Paris accommodates wandering pedestrians, intimate conversationalists and lively debaters. The café scene is ideal for contemplative solitude or lively socializing. But it is the emergent hip-hop and contemporary music scene that is generating sparks and perking up ears. Jazz has reigned supreme in Paris since the days of Josephine Baker and members of the Harlem Renaissance started flocking to the city.
My ears first perked up to French hip-hop in 1999 when a Black lesbian sistah gifted me with a CD titled “Vivre Ou Mourir” by a French female artist name Bams. I am not a big fan of hip-hop, the genre doesn’t move me, but this artist won me over. The melodic and orchestral underpinnings of her music combined with her hard hitting lyrics rocked my world! The day I started listening to her music is the day I made a conscious decision to stop generalizing hip-hop music. Bam’s 2006 release entitled “De ce Monde” is evident of her musical skills and proof she will be around for a long time.
I was recently introduced to the music of another French female artist named Keny Arkana, in fact it was the new friend I met at Le Louvre who gave me the heads up. The raw, gritty, passionate intensity of this artist’s music is like water on parched earth. Her video Le Rage is captivating in an in your face kind of way, but for me, listening to the MP3 file without the visuals was a cathartic experience.
Arkana’s musical style takes me back to the days of fierce dub-poetry and recordings like Annette Brissett and the Taxi Gang, Lillian Allen’s Revolutionary Tea Party and Conditions Critical, and Casselberry-Dupre’s rendition of Rivers of Babylon and their album City Down. French hip-hop female artists seem to be screaming the message to mainstream society: “Back the f_k up, Pierre or risk getting stomped!” The music of Bams, Arkana and old heads mentioned above is like the healing effects of extra strength Tiger Balm, you are going to feel the heat, DA FIRE-YUH, before you feel relief!
African American literature in general and Black feminist literary influences in particular are deeply rooted in some Parisian intellectual circles. One can scarcely attend any type of lesbian intellectual, literary or cultural function without there being some reference or quote attributed to writers that sprang forth from Kitchen Table Press in the 1980’s. I must say, I find it disappointing that many French lesbian feminists do not appear to seek out more contemporary writers or later work by the earlier writers they cite.
February 19th, 2007 at 1:39 pm
I am so in love with Paris! I always have been. It is one of my dreams to visit and eventually live part-time in Paris. I really enjoyed Skye’s commentary. It was very informative and lively.
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