Review Summary: The greatest French rap classic.
L'école du micro d'argent was a tidal wave. To this day, this is the best-selling French rap album. It's the most acclaimed too, established as an obelisk, an impassable monument raised to the glory of words, sounds, of a hip-hop that knows how to assume its street/intellect schizophrenia. The album, translated as "
School of the Silver Mic", also represents a turning point in France: it's the one that introduced rap to the general public. A national deflowering, in a nutshell.
The group responsible for this tsunami is the Marseille-based collective IAM. The band exists since 1989 and is composed of two MCs (
Akhenaton and
Shurik'n), accompanied by three DJs (Kheops, Imhotep, and Kephren) as well as dancer and
kagemusha Freeman. Taking most of their nicknames from Ancient Egypt, the group demonstrate from the outset their observation on today's society: Westerners are cavemen with laser pistols.
At the time, however, the group was not known for their precise lyricism or for their exploration of social themes, but for a
candy track,
Je danse le Mia, a song that earned them quips from the "serious" rap scene as it gained airplay in all nightclubs from Marseille to Brussels. Eagerly awaited by the general public wanting to shake their bum again, but also by the very rigid rap scene, they knew they had to make a rap album, a real one. If they didn't, their legitimacy would have taken a hard blow and they would have been pigeonholed forever as pop artists rather than a trve rap collective.
To establish this reputation, nothing was more obvious than going on a pilgrimage to the Mecca of hip hop: NYC. The band went to spend four months during the 1996 Spring in the Big Apple. They were looking for a very cinematographic sound that had not been done in France yet. Influenced by the
Wu-Tang Clan,
Mobb Deep and
Pete Rock, they were looking for a beat that
knocks, that fugitive energy when a baseball bat hits the ball. They were so determined that they decided to throw away an entire album because the outcome sounded, according to them, too nice and nuanced.
It resulted in very dense, deep and bewitching-to-death productions, based on dark and warm beats, feeding the famous piano/violin duo and velvety R'n'B all rappers of the time would have killed for. It culminated into a testament to the end of an era. Few American productions have managed to achieve the balance of this record, one that can marry the accessibility to all ears and the depth desired by purists, between imperturbable beats, scratches like a pinch of coriander and plump basses to honor the speakers. The package achieved a level of sophistication that was unequalled at the time, and which is still not about to be surpassed.
Eventually, they realized that with these new productions, the raps were slightly ahead of the beat, while
The Notorious B.I.G., for example, was dragging after the beat. Instead of re-recording everything, it was decided to shift all vocal parts by twenty milliseconds. Glued as close as possible to the rhythm, the rappers set themselves up as defenders of this flowstyle developed by
Rakim. As their idols of the Wu-Tang Clan, IAM consider flow as a samurai art, a martial art: a Martian art. They understood it was no longer necessary to directly attack the listener: their power is now contained, almost feline. Even when they drill themselves to the exercise of egotrip, there always is an austere atmosphere.
This rigor is also to be found in the lyrics. The wordsmiths display a rare finesse in comparison to the essence of the genre: few or no insults, taking a necessary step back from the subjects they deal with to reach a precision rarely achieved in French conscious rap. The lyrics are serious and grave, but always leave room for a lighter sentence that allows their discourse not to be too heavy.
The record is still full of war metaphors, because life is but a war. The group even displays a stereophonic bellicosity by attacking France's national motto:
Liberté, Equalité, Fraternité. What freedom is there to be found when one's life is dictated by one's social condition? What equality is there when two people are not born under the same star? What fraternity is there when life comes down to a great race where all strokes are allowed? Yet no morals to follow are dictated as the two rappers are just narrating their journey and that of their family. Despite the seriousness of the lyrics and the sometimes aggressive egotrips, IAM keeps what it takes in terms of sobriety and self-mockery to avoid going over to the dark side.
The symbol of this triumph is the closing track,
Demain c'est loin ("
Tomorrow is far away"), a 9-minute song with no chorus built with a refined 10-second loop. Like a sequence shot, the rappers paint a sonic panorama of the conditions and aspirations of their time. The alarming reality of life in the French
cités, the aspirations of its young inhabitants, their rampant stagnation, the precariousness of the next day, humor, seriousness, everything is blended together into an epic tale bringing the auditor straight back to 90s France. IAM accurately portrays our disillusioned youth falling into delinquency, fooled as they are by the system, the media, and the public. Like Polaroid snapshots recounting the lives of the ghosts inhabiting Marseille, the whole breathes authenticity through every pore. No one has ever succeeded so well in rallying hardcore fans and the general public.
Although this is a cultural and French classic, a minor personal complaint is the slight dip in quality in the middle of the record. Mind me, these tracks are still excellent, but compared to the bravura pieces the beginning and end of the album represent, I personally can't help but think a little pruning would have done some good. It still doesn't stop me from replaying the album again, and again.
It hasn't aged a single wrinkle, and still sounds as crisp as it did when it came out. For if it is important to mark one's era, it is necessary to go beyond this status to enter the pantheon of classic works, those both contemporary and timeless.
L'école du micro d'argent is the definitive French rap classic, a photograph from the late '90s, a collection of fables told by wise shaolin warriors. This is the polar star of French rap, the lighthouse that guides it despite the surrounding fog and the violence of the waves. If there was only one album of the genre that you would absolutely have to listen to, this would be the one.
