“Beur/Maghrebi Musical Interventions in Contemporary France”1
Ted Swedenburg
[email protected]
University of Arkansas
Paper presented to the symposium
“The Southern Shores of the Mediterranean and Beyond: 1800 – to the Present”
Institute for Advanced Study
University of Minnesota
April 13, 2013
Please do not cite without permission of the author
Over the past two decades both rai music (originally from Algeria) and French rap music have
both come to occupy important positions within the French cultural mainstream, and musicians
working in both genres have done a great deal to bring the culture and the political issues of France's
citizens and residents of North African origin into that mainstream as well. Both rai and rap began to
make their appearance in the French charts at roughly the same time, the early nineties.2 While rai is
produced almost exclusively by Algerian immigrants as well as some Beurs (French-born children of
North African immigrants), rap is for the most part the product of youth from France's multi-ethnic
banlieues, its ghetto-like urban periphery. Due to the demographic character of the banlieues, rap in
France is not associated with a specific racial group, but Beurs have played and continue to play a
significant role in the hip-hop scene.
While both genres of music have been commercially successful in France (although rap
however is by far the largest seller) and while both raise issues of concern to Maghrebis and Muslims
resident in France, they are consumed in very different ways. French rap music is typically seen as
1 Special thanks to Hishaam Aidi for help with tricky translation issues.
2 The first big French rap hit was MC Solaar's 1991 hit “Bouge de là” (some would claim it was Benny B's 1990 "Vous
êtes fous”). The first rai hit was Khaled's 1992 single, “Didi.”
emanating from the dangerous milieu of the banlieues, the home to so-called immigrant populations,
and particularly to a young population regarded as congenitally inclined to criminality and extremism.
In October-November 2005 three weeks of violent confrontations between young residents of the
banlieues and French police broke out after the deaths from electrocution of two teens from Clichysous-Bois who were seeking to avoid arrest by the police. In the wake of the unrest, nearly a quarter of
the members of the French parliament signed a petition addressed to Justice Minister Pascal Clément,
accusing seven French rap outfits of helping provoke the “riots” through their rap lyrics, which, the
MPs asserted, promoted “incivility, if not terrorism” among the “deracinated, de-cultured youth” of the
country. Clément promptly launched opened an investigation into the artists who, according to the
petition's initiator, were guilty of endorsing “anti-white racism” and “hatred for France.” (Although
ultimately no charges were filed, other French rappers have been charged .3 The hysteria was entirely
symptomatic of the way that rap is frequently regarded in France, particularly at moments of moral or
political panic. France's well-known rappers in fact do tend to be from the banlieues, and the dominant
contemporary trend in French rap is “gangsta,” which involves rappers playing up their tough,
threatening character. Yet it turns out that in France too, as with the US gangsta rap of South Compton,
danger both incites fear, and sells. Therefore even as the banlieues and their youth have been
progressively militarized and stigmatized over the two decades, rap from the banlieues has conquered
the centers of French popular culture. This is due in part to state cultural protectionist policies, which
since 1996 have required that French radio stations devote a minimum of 40% of musical programming
to French artists (Silverstein 2012a). This policy has fueled French rap production and prompted major
labels to sign additional rap artists, as commercial radio stations have increasingly favored rap. In
addition, since the mid-1990s, the French government has targeted the banlieues for neo-liberal
“development,” creating tax-free zones for commercial ventures, and multinational music production
companies have been among the beneficiaries of the policy. This mix of state protectionism, neo-liberal
3 The investigation came to nothing, but other rap artists have been charged and fined, for similar reasons.
corporate penetration, and securitization has produced a situation whereby the antagonism, la haine,4 of
young banlieuesards toward state policies and mainstream culture has been massively commodified.
Rai, on the other hand, is regarded in quite different ways. Although since at least the early
eighties its base of popularity has been the Maghrebi population of France, both young Beurs and older
immigrants, the French public tends to consume it as something exotic, foreign, that fits within the
rubric of “world music.” Particularly since the outbreak of civil war in Algeria in 1991, the media has
tended to present rai as kind of “rebel” youth music, analogous to rock'n'roll, and as a youthful cultural
practice that is resistant to conservative values or Islamist extremism in Algeria. The 1997 film 100%
Arabica (dir. Mahmoud Zemmouri) is a particularly good example of this sort of mainstream discourse
on rai. The movie's plot revolves essentially around a struggle for the leadership of the youth in a
mostly Arab neighborhood in Paris, a contest that pits a gang of intolerant and corrupt Islamists against
a group of rai musicians (played by rai stars Cheb Mami and Khaled) and their friends, who are fun,
lovable and tolerant, and who are able to appeal not just to young Arabs but to “native” French as well.
The exotic attractiveness of rai seemed only to have increased in the wake of the 2005 “riots.” An
article in the New York Times travel section that appeared in the month after the uprising's end
described the multiple ways in which North African fashion, cuisine, and music had become terribly
chic and hip in Paris, particularly for the sophisticated middle and upper-middle classes (Sherwood
2005). And of all the genres of music from North Africa that are marketed in France, it is rai that has
made the most inroads. In fact rai has become virtually mainstream in France, and rai artists like
Khaled, Cheb Mami, and Faudel, as well as Arab rocker Rachid Taha, are well-known “French” stars.
Yet if rai has in fact, “crossed over” it is nonetheless still typically seen and represented as somehow
exotic and as representative of an “authentic” elsewhere. Rai then represents a kind of colorful and
benign other that is distinct from the much more dangerous other of the banlieues.
The situation is somewhat analogous, therefore, to that of the UK, which during the last third of
4 La Haine (1995, dir. Mathieu Kassovitz) is the title of a very powerful film about the life of three young banlieusards
and their hostility toward mainstream society and especially the police.
the 1990s witnessed an upsurge in racist attacks and racist state policies aimed at British Asians and
particularly Muslims, and at the same time, experienced a “mainstream passion for all things culturally
diverse” Hesse and Sayyid (2005: 27), and especially things produced by the suddenly “cool” Asians
(who in the UK signify as South Asians). Hesse and Sayyid (2005: 27) have called this UK
phenomenon a kind of “ethnic love and hate fest.” For his part Hutnyk noted a similar tendency in
recent monographs on British Asians which, he observed, did an “‘exotica-fanatica’ two-step,”
depicting Asians as either, or simultaneously, a people of curious yet fascinating culture and/or a people
beset by fanaticism (2005:77).
It is out of this complex political/cultural mix in France, where rai is stereotypically exotic and
friendly and rap is forbidding and potentially terroristic, and where both genres sell, that the songs
discussed here emerge. The artists are products of the prevailing atmosphere and their work in some
ways is scripted by conventional expectations and mainstream stereotypes. Yet at the same time, they
struggle to work within the conventions and generic forms, which they both help to reproduce and at
the same time deploy in order to bring issues of concern to young Maghrebis and Muslims, both those
of France and the Maghreb, to a wider French public. The songs examined here are chosen because
they were “hits” (to varying degrees) with wide French audiences, and because they can provide us
with some insights into the diverse and complicated sorts of impact that North Africans and their
culture(s) are having on contemporary France.
Partir Loin/Y'al Babour
The song “Partir loin” (To Go Far Away) is from the certified-gold 2005 album 113 Degrès by
the well-known rap group 113, whose three members variously are of Algerian, Malian, and
Guadeloupean background, and hail from the Paris banlieue of Vitry-sur-Seine.5 This song features
113's leader, the Algerian-origin Rim'K,6 who raps mostly in French and uses a few words in Algerian
5 The name 113 is the number of the building rue Camille-Groult in Vitry-sur-Seine where the group's members spent
their youth.
6 Verlan (hip French slang) for Karim. He was born Abdelkrim Brahmi-Benalla.
dialect, and Algerian rai artist Reda Taliani, who is originally from Algiers7 but is now based in
Marseille, and who sings in a distinctive mix of Algerian Arabic dialect and French.
Such rai-rap collaborations were, by 2005, nothing new in France. One of the first rai/rap
collaborations was “Oran/Marseille,” on rai artist Khaled's 1997 album Sahra, which featured raps
from one of France's top hip-hop groups, IAM. Such mixing of rai and rap vocals and musical styles
became very common during the early aughts, and a number of rai-rap songs have been hits in both
France and Algeria.8 The practice was even given a genre name, “rai 'n' b,” in 2004, when the first in
what became a series of collections called Raï N'B Fever (produced by Kore and Scalp) was released,
to great commercial success, in both France and North Africa (the first Raï N'B Fever was certified
double gold in France).9 Some observers (Davet 2004) considered rai 'n' b to have given a much-needed
jolt to a rap scene that was sagging and in need of a breath of fresh air (France is the second largest rap
market in the world).
“Partir Loin” commences with traditional Algerian percussion, and the instrumentation is
dominated by electronic keyboards playing instrumental riffs typical of rai, that imitate both the
trumpet, a traditional instrument of “pop rai,” and the gasba, the reed flute, the key instrument of “folk
rai.” The opening traditional percussion, and the simulated sounds of the gasba, serve to guarantee the
“authenticity” of this rai track, which otherwise has a very modern instrumental feel. The rhythm is
Western style (as is true of much of contemporary rai), but the bass is somewhat more restrained than in
7 Taliani (Tamni Réda) was born in 1980 in the El Biar district of Algiers, where Jacque Derrida also was born and raised,
as was chaabi singer Dahmane El Harrachi, who recorded probably the most beloved Algerian song about migration,
“Ya Rayah” (O Emigrant). Tamni Réda grew up in Kolea, a town 20 miles southwest of Algiers, where he earned the
nickname “Taliani” (Italian) because of the way he dressed.
8 Here are just a few of the well-known ones, chosen somewhat at random: Rim'K and Chaba Zahouania, “Rachid
Sytem” (#35 on the French charts), from Rim'K's 2004 solo LP, Enfant du pays; Freeman and Khaled, “Bledi,” 1999,
from Freeman's Palais de Justice; Rim K and Chaba Zahouania, “Clandestino,” 2008 (#25 on the French charts); Cheb
Mami et K-Mel, “Parisien du Nord,” 2009 (#1 on charts), from Cheb Mami's Melli Melli; Rim-K and Chaba Maria, “Le
Jour Maghreb United,” 2009; 113 and Chaba Zahouania, “Ndabbar Rassi,” 2006, on Remix Rai 2006. Reda Taliani has
recorded several rai-rap collaborations which have done well: with Sniper, “Arabia,” 2011, on Sniper's À toute épreuve;
with Rappeurs d'Instinct, “Cholé Cholé,” 2006, on Raï N' B Fever 2; with Tunisiano, “Ca passe où ça casse,” 2011; with
Grand Corps Malade, “Inch'Allah,” 2011 (#59).
9 Raï N'B Fever 2 and 3, produced by Kore and DJ Bellek, were released in 2006 and 2008. Raï'n'B Fever 3 Même pas
fatigué came out in 2009, and Raï N'B Fever 4, produced by Kore, was released in 2011. A number of other collections
have also appeared, several produced in Algeria, and sometimes released under the generic name rai r'n'b.
many rai-rap tracks, which are very hip-hop dance style. Taliani's vocals are autotuned, making his
voice sound slightly synthesized and ratcheting up its expressiveness and its emotionality. Autotuning
technology has been used heavily in rai vocals in both Algeria and France, ever since the release of
Algerian rai artist Chaba Djenet's 2000 single, “Kwit Galbi Wahdi.”10
After the instrumental introduction, Reda Taliani commences to sing the lyrics of a song called
“L'Babour,”11 the steamboat, originally written and recorded by Cheb Bouâa, a rai artist from Anvers,
Belgium.12 Rim'K punctuates Taliani's signing, occasionally interjecting with words like “partir loin” or
“c'est bon.” The first verse goes as follows:
Y'al bābūr yā mon amour (O steamboat O my love)
Kherjnī min al-misère (Take me away from misery)
Fī bledī rānī maḥgūr (I'm despised in my homeland)
‘Ayit ‘ayit ou j'en ai marre (I'm tired, tired and fed up with it)
Ma nrāṭīsh l’occasion (Don't want to miss this chance)
Fī bālī ça fait longtemps (It's been on my mind for so long)
Hādā nssātnī qui je suis (It [migration] has made me forget who I am)
Nekhdem ‘alīhā jour et nuit (I work on it day and night)
Y'al bābūr yā mon amour/kherejnī min al-misère
Évasion spéciale (Special escape)
Min l’Algérie à l’occidental (from Algeria to the West)
The song then is, on the one hand, a kind of love song to a tramp steamer, with a simple, clever,
and amusing lyric. At the same time, the sentiment is tragic, because a young Algerian male's love song
would and should conventionally be addressed to a young woman. But conditions in the homeland of
10 Autotune is an audio processor technology used to alter pitch and distort the voice. On Chaba Djenet and the broader use
of autotuning on Maghrebi music, see Clayton 2009.
11 “Babour” is from the Italian vapore, steamboat.
12 There are other songs about the “babour,” notably Cheb Khaled's “El Babour Kallaa,” recorded with Chaba Fadela
(around 1981) and Moroccan chaabi star Abdelaziz Stati's “El Babour Quallaâ,” in which “babour” is used to rhyme
with “bye bye ya mon amour.”
Algeria are so miserable that the singer is obsessed not with a beautiful girl but with the dream of
escape to the West. So the song is also a kind of lament. The vocals of the last lines of the verse,
“Special escape from Algeria to the West,” are much more heavily autotuned than the previous ones,
giving the statement an especially emotional resonance. The code-switching between French and
colloquial Arabic that Taliani employs is typical of rai music, and also of contemporary urban Algerian
speech. The interpenetration of the two languages for post-colonial Algerians is so complete that Reda
describes “misery” as “al-misère,” using the Arabic article al in place of the French la.
After a rapped verse from Rim'K, Taliani goes on to assert his fondness for his homeland: Ya
blādī ntī fīk lkhīr (O my country, you're full of treasures). But, only the “one with connections” (llī
‘indu lktāf) will succeed there, and only the one with luck (al-zahr) will benefit from those treasures.
So, “let's go, let's go” (rwāḥ rwāḥ), he sings, that is, let's get on the babour. And then I'll sacrifice
(nsākrīfī) and I'll build a home and I'll become a rich man (nwllī rīshār).
When Rim'K raps, the instrumental backing becomes more spare, and the distinctive rai
keyboard frills imitating trumpet and reed flute for the most part drop out. Rim'K and 113 are among
those French rappers who have fostered a reputation for being hardcore, “gangsta” or cailleras.13 And
113 are one of the seven rap groups cited by French parliamentarians in 2005 as appropriate targets for
governmental investigation. But Rim'K's raps on “Partir Loin” are not particularly gangsta. He begins
by saying he is from “Kabylifornia,” and that he has smoked “350 benji” along the Corniche. Rim'K is
of Kabyle (Berber) background, but, as he underscores, no “pure” Kabyle, rather a kabylifornian. I
assume that 350 benji is some sort of hashish, and the Corniche where he consumed it could either or
both Marseille and Algiers, both of which are shown in the “Partir Loin” video (about which more
later). And, Rim'K adds, so what if I do something illegal? Go ahead, “arrest me, who cares?” (ḥabsīnī
ma‘līsh, Arabic). The rest of the rap contains several references to his hard life and his dangerous state:
13 As Silverstein (2012b) shows, 113 has self-represented as “marginal” figures “outside the law” (“Marginal,” 2005), as
“fugitives... presumed to be dangerous” (“Les Evadés,” 1998), and as “street niggaz (négros), ruff in spirit and 100%
insubordinate (insoumis)” (“C'est Ici Que La Vie Commence,” 1998).
“Nothing to lose, Rim'K mentally ill”; “I consider myself lucky to be alive”; “I grew up only with
thieves.” Rim'K's plaints sometimes echo Taliani's: “take me away from my misery” (amène moi loin
de la misère). But the tough conditions Rim'K describes are not those of Algeria, but of the banlieues,
of urban France's ghettos. Rim'K also makes other references to his Algerian background. He wants to
“decorate his beloved with henna” (i.e., for marriage). He's “sentimental” like Cheb Hasni, the
celebrated singer of romantic “love rai,” assassinated in 1994, most likely by the extremist GIA (Armed
Islamic Group). He's still, he says, a bledard, a villager, a country boy, and ululations (youyous) always
echo in his head.
For Taliani, then, the escape (evasion) is from Algeria, and the homeland (bled) is where misery
lies. For Rim'K, al-misère is located in France, in the banlieues. “When the airplane lands I'll clap,”
says Rim'K, but it's not clear where that plane is landing. If there is escape for Rim'K, it seems to lie in
the 350 benjis, in a kind of nostalgia for the Algerian homeland (but not a desire to return), and
ultimately, in music and dance. “A moment of escape, c'mon donkey (ḥmār, Arabic), get up and
dance.”
The song then, or at least Taliani's part of it, speaks to how migration functions in the
imagination of so many Algerian youth. Desires to emigrate are very very strong. A recent poll showed
that 72% of Moroccans dreamed of expatriating (Abder-razzak 2011), while in 2009, The Economist
reported that a poll of Algerian men between the ages of 15 and 34 had found that half of would
probably or definitely try to get to Europe in the near future (Mundy 2009). In Algeria those who leave
are known in colloquial dialect as harragas, meaning literally, those who burn, and the term refers to
the symbolic act committed by many migrants, who burn their papers before they depart, in order to
make it difficult for the receiving countries in Europe to repatriate them. This burning of documents is
a quite remarkable act, as it means, in a quite literal way, the destruction of one's “identity” before
departure, and it also constitutes a very desperate measure given how essential “papers” in everyday
life in Algeria. The reasons why so many seek to depart include lack of adequate employment, tensions
and fears created by the violence of Algeria's civil war, which began in 1991 and only began to die
down around 2004-05 (although a state of emergency remained in place until 2011), social controls
variously exercised by an authoritarian State and by Islamist forces, a severe housing crisis, and so on.
Europe, despite its strong racism towards Arabs and Muslims and illegal workers, remains attractive,
particularly due to the availability of work, albeit menial. Kamel Daoud (2010), a columnist for the
Algerian paper Le Quotidien d’Oran, argues that migration has a different set of motivations: “Our
harraga don’t leave the country because they are poor or jobless or can’t find a storefront to rent, even
if that’s what they say. They leave because here, in this country, their lives are pointless, there’s no
room to dream, and worst of all, there’s no fun, no laughter, no kissing, and no color.” At the end of
“Partir Loin,” Rim'K asserts: Partir loin/Pour fuir les problèmes qu'on a dans la tête mec! (Go far
away, to escape the problems in our head, dude!)
The harraga, however, do not typically exit via a babour, and in particular, not the kind of big
steamboat that is depicted in the official video for “Partir Loin.”14 That is the vehicle of conveyance
across the Mediterranean for legal migrants and travelers. The harragas typically resort to dinghies, to
small, vulnerable, and slow flat-bottomed boats or inflatable rafts to take them to what Rim'K calls
their Eldorado. Such an évasion spéciale is not only illegal, sans papiers, but dangerous and all to
frequently, deadly. Between 2005 and 2008, the number of victims found dead on the Algerian coast by
the Coast Guard more than tripled, from 29 to 98 (Madjid 2009), and the numbers of bodies washing up
on the Mediterranean's northern shore are growing as well. The Algerian state, in response to demands
from a would-be Fortress Europe, has criminalized undocumented migration out of the country, and so
in 2008, the Algerian coast guard arrested over 1300 potential migrants, aged 21-27 years. Meanwhile
European statistics were documented some 67,000 illegal arrivals in 2008 (Madjid 2009).
While Algerian rai singers have recorded a number of songs about babours and visa15 and
migration, the Algerian cinema industry has recently produced some remarkable films about migration.
14 http://www.youtube.com/embed/DLMkUr_GIIc
15 For instance, the late Cheb Hasni's “El Visa.”
Tariq Teguia's 2006 Rome plutôt que vous (“Roma wa la 'touma”) chronicles the desperate effort of two
young Algerians, Kamal and Zina, to obtain forged documents that will allow Kamal to travel abroad.
Merzak Allouache's 2009 Harragas treats the travails of a group of 10 passengers who leave
Mostaganem in western Algeria, headed for Canary Islands. Hakim Abder-razzak (2011) has made the
poignant observation that in contemporary Maghrebi cinema (and this includes Rome plutôt que vous
and Harragas), the beach no longer functions as a space of leisure but rather, as a place where
Maghrebis go in order to look at the water and to imagine arriving at a different and better future, in
another place, across the sea.
“Partir Loin,” and particularly the video clip, presents the issue of migration in a lighter tone
than the two films. The boat that is the object of affection is not a small, susceptible dinghy but a solid
steamer. Migration and travel are imagined as legal, involving the kind of circuit of movement and
existence that Reda Taliani himself lives, as someone able to move legally between Marseille, where he
currently resides, and Algiers, where he was born. The video shows both the ports of Algiers and
Marseille, places that both Taliani and Rim'K are able to cycle between. Julien Courbey, a well known
French comic star (whose father is French, mother Mauritanian), appears in the video as well, adding a
bit of levity as he mugs for the camera and dances around.
But while “Partir Loin” does not depict the issues of migration and displacement in particularly
bleak terms, it does at least bring these issues into mainstream French consciousness. In the absence of
any fieldwork-based study of the impact of the song, it is possible only to speculate on its effects.
Given that the opening lines of “Partir Loin” are delivered in Arabic that one with only a rudimentary
knowledge could grasp, it is likely that the key theme, that of a love song to a steamboat that will
deliver the male singer from misery, would carry some resonance about the tough conditions push so
many young Algerians to leave for France, and, perhaps, garner some sympathy.
Don't Panik, I'm Muslim
Rapper Médine's 2008 song “Don't Panik”16 confronts directly the realities of life for young
Beurs (French Arabs, offspring of North African immigrants) of the banlieue that Rim'K only alludes to
in “Partir Loin.” Whereas Rim'K and 113 belong the reigning tendency in French rap that Silverstein
(2012a) classifies as hardcore or “gangsta”,17 Médine, while connected to “hardcore,” calls what he
does “conscious rap” (Planet Hip-Hop 2005).18 Although Médine's shaved head, full beard, and
football-player build and posture make him look much more caillera than does the rather slight Rim'K,
Médine's lyrics do not project a gangsta persona. Born Mehdi Zaouich, is a cité boy of Algerian
heritage from the port city of Le Havre, Médine is more the tough, reflective, progressive, teacherly
young Maghrebi Muslim rapper than the incendiary “marginal,” more Chuck D than Ice-T.19 His song
“Don't Panik” is a kind of riposte to French mainstream media representations of life in the banlieue,
which present its “terrors” not as a matter of the everyday horrors of life experienced by the youths of
the cités, the housing projects of the banlieues, youths who face quotidian police harassment and abuse,
incessant demands to present identity papers, high and increasing unemployment rates, poor job
prospects for graduates due to endemic racism,20 sub-par schooling, decrepit housing, lack of amenities
in the banlieues (parks, sports facilities, etc.), absence of political representation, and so on. Rather,
official media discourse sees banlieue “terror” as defined by Muslim youths of North African
background (Derderian 2004: 148, citing Boyard and Lochard, Scènes de télévision en banlieues).21
“Don't Panik” is a response as well to the Islamophobic rhetoric pervading mainstream French
discourse.
Like most “hardcore” French rap, the soundtrack is firmly within the sound tradition established
16 It is both on Médine's 2008 Don't Panik mixtape and on his 2008 album Arabian Panther.
17 Silverstein describes French gangsta rap as characterized by a harsh vocal flow, complex layering of samples, and a
lyrical concentration on issues of racism and violence (p??).
18 Médine consciously adopts the term from the US rap scene. The canonical “conscious” US rappers are, of course, Public
Enemy. Médine has, however, collaborated with an array of French hardcore artists (Silverstein 2012b: 27).
19 Good accounts of Médine are in Aidi (2012, 2011) and Silverstein (2012b).
20 While overall unemployment for French university graduates is 5%, the figure for graduates of North African origin is
over 26% (BBC 2005).
21 Out of a population of 60 million (2005) about 4 to 4.5 million are Muslims, and about 3 million of these are of North
African origin. An estimated 3 million French Muslims are citizens, or 5% of the population.
by rap produced in the US, rooted in r'n'b and soul and blues and jazz, and possessing not a trace of
Arab or Middle Eastern musical trappings. Set in a minor key, the song's beats and the synthesized
keyboard convey a sense of urgency, as does Médine's tough tone of voice. Yet the song's theme in
some ways cuts across the track's sonic atmospherics. The core of Médine's message for the French
audience who might be prone to prejudice against the denizens of France's urban peripheries is: don't
panic, don't get hysterical, don't worry, when you see something “different.” Médine's advice for all the
stigmatized social categories in France, for the bearded one (the Orthodox Muslim), for the veiled
Muslim woman, for the resident of the banlieue, for the proletarian, for the African, for the devout
Muslim is all the same: tell “them” -- “don't panik!” (Médine repeats the phrase in English, rather than
using the French, ne paniquez pas.)
Médine proceeds to give what he terms his chronicle of what he calls a decayed (effritées)
republic, a republic whose values he is much invested in. He insists that Muslim philosophy is in favor
of emancipating women, and not, contrary to popular belief, about female circumcision (excision) or
about embracing the Afghan (i.e. Taliban) way or in about advocating equal work for men and women
but unequal pay for the latter. Respecting the “sisters” only on the International Day of Women (March
8), he asserts, is the hypocritical act of a patriarchal society. A society that has turned injustice into a
Patriot Act, one that imposes the values of “Libertine, Laïcité, et Liberticide” (libertinism, secularism
and liberticide), that “violate/rape our civil rights without a condom.” Here Médine calls attention to
what he believes is a contemporary degradation of the ideals of French Republicanism (Liberté,
Égalité, Fraternité), and he responds to the impositions of a dogmatic and intolerant laïcité
(secularism), the property of the left as much as the right, that has of late targeted Muslims in
particular, whom some laïcistes regard as simply unassimilable. Many Muslims see as a particularly
repressive secularist initiative the law passed in 2004, with the support of all political parties, that
banned the wearing of conspicuous religious symbols in public schools, and was aimed specifically at
headscarves worn by Muslim girls. At the same time, official discourse constantly touts bikinis and
miniskirts as signs of female liberation.22
Although the Patriot Act was a US security response to 9/11, Médine uses the term to critique
France and its increasing securitization, a move that in fact predates 9/11. During the 1990s, motivated
by both generalized Islamophobia and in response to extremist Islamist trends in France,23 the French
state actively contributed to the rearticulation of the banlieue as a special threat and as an object of fear,
through a whole array of new policies (such as the creation of a special “Cities and Banlieues” section
of the Intelligence Service [RG] that specializes in “urban violence”), repressive laws, and statements
(production of new sorts of statistics on "urban violence", and so on) (Dikeç 2004: 195, 199). The
militarization and stigmatization of the banlieues was ratcheted up even further during Nicolas
Sarkozy's tenure as Minister of the Interior (2002-04, 2005-07).
Médine proceeds to provide an inventory of all the insulting ways in which residents of the
banlieues are viewed and depicted, using lots of verlan (hip slang that involves inverting syllables),
clever internal rhymes, and sharp images. They are seen as having: one foot in the demonstrations, one
foot with the rioters (casseurs); one with the sportsmen, one with the dealers; one foot in the mosque,
the other with the gang rapists; one in the mire (bourbier), one in the turmoil; one in the minibar, the
other in the minbar (mosque pulpit); one foot with the barbarians (barbares), the other with the bearded
ones (bu-bar, verlan for barbus); one in the stickups (cage-bra, verlan for braquage), one in the brawls
(gar-ba, verlan for bagarre); one in custody (gard'av, for garde à vue), the other toward the Kaaba
(located in Mecca, the direction in which Muslims pray); one foot in the riots (émeutes), one with the
dropouts (zonards); one foot with the imams, the other with the zidanes (the Beur soccer star, Zeinedine
Zidane); one with the Arabs, the other with the gypsies. By writing his list, he says, he'll have revenge
22 For instance Fadela Amara, long-time Socialist Party member and founder of Ni Putes Ni Soumises (“Neither Whores
Nor Submissive”), a feminist organization that fights violence against women in the banlieue, who famously contrasted
the image of the Beurette, the young French Arab woman who puts on mini-skirts and desires liberation, with the image
of the oppressed woman in a veil (Costa-Kostritsky 2012).
23 Particularly after 1995, when the Algerian Islamist militant group GIA launched several terrorist attacks in France,
using local recruits, most famously Khaled Kelkal, in response to France's support for Algeria's military regime in that
country's civil war.
against the journalists, like Mesrine -- a reference to Jacques Mesrine, the most notorious French
criminal of the twentieth century, who French rappers often refer to as the archetypal gangster.24
Médine's catalog of how young banlieusards are typically regarded, by the public, the media, the
police, and state officials, points to the dual nature of the “panicked” mainstream imagination: on the
one hand, youth of the banlieues are seen as violent criminals, troublemakers, rapists, brawlers and
drug dealers, and on the other, as fanatical bearded Islamists. The widespread and entirely mainstream
tendency in France is to lump together the banlieues, immigrants, Muslims, rappers, gangs, Arabs
(beurs), terrorism, youth criminality and so on, to view each category as more or less equivalents, and
to depict them as the sources of France's “problems.” Conflicts that involve banlieue youth responding
to police violence are typically labeled “riots,” as if they were caused by spontaneous hooligan
outbursts.25 Médine starts his list by saying that it's commonly believed the youth of the banlieues have
a lot in common with Abou Hamza (the Egyptian jihadist based in London, extradited to US 2012).
The only possibly “positive” association within this relentlessly negative mix that defines the banlieue
is with athletes, most notably Zeineddine Zidane, regarded as one of France's greatest soccer players of
all time, and who retired in 2006.
Médine contrasts the negative views of the press and the “long expressions” of its chiefs, with
his own views, that of a religious person with a sense of entertainment (Je suis un religieux avec le sens
de l'entertainment). And he bookends his enjoinder to the French public to not panic with an assertion
of his Muslim identity. “Don't panik, je suis [I am] Muslim every day,” he begins the song. He ends it
by saying, Tout les jours au centre de la cible/Car tout les jours je suis muslim! (Every day the
bullseye/Because every day I'm Muslim). Then he ends by repeating a number of times, in English,
“Every day I'm Muslim! every every every day I'm Muslim, Every day I'm Muslim Muslim Muslim.”
Médine pronounces Muslim as musilam, using three syllables, and at this point his voice is
24 I've not been able to determine how Mesrine took “revenge” on journalists.
25 The killing of local youths of immigrant origins, in fact, was a common feature of 34 of the 48 major so-called riots that
broke out in banlieues between 1990 and 2000 (Dikeç 2004).
electronically distorted. The conclusion is made to sound deliberately like the chorus of Rick Ross' 5x
platinum 2006 single, “Hustlin',” a paean to cocaine dealing, which goes “Everyday I’m hustlin',” with
“hustlin'” also pronounced in three syllables. Médine's electronically distorted “musilam” sounds
almost as though it could have been sampled from Ross' “hustle-in.” By citing Rick Ross, Médine at
once demonstrates his familiarity with global hip-hop and evokes Ross' tough gangsta aura, while at the
same time underlines that he is not a dope-dealing hustler but rather a Muslim.
The “Don't Panic” video also reinforces the message in interesting ways. Médine appears in the
opening sequence in a t-shirt that says I'm Muslim Don't Panik. I'm fiercely proud of my religious
heritage and beliefs, the shirt seems to say, but don't let it worry you. Médine is shown chanting his
lyrics on stage, his fist in the air, a huge banner behind him that reads Don't Panik, and a multi-ethnic
throng, also wearing black t-shirts that look just like Médine's, pump their fists along with him. The
assemblage resembles a highly-organized and combative political rally as as much as it does a music
concert. Médine is also shown walking around in his home town of Le Havre. The attitude, the overall
atmosphere of the video, is of militancy and toughness, as if it is designed to mobilize and unite the the
despised social categories of France. It is not clear that pictures of crowds of banlieue youths with
raised fists will convey the intended message to a suspicious and sometimes hostile French public. Will
they really “not panic” after seeing such a clip? Interestingly, there are no women in the crowds or
grouped around Médine as part of his posse wearing anything that might signify as “Islamic dress.” If
any woman's hair is covered, it is by a hoodie, baseball cap or a scarf, all are coded as “hip-hop” rather
than as signs of religiosity.
Although Médine does not enjoy anything like the star quality of Rim'K and 113 in France,26
nor is he a best-selling artist, he is well-respected and has a fairly large audience for an “underground”
musician. The “official” video clip for “Don't Panik” on Youtube has (as of this writing) roughly a half
million views. “Don't Panik” has become for Médine, as he states in the song, his signature, his motto.27
26 Four of 113's five albums have been them certified either gold or platinum.
27 Médine also released a short video on Youtube in 2012, with English subtitles, called “I'm Migrant Don't Panik,” where
Médine has spread the songs message of the song through other means as well. He has co-authored a
recent book of the same title with Pascal Boniface28 (Boniface and Médine 2012), and he appears in a
documentary by Keira Maameri, entitled Don't Panik, in which he and five other rappers talk about
what it means to Muslims in the world of hip-hop.29 In the documentary Médine describes his “Don't
Panik” song as intended to bring together France's diverse underprivileged communities and to
denounce the discrimination against them. But, he complains, all anyone seems to remember about the
track is that it's about Muslims. Perhaps he should not be surprised, and not only because he ends the
track by repeating, “Every day I'm Muslim,” over and over. For while all young residents of the
banlieues, whatever their ethnic, racial, or national background, face very similar problems,
mainstream and official discourse (makers of public meaning) tend to single out Muslim North
Africans in particular, in a process of synecdochization that in turn further taints, besmirches and in a
sense, “Islamizes,” all cité youth (De Koning 2006). All the while, a spatial apartheid divides the
ghettos (the term Médine typically uses to describe the banlieues) from the zones of privilege, (5) in a
process that Dikeç (2004: 203) terms “spatial stigmatization.”
Médine's “Don't Panik” then is in line with much of his other work, which advocates not a
refusal of essential French values but rather a strong desire that France live up to those values, to the
republican values, the Rights of Man, and so on. He is relentless in his exposure of French double
standards, in exposing official hypocrisies and the intolerances of a supposedly tolerant society, and he
is able to do so because of his deep familiarity with mainstream mores. He is much less interested in
trumpeting his personal piety and religiosity (a very “secular” move on his part, in a sense) than in
arguing for the rights of Muslims to practice their beliefs without interference and in correcting
mainstream misconceptions about Islam. On his 2005 album Jihad: le plus grand combat est contre soi
même (Jihad: the greatest struggle is against the self), Médine attempts to re-cast dominant Western
he elaborates on his artistic and political aims and projects: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnKtEkNZWcI
28 A “mediatique” academic, lecturer at the Institute of European Studies of the University of Paris VIII, who was kicked
out of the Socialist Party for his pro-Palestinian views.
29 A trailer can be viewed on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIDAUxjNkGs.
notions of jihad as holy war, presenting jihad instead as the individual Muslim's struggle to control his
or her lesser instincts, what is known as jihad al-nafs, and what Muslims consider to be the “greater
jihad.” And Médine also continually confronts what he considers to be intolerant laïcité, for instance on
the song “Anéanti” (“Annihilated,” from Jihad), where he complains that “they” want him to abandon
his beard at the gates of France, and that “they” wish that his religion would come down to a couscous
merguez, a couscous made with spicy North African meat sausage. That is, hegemonic secularists want
him to abandon his masculine sign of piety (itself a conspicuous religious symbol) and would prefer
that his religion be reduced to little more than an exotic, tasty and easily digested tradition. At the same
time, it should be stressed that Médine's concerns are in no ways exclusively “Muslim,” for he is
concerned with making connections between marginalized peoples, with struggles that link Muslims to
others, with struggles over racial and class discrimination, against the legacies of colonialism, and so
on.
Not Even Tired
“Même pas fatigué” (Not even tired) is a rai-zouglou fusion from rai superstar Khaled, born in
Oran, Algeria and resident of France from the late eighties until 2008,30 and Magic System, from the
Ivory Coast. The single is from Khaled's 2009 album Liberté,31 and the song occupied the number one
slot on the French singles charts for seven weeks in 2009, making it Khaled's first major hit in France
in over a decade. The song is also featured on the 2009 rai'n'b collection Raï'n'B Fever 3: Même pas
fatigué.
Khaled is the major rai star in France, a position he has occupied ever since his single “Didi” hit
the French Top Ten in 1992. His 1996 chart-topping single “Aïcha” won him a Victoires de la Musique
award (France's Grammy equivalent) for (French!) Song of the Year; he won again in 2013 for his 2012
single (top position: #4), “C'est La Vie.” Despite the occasional scandal, Khaled is a beloved figure in
30 He has lived since then in Luxembourg, reportedly to avoid charges of domestic abuse and abandoning his offspring
brought against him in France.
31 For some reason, the song was left off the verions of Liberté marketed in the US.
France. He projects a persistently upbeat image, and a legendary smile that never seems to vanish from
his still-boyish face.32 Khaled has been at the forefront of a growing group of artists of Arab Maghrebi
background who have accomplished the rather incredible feat of bringing the sounds of Arabic music
and Arab language into French mainstream culture. Given that Arabic is the language of the true Other
in France, the Algerian, the Muslim, who are much more derided and hated than are any other racial or
ethnic group, including Blacks, it is remarkable how many songs sung (and on occasion rapped) in
Arabic have made it to the French charts since “Didi” 1992 success. The “hybrid” sound of “Même pas
fatigué” is nothing new for Khaled either. Modern rai emerged in fact out of the polyglot and
multicultural environment that prevailed in the Oran region of northwest Algeria during the colonial
period. Khaled states that while growing up in Oran in the sixties and seventies, he used to listen to
Johnny Hallyday (French rock'n'roller), Elvis Presley, Edith Piaf, Adamo (French pop star), Joselito
(Spanish pop), Farid al-Atrash (Egyptian neo-classical), Algerian chaabi, Moroccan music (like Nass
El Ghiwane), ouahrani, as well as traditional “folk” rai (Khaled 1998: 65-67). Khaled's first album
produced in France, Kutché (1988), was a collaboration with French-based Algerian jazz musician Safy
Boutella. His hit “Didi,” with its funk beats, was produced by the well-known Don Was, who has
worked with the Rolling Stones, Bonnie Raitt, the B-52s, and Bob Dylan, among others. When asked
about his salsa-rai fusions on his 1999 album Kenza, Khaled replied that he grew up with flamenco,
that he had always performed salsa and rumba, and that such musical varieties were part of his “roots”
(Tenaille 2002: 92-93).
Magic System are one of the Ivory Coast's biggest zouglou bands. When Khaled hired them to
work with him he was getting an established commodity. Magic System's first single to hit the French
charts (it reached the number 4 position) was “1er Gaou33” in 2001. Their “Un Gaou à Oran,” with rai
singer Mohamed Lamine and Mokobé & AP from 113, hit number 9 in 2004; “C chô, ça brûle”
32 Hence the title of his 1998 autobiography, Khaled: Derrière le sourire (Khaled: Behind the Smile). Khaled turned 53 in
February.
33 A rube, in ivoirean slang.
(Unemployment, it burns), recorded with rai artists Akil, Cheb Bilal et rapper Big Ali (originally from
Queens, based in Paris since 2001) reached number 4 in the French charts in 2006.
The soundtrack of “Même pas fatigué” is dominated by an urgent, insistent, dance beat, and not
a hint of Arabic or Middle Eastern decoration. The instrumentation is simple and basic, with prominent
bass and drums, and electronic keyboards that for the most part follow the melody. The chorus as sung
by Magic System (who do most of the vocals) is all about fun and partying all night long. “We make
the mood/There's no problem/Khaled, Magic System/That's the sound you love/Everywhere it's the
same/Not tired is the theme/Not even tired/Tonight we've gotta dance/We'll give it our all.” They repeat
the chorus four more times over the course of the song, with Khaled at times singing along as well as
adding embellishments in the traditional ululating style of Arabic vocals. Magic System sing one more
verse, which includes the lines, “We can't help/Being hot rai'n'b fever,” calling attention to their
participation in the highly-popular generic brand.
The official video clip34 for the song shows Khaled and Magic System in a modest,
neighborhood soccer field (all dirt, no grass), along with a bunch of men from the 'hood, a multi-ethnic
cast, who are playing a pick-up game. The football players mug and smile and dance to the music along
with the singers. The mood is overwhelmingly happy. “No problem”: “Y'a pas d'problème,” they all
sing, again and again. And in a short verse Khaled sings in French, he adds, “No, no, there's no
hate/Hand in hand/No, no, there's no trouble” (No no y a pas de haine/La main dans la main/no no y a
pas de gène).
The song, and the video, put a feel-good, happy face on French multiculturalism. The banlieues
presented here are anything but threatening. What could be more appealing to a mainstream audience
than football mixed with infectious, joyful dance music, an unstoppably upbeat party song that
celebrates the arrival of a multi-cultural France and its rich blend of peoples and sounds and customs?
The musicians and the football players are not the threatening youth of the cités but adult men. The
34 http://youtu.be/y5xikVELf78
video of course does reflect the multi-ethnic character of the banlieues, and the fact that the song hit
number one meant that Arabic language singing was blasting out once again over France's mainstream
airwaves. But at the same time, as wonderful as it is, the song and video seem a bit Cosby Show.
And yet: there is the matter of Khaled's verse in Arabic:
I'm [indistinct] happy / sa‘dī
Come to me / ejjī l‘endī
We'll spend night and day / N'dīrū līl wi n'hār
In the country of the poor / fī bled az-zawālī
Living happy / ‘Ayish zahwānī
An exile and a foreigner / Ghrīb wi barrānī
I'm burning / Ānā megwānī
Living in a daze like a fool ye ye ye ye / ayish buhālī yé yé yé yé
While the lyrics here do speak of living happy, it's the sort of “happiness” that an immigrant manages
to make in conditions of exile and poverty. It is a situation that also hurts, burns, and reduces one to a
crazy simpleton, a nitwit (buhālī), even if a lovable one. In the video, while Khaled vocalizes with his
trademark smile and the beat is upbeat, the lyric here interjects a bittersweetness, a brace of the reality
of life for migrants and uprooted people. The question one would ask, of course, is, does anyone get the
ambiguities of this message? Not monolingual French speakers, of course, but at least some of Khaled's
core audience, speakers of Maghrebi dialect. Perhaps Khaled's purpose is to remind his core Arab
audience that even though he is a big star in France, he remains one of them, and he understands their
issues. Khaled is of course constantly appropriated by the institutions and orchestrators of public
meaning as a key symbol of the “good Arab,” seen as opposed to the fanatical and fundamentalist
Arab, and Khaled himself typically says about himself that he is not “political,” that he wants just one
thing: to party, to live, to drink and to dance (Khaled 1998: 17). But he has nonetheless been known on
occasion to complain about racism and to state his support for Palestinian rights.35
Conclusion
The purpose of this paper has been to present a sample from the array of ways in which Beurs
and Maghrebi and Muslim residents of France have used popular music in an effort bring an awareness
of their culture, language, and socio-political issues into the mainstream of French cultural life. I would
not want to overstate the significance of this activity, however. In the absence of any serious social
scientific study into the nature of reception of the cultural artifacts under discussion, it is difficult to do
more than speculate, as I have done here, about how songs/videos like “Partir Loin” or “Don' Panik”
might impact audiences. We know of course that any work of art is open and available to multiple
readings, and that dominant discourses frequently guide the manner in which a cultural artifact is
consumed. Lyrics are frequently misunderstood or misread, even by native speakers, as my own search
on the web for authoritative song lyrics, meanings and translations amply confirms, and interpretations
vary widely. The problem is of course complicated further when we are dealing with songs that are
vocalised in more than one language, that liberally employ slang, and that are often grounded in very
local references and insider knowledges (rap artists are particularly prone to make incessant reference
to their 'hoods).
There is also a danger in overvaluing the political significance and potential of cultural
practitioners in France at this moment. The base audience for the music in question, its practitioners
and much of its dynamism, emerges from a banlieue environment which has seen little political
activism. The main organized political tendencies among Maghrebis in France, the secular Beur
movements that arose in the eighties and the political Islamist movements of the nineties, have middle
class and clientelist, and mostly disconnected from the banlieues. Jihadists and the salafists in the
banlieues have been active in this vacuum, but their focus of organizing for the most part has not been
35 Daniel 1997; Siclier 2002.
oriented to the main social issues facing the cité residents. Neither jihadis nor salafis played any
significant role in the “riots” of 2005, and that mostly spontaneous and chaotic unrest in fact was more
a symptom of the absence of political movements or organization in the banlieues than of any
consistent grassroots organizing. The rappers or rappers of cité origins are, by and large, not political
activists either, but rather artists who report on cité realities and vocalize youth grievances. In this
political vacuum, therefore, such musicians have come to play an exaggerated role.36 Effective political
action, that will truly transform banlieue conditions, will not come through the leadership of artists,
however intelligent (as for instance Médine) or well-intentioned they are. (Even if Médine is active in
the anti-racist Mouvement des Indigènes de la République.)
Perhaps the chief achievement is modest: the simple presence on the airwaves of the language
and culture of what many in France regard as the enemy, as a demographic threat to France, a social
force that will forcibly impose shari‘a law. Perhaps “Même pas fatigué” has given some “native”
French people a more nuanced and positive view of the banlieues. Perhaps Médine has helped
“normalize” Islam for some in of his listeners. In the short film “I'm Migrant Don't Panik” reveals that
in 2012 the text of one of his songs was taught in the French high school history curriculum. The song,
“17 Octobre,” on his 2006 album Table d'écoute, is about the 1961 Paris police massacre of between 50
and 200 French Algerians who were peaceably demonstrating against a curfew and in support of the
FLN. This bloody event, in which some of the deaths resulted after police tossed men they had beaten
unconscious into the Seine, is one that France tried for decades to assign to the black hole of memory.
No one has ever been prosecuted for involvement in the killings, due to the general amnesty declared at
the end of the Algerian war. It is remarkable then that Médine's text has made it into the school
curriculum, and it is consistent with with Médine's claims, articulated in a number of his songs, that the
anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia and the urban crises of the present has their roots in the colonial
period, and that better understanding is only possible when the full extent of the crimes inflicted by the
36 A similar situation pertains, alas, in the US rap scene.
colonial regime on the Algerian populace is publicly acknowledged.37 In addition, perhaps Rim'K and
Reda Taliani's “Partir Loin,” raised at least some sympathy for the plight of Maghrebi migrants to
France. These may be modest accomplishments, and of course it is urgent that much much more be
done to improve conditions for Maghrebis and Muslims in France, particularly the young and
unemployed without hope, but these small steps, I believe, are not to be scoffed at, for they could, in a
different political context, form the basis for more profound political action.
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