Early 80s hip hop12/31/2023 ![]() ![]() Our list of experimental, pioneering and novelty French raps includes essential and interesting tunes, but compared to the discoveries we made in the Netherlands, Sweden or the United Kingdom, France hits the jackpot fewer times. And in regards to rap stealing into individual compositions, the variété française genre might have simply been attracted by the fun a rap part could provide on a pure sonic level of a song.įinding French pop tunes with rap was not the problem. The French music industry was open to it, and one of the reasons for that may have been that boogie began a liaison with the French version of post-war pop music, variété française. French boogie emerged initially as catchy, danceable blends of American synthetic funk, plus disco, soul and old school rap, and the genre would come to herald the beginnings of French rap.’ The legalisation of pirate radio in the country in 1981 allowed people to adopt a freer attitude towards what they spun on the airwaves and produced fertile ground for new sounds to take hold. According to the DUMMY website ”French boogie’ is a nebulous term used to describe a new, carefree form of music that didn’t take itself seriously. ![]() Since nowadays boogie is primarily a collector’s term, it’s not quite clear how much it was considered a brand in France at the time. A scene of boogie devotees would eventually develop in the UK, although British pop music embarked on adventures of its own during that period. Boogie never established itself as an explicit genre in the USA, even though it originated there. One such niche was what is retrospectively called boogie, a cluster of post-disco dancefloor tunes that could be characterized as disco going back to its roots in funk and soul. ![]() From the obvious picks from the ’80s pop canon (the most obvious being Pet Shop Boys‘ “West End Girls”) and the rest that I discovered especially in the United Kingdom I concluded that such artefacts would not be hard to find in pop and rock music across Western, Northern and Southern Europe and North America so that we could put together an anthology of rap’s initial permeation into popular – predominantly white – music.Īs it turned out, rap was not necessarily adopted by the major artists of their time (or the countless folks going with the flow of the mainstream) but in niche markets and by maverick or accidental artists. I began to remember random ’80s tunes with any sort of rapping that did not belong to the rap tracks I was intimately familiar with as a longtime hip-hop fan. When Born Bad Records followed up with “France Chébran Volume 2” three years later, it was a déjà-vu in the best possible sense. The vocalists’ interpretations of ‘rapping’ varied, but compared to other collections and playlists covering this specific style (and region and period), the emphasis on rap vocals was evident. Through it, I discovered tunes – often obscure, sometimes vaguely familiar – that featured a healthy amount of rapping. I first got the idea to search for rapping on ’80s pop records when I came across the compilation “France Chébran – French Boogie 1981-1985” in 2015. ![]()
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