THE MORNING LIST
This week, here is a selection of three recently published books, a comic book and a music magazine. An analysis on the perception of rap, a black and white comic book on the punk scene in France in the 1980s, a collection of chronicles by the musician and host André Manoukian, a short biography devoted to the singer Amy Winehouse, and number 50 from the magazine Schnock, for a Johnny Hallyday special.
“Thinking about rap”: from maligned culture to dominant music
There are now a plethora of books that tell the history of rap in the United States or France. On the other hand, finding a work that takes stock of what it represents in 2024 or what it says today is rarer. This is what Kévin Boucaud-Victoire, aged 35, suggests. In around a hundred pages, this enthusiast, editor-in-chief of the “Debates and Ideas” section of the magazine Marianne, analyzes what he calls a “cultural phenomenon”. Or how rap has gone from pariah status to dominant status in ten years. He bases his demonstration not only on the best album sales in recent years established by the National Union of Phonographic Edition (SNEP), but also on his own experience.
In June 2003, as a schoolboy in Val-d’Oise, the future journalist made his music teacher jump by making him listen to Timeout of Booba or For those of the Mafia K’1 Fry. Almost fifteen years later, he is a temporary professor of economics and social sciences at the Lycée Voltaire, in Paris XI.eand notes : “Social diversity is there, yet there is little musical diversity: rap crushes everything. First with the students… then in the teachers’ room. » From there, the journalist summarizes the history of hip-hop culture in France (admittedly with some approximations, the dance group Aktuel not having been created by Kool Shen and Joey Starr), compiles, among other things, the best writings by sociologist Karim Hammou or historian Bénédicte Delorme-Montini.
Above all, he cites the texts of rappers like Despo Rutti, Josman, Kaaris, Hugo TSR to highlight their contradictions on capitalism, for example. And he does not avoid any angry subject, such as the anti-Semitism of Freeze Corleone or the rejection of gender theory by artists like Dosseh or Lacrim. However, the conclusion leaves us wanting more: rap would have a destiny closer to rock than that of pop. Too bad in this case not to have cited Casey, one of the artists who thinks the most about rap. St. B.
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