their own blocks
contributes to their identifying with Marseille, and this explains
why there’s no car burning. Different communities in Marseille are
still quite separate, there’s racism here, but it’s a city in which
you have the freedom to move among communities if you choose."
It is also true that this city has a contrarian streak going back
at least 2,000 years to when it backed Pompey over Caesar. You
might say Marseillais rappers reflect the tradition of "pays," or
local communities, to which their inhabitants maintain more powerful
loyalties than to France. At the same time, it is a place proud of its
old Corsican and French Italian mob heritage (a popular city-center
clothing store was named after a famous mob boss), and the prevalence
of drug dealers and North African gangs does partly explain why there
is relative calm in destitute areas: Calm is maintained for the sake
of their business.
Unemployment nears 40 percent in those same parts of town among people
18 to 25; it is 13 percent citywide, much more than the national
average of 8 percent. So clearly, jobs alone, or the lack of them,
do not account for the recent urban violence.
It helps that an old, Mediterranean-style civic patronage system doles
out favors to earn loyalty and keep the peace. And, as everybody says,
unlike in Paris, where the immigrant poor occupy huge concrete blocks
cut off from the city center, Marseille neighborhoods like Noailles
are smack in the middle of town while the hard-pressed quarters
to the north are linked to the center by cheap public transport and
remain inside city limits. So residents feel they belong to Marseille,
because they do, and in turn they feel that Marseille belongs to them.
Out of these communities, where musicians have their own version of
a patronage system, hip-hop has developed.
"Marseille rap never integrated violence the way Paris did," Philippe
Fragione said. He is Akhenaton, the leader of IAM. He, like other
older musicians here, supports younger Marseille rappers. It was
his studio in Loubières that PSY4 was using. Marseilles rap is "more
socially conscious," Fragione added. "That’s because there is a real
sense of community."
Paul Colombani is the deputy director of Euromediterranee. With
more than $5 billion in public and private investments, it plans,
by 2012, to turn about four kilometers, or two and a half miles,
of the city center into office towers, mixed-income apartments,
museums and esplanades.
Zaha Hadid, Jean Nouvel and others archistars have signed on. Outside
the porthole office window of Colombani’s waterfront office, the
Danielle Casanova, an enormous white ferry, waited to carry passengers
to Algeria. Passengers coming back often bring knockoff goods that
merchants hawk on sidewalks.
"Les jeunes errants," migrant children, some as young as 12, hide in
the boat, then head for Noailles when they land. A few have become
the aspiring rappers of Marseille through community cultural centers
like Le Mille-Patte.
"That will be moved out of this area," Colombani said about the
ferry. He meant to L’Estaque, far to the north. "Easier for customs,"
he said. Luxury cruise ships will dock here instead.
Marseille can surely use the money, but hardly at the cost of undoing
the social chemistry that has kept the peace and fostered, among other
things, the city’s musical life. At Le Mille-Patte, those dozen or so
young rappers outside were a typical Marseille mix: first, second or
third generation immigrants from Algeria, Morocco, the Comoro Islands,
Eastern Europe, Argentina.
Habib was a skinny 18-year-old with a doleful face and a band called
Urban Revolution. "We all get along because we share music," he said.
Le Mille-Patte had first encouraged him to rap as a young boy. "I
didn’t know what to do with my days," he said. "So this place was
very important."
Bacariane, a slightly older rapper wearing a New York Yankees baseball
cap, its brim pressed down over his eyes, piped in: "This is a rough
neighborhood, but there’s not violence here without meaning, like in
Paris. I lived there for a while," meaning in the isolated suburbs
outside the capital. He paused to consider the difference.
"Here there is a culture of respect. We’re all Marseillais."
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