Culturebox highlights Marseille rap from SCH

CULTUREBOX – MONDAY OCTOBER 14 AT 9 P.M. – CONCERT

It’s good to find SCH, rapper from Marseille, in the culture pages of a newspaper and not in the news pages. On Monday October 14, the TNT channel Culturebox devotes a prime time evening to this artist, the gifted one of his generation, with the broadcast of his two-hour concert at the Stade Vélodrome in Marseille, on July 22, 2023. A performance which earned him the trophy for best concert of the year during the Flames in April, a ceremony which rewards artists of rap and its musical variants (R&B, dancehall, afrobeat). The rapper’s oiled and controlled show during his “Decennium” tour will be followed by Skyrock’s “Planète Rap” show, usually broadcast on France Télévisions.

Real name Julien Schwarzer, 31 years old, the rapper has succeeded, in ten years and eight albums, in imposing his style: cinematic narration, dark poetry and a very pronounced taste for fashion and image. His fascination with Italian, Corsican and Marseille mafiosi led him, in his records, to use the French voice of Al Pacino (that of José Luccioni), whose films Scarface (1983), by Brian De Palma, and The Devil’s Associate (1997), by Taylor Hackford, rocked his adolescence.

Friendly milf

From his passion for gangster films, SCH created a character, JVLIVS, a young Mediterranean mafioso whose life he describes in a trilogy which takes him from Marseille to Gibraltar. During the promotion of the last part of this trilogy, Prequelfiction will meet reality.

On the morning of August 26, when leaving a nightclub in La Grande-Motte (Hérault), his minibus was targeted by armed men. One of his security agents was shot dead, his driver seriously injured. Fortunately for him, the artist had not gotten into the vehicle. The investigation is now underway and the grieving rapper is remaining discreet.

The concert and the show, broadcast this Monday, were recorded before this event and viewers can then discover a friendly thirty-year-old who explains his love for cinema, fashion, film 8 Mile (2002), by Curtis Hanson, which recounted the beginnings of the American rapper Eminem, and which triggered in the Marseillais this crazy desire to make music, he, the son of a nurse and a truck driver, living in Aubagne (Bouches-du-Rhône).

For the setting of the show recorded in the premises of Skyrock radio, the presenter Fred Musa transforms into Don Fredo, like The Godfatherhe took out the candlesticks, the crystal glasses and the fur coat. He serves the famous cannelloni for which SCH provides the recipe in his disc and gives “my spoiled one” to the rapper, who popularized the Marseille expression in his interviews or in the rap springboard New Schoolbroadcast on Netflix, and of which he is one of the members of the jury.

In one of the archives, we discover SCH at the age of 16, very young and with a round face, rapping his first lyrics, far from the “gothic chic” image that he developed from his first mixtape, A7 (2015), whose cover recalls one of the characters from the film Blow (2001), by Ted Demme. He will present the recurring themes of his career: “Death, time, betrayal, violence, precariousness, this desire for social ascension, revenge on the life that my father led”he confides to Fred Musa. A dark universe that he stages very well at the Vélodrome, in a particularly well-produced recording of the concert.