Review Summary: When French rap agreed to be the new Chanson Francaise
Do you know what a flip is? Basically, it's a skateboard maneuver in which the rider flips their board 360°. Apart from his love for skateboarding, there's a good reason Lomepal named his first full-length album like this figure: he decided to totally
flip the way people viewed French rap to come up with the most modern version of the genre. As the figure itself requires training and experience, it took quite some time for Lomepal to master his art. First known for his rapological technique - an obligatory step to be taken seriously - in 2013's
Cette foutue perle and
Le singe fume sa cigarette, he slowly started experimenting with his sound in his most recent EPs,
Seigneur and
Majesté. The transformation is complete with 2017's
FLIP, an album that strays away from rap and ought to be instead approached as a lyrics-centered pop album. Completely assuming his persona’s inner weirdness right from the album cover, Lomepal makes his rap more pop, and crafts pop that rapheads can appreciate.
For if rap has not totally disappeared from his music, it has nevertheless been diluted within the rapper’s other influences. There still remains an acute punchline awareness, and although some songs are more sung than rapped, it is always done with rhyming schemes and rapping flows. Yet, intelligibility has now triumphed over the rapological technique. Likewise, the beats are all built as rap instrumentals, yet have a sweet undertone. The music alternate between gliding beats ("Palpal”), modern rap instrumentals ("Lucy") or electronic-laden ones ("Bécane").
If this mix of two sounds can explain part of his success, the most important factor remains his authenticity. Lomepal has managed to deeply speak to his audience by dealing with extremely personal subjects. Love, a customary French song theme, is looked at through different lenses. Regret is touched upon in "Yeux disent" - the uber-hit from the album -, animalistic sexual intercourse is quite grossly mentioned in "Malaise", while "Danse" is but a metaphor for a tender sexytime. But in spite of this abundance of references, love is not the focus here.
Another important theme throughout the album is skateboarding, from the album title to the "Bryan Herman"/"Skit Skate" diptych. Lomepal loves skateboarding so much his promotional tour was called the FLIP Skate Tour. The concept was to arrive every day in a new city, go to a skate park, skateboard and then do an outdoors concert. With this promotional tour, Lomepal boldly claimed he does what he wants the way he wants it. And it is here that one can understand what made this album popular: it's part of the zeitgeist. Lomepal, 26 years old at the time, simply talks about being young and dumb. Love and skateboarding are mere pretexts to fully live his life. No huge political claims, no life-affirming lyrics, but only a will to enjoy youth. And this is what FLIP truly is all about.
This is the kind of album that was played from front to end in my college bar, because everybody could relate to it. Different kinds of people loved the record for different reasons. The album reached massive success during my last university year, and as the faculty bar manager, I spent more time being drunk than studying. One sentence deeply hit me:
J'ai l'impression d'avoir une vie bien remplie alors que je passe toutes mes journées défoncé, which can be translated as
I feel like I have a busy life when I spend all my days shitfaced. I was not the only one to be touched by the reality of the record: each of my friends loved it for various reasons. One of them preferred its cheeky punchlines, another liked the lyrics, and another one loved it for how musically diverse it was. This is true popularity: when you are loved by different people for different reasons.
On top of these personal considerations, the record can be further explained with the Deluxe version released in 2018. The three new songs synthesize the record, "Club" being the poppiest side of his music, "Un peu de sang" displaying how he experiments with his voice and "Outsider" recalling his EPs' themes. The deluxe edition also contains six live acoustic versions of
FLIP's songs showing his will to stray away from rap. Lomepal later indicated in interviews that he also wanted to do a rock album influenced by The Strokes and Mac Demarco. While he's not there yet, the first step is displayed with this album re-edition.
A pivotal moment in French song,
FLIP symbolizes the decade during which French hip hop finally accepted what it was: the music of the people. Letting go of any gangsta or conscious attitude, Lomepal simply puts his thoughts into music, and that is one of the main reasons why he earned massive success. Inauthenticity has always been an issue within the scene, many rappers being considered as using a fake persona to achieve success. This record was thus a breath of fresh air at the time as it was deeply personal and true to what Lomepal stood for. That’s not the only reason though: his music is genre-bending, he speaks his mind - very much connected to the zeitgeist without being political - and doesn't care about the repercussions of his artistry on his "legitimacy" as a rapper. As he would go on to say in his second album: "FLIP c'est un monument". That's arrogant, but he's right. This is an album that changed the game.
