For three weeks, with a few rare exceptions, they had not said a word on their social networks or in their titles. We had known rappers to be more virulent and more talkative, especially in the aftermath of the first round of the 2002 presidential election, when Jean-Marie Le Pen faced Jacques Chirac. Even the irreconcilable Kool Shen of NTM and Akhenaton of IAM were then featured in a joint call to vote against the National Front. In the aftermath of the 2005 riots, JoeyStarr and his collective Devoirs de mémoire had also mobilized so that the youngest would register on the electoral lists. Diam’s had written two songs against the National Front, Marine (2004) et My France To Me (2006).
Read the story: Article reserved for our subscribers “Youth annoys the National Front”, the return of a punk and forty-year-old slogan
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The day after the European elections dominated by the National Rally (RN), after the announcement of the dissolution of the National Assembly, nothing… barely a column in a daily newspaper, a few videos of young artists like the rapper Danyl on Instagram calling on the youngest to go and vote. But what about the heavyweights of the genre, Ninho, SCH, Gazo?…
At 11:45 p.m. on the night of Monday 1is July, about twenty rappers finally broke this silence. Among them, Akhenaton, but also a returnee, Pit Baccardi, some leaders of the rap industry like Fianso, Soso Maness, Mac Tyer, Demi Portion and, finally, some turbos of the young generation like Zola, Kerchak or RK. Brought together by producer Kore and designer Ramdane Touhami, they recorded a nine-minute and forty-three minute long track, Not passinspired by the slogan of the Spanish Republicans against Franco’s fascism and the rap song against the Debré laws in 1997, 11 min 30 against racist laws. “All revenue generated by the song will be donated to the Abbé Pierre Foundation”it is specified at the beginning of the clip where the rappers intervene successively on archive images. The tone is angry, the words often excessive or even insulting, the remarks misogynistic and conspiratorial, mixing in the same piece the Freemasons, the Illuminati and Benyamin Netanyahu. At the risk of confusing their message.
“I prefer the outstretched hand to the outstretched arm”
“The idea, at the beginning, is to speak to young people who listen to rap, Touhami summarizes. With Kore, we said to ourselves that we couldn’t just sit back and do nothing, we have children, we have to explain to them that the RN is dangerous. The first idea was to make two songs, First round et Second tourbut rap is too much ego.” Some decline the invitation saying they are not interested, others have scheduling difficulties. “And then finally, we said to ourselves that we were going to counterattack between the two rounds.”
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