On a certain level, it’s hard to blame Anglophone critics. Your junior-high être et avoir won’t get you very far with the torrents of slang that fill French rap. Even most French-speakers find it hard to follow along. Many MCs deliver whole songs in Verlan, the ingenious, dizzying slang in which words are reversed or recombined, turning arabe (arab) into rabza, bourré (drunk) into rébou, bête (stupid) into teubé, and so on. (Verlan is itself an example of the form: Verlan= l’envers, “the reverse.”) It’s not surprising that France, the nation that enshrines conversational grandiloquence as a civic virtue right up there with fraternité, would take to the most blabbermouthed genre in music history. France’s chanson tradition is famous for emphasizing lyrics—the complete works of George Brassens and Charles Trenet are for sale in the poetry section of bookstores, right alongside Baudelaire and Rimbaud—and rappers are widely viewed as heirs to the chansonniers. The French Ministry of Culture, stodgy arbiters of all that is Truly French, has already given one of its top music prizes to Marseilles firebrands IAM, largely because of the poetic skills of its lead rapper, Akhenaton.
