Marginal binaire audio / outsider et en stéréo

Rap music has always expressed various degrees of confrontation, appropriation, rejection, and crossing borders. Providing outlets for expressions previously limited to the margins, it offers a large canvas against which many dimensions of identity politics can be projected. France, the world's second-largest market for rap music, is by no means an exception in this regard, as its forms of hip-hop music have grown out of inflections of the dominant African-American practice and evolved into something unique to its own cultural and historical situation. Or, rather, situations: for the central practice of borrowing, riffing, and blending often yields a music rich with confrontation between and métissage among issues of identity as they are related to race, ethnicity, and nation. By examining several recent French rap projects through the notion of the "counternation" that proposes simultaneous inclusion and exclusion, the present study considers how expressions from the margins can also be expressions of the margins: in this case, blurring the boundaries between musical genres. Some examples of recent French rap music illustrate how tensions surrounding undecidability and indeterminacy are played out, lyrically and musically, by artists who seek different degrees of resolving the tensions (or letting them linger). Ultimately, as it crosses borders - of genre, nation, and language - French rap music represents an increasingly important cultural presence throughout the world

Art · Canadian Identity and History · Cultural Identity and Heritage · Music History and Culture

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