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French rap artists produce violent anti-French works
by Olivier Guitta, The Weekly Standard EFL.You thought Kayne West was bad . . . . . . the kingpin of rapping French Francophobes is Mr. R. In his latest single--entitled "FranSSe," from the March 2005 album "PolitiKment IncorreKt"--he likens France to the Third Reich, singing: "France is a bitch, don't forget to f--her to exhaustion. You have to treat her like a whore, man! . . . France is one of the bitches who gave birth to you. . . . I am not at home and I don't give a damn, and besides the state can go f--itself. . . . I pee on Napoleon and General De Gaulle. . . . My niggers and my Arabs, our playground is the street with the most guns. . . . F--ing cops, sons of whores. . . . France is a lousy mother who abandoned her sons on the sidewalk. . . . My Muslim brothers are hated like my Jewish brothers were during the Reich"--at which point Mr. R's video shows footage of Hitler and of Nazi concentration camps. The video borders on pornography. It shows violent acts supposedly committed by the French Army. France is represented by two naked white women called "Gauloises" (a reference to the ancient inhabitants of France) who perform lewd acts with the French flag while a group of blacks make an obscene gesture. As a disclaimer Mr. R says, "When I speak of France, I don't mean the French people but their leaders. They've been exploiting us for a long time, from slavery to colonization, and they're still jerking us around." Tellingly, in the last words of the song, "France" is replaced by "Europe": "Europe is a bitch, don't forget to f--her to exhaustion. You have to treat her like a whore, man!"--which suggests that the rapper's grievances extend past France to include much of the West. Wonder if that violates any EU regulations? French intellectuals, journalists, and music critics have taken all this in stride. Fnac, the largest French chain of music stores, selected "PolitiKment IncorreKt" as its top featured album. Fnac's fawning review of the CD says: "And what if the subversive spirit of rock had made its way into French rap? . . . Monsieur R: a revelation." On July 16, Mr. R was among the lead performers at the prestigious Francofolies music festival in La Rochelle. Last month, Francois Grosdidier, a member of parliament from President Chirac's party, called on the minister of Justice to ban the broadcast of the video and take up legal action against Mr. R for "incitement to racism and hatred." The press reacted with outrage--against Grosdidier. The left-wing daily Libération denounced this harassment of rappers as futile. Mr. R, responding to the charge of anti-French racism, stuck to his guns: He's only talking about French leaders, he said, not the French people. As he told the newsmagazine Le Point, "I am not anti-French. I am a Belgian citizen." Another outspoken defender of Mr. R is Olivier Besancenot, head of the Communist Revolutionary League and a rising star of the French left. In 2002 at the age of 29, Besancenot ran in the first round of the presidential election and came in eighth out of 16 candidates, with over 4 percent of the votes. He actually performs--raps--on Mr. R's latest album. He told Libération that criticism of the video amounted to an "infringement of the freedom of expression." . . . With luck this new phenomenon might turn out to be a fad which peters out, the way anti-police, anti-white gangsta rap did in America after the early '90s. But in the meantime it will be interesting to see if the French will enforce their laws against racism and anti-Semitism--the toughest in Europe--against this homegrown anti-Western hatred. JFM, your thoughts? Posted by: Mike 2005-09-23 |
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