Solo, a figure in French rap with his group Assassin and precursor of breakdancing in France, claimed to have been, as a teenager, a “victim” of the American DJ and hip-hop pioneer Afrika Bambaataa, already targeted by accusations of sexual assault on a minor in the United States.
“Being confronted with a predator, especially someone you admire, is the hardest thing,” Solo said Wednesday in the show “Clique” on Canal+. The artist was one of the rare French people to experience the beginnings of hip-hop in the United States from the inside, alongside pioneers including Afrika Bambaataa, with whom he was hosted.
The American DJ enjoys an aura that is all the more intense because he co-founded, in 1973, the Zulu Nation, an organization that stands against the violence of New York gangs and uses hip-hop and its currents to convey peaceful values.
In “Note my name on your list”, an autobiography published in mid-November (Massot éditions), Solo recounts having overheard a scene of sexual assault on a minor during his stay, without further details.
Then, “one evening, Bambaataa calls me into the living room while he is watching a porno. I feel discomfort, but I don’t move. At this precise moment, I understand that it is my turn to become his toy,” relates Solo, who says he was 17 at the time. “At the time, I took it as a very unpleasant and inevitable passage,” he wrote, without giving more details on the facts.
Questioned about this episode in Clique, the artist speaks of “totally inappropriate behavior” on the part of Bambaataa, whom it took “more than forty years” to be able to evoke. “Above all, I needed personal development and support, if only to recognize that I was a victim,” he adds in the show.
The Assassin pillar specifies that he was “a thousand miles from imagining the scale of the phenomenon” brought to light years later, describing Bambaataa as a “sexual predator”.
The Zulu Nation, made up of representatives of hip-hop and its philosophy around the world, dissociated itself from its leader in 2016, when Afrika Bambaataa was accused of sexual assault on a minor, which he denied. A trial was to be held in 2021 after another complaint, but the artist never showed up.
AFP requested a reaction from Afrika Bambaataa on her Instagram account on Thursday, without obtaining an immediate response.
