Slate, while taking a certain "journalist" out to the woodshed for a solid (and amusing) whomping, provides an outstanding primer on the largely-ignored French hip-hop scene and the head-spinning French slang known as Verlan .. read more for an excerpt or get the whole thing here
Slate To be fair, Brooks is tromping into territory that has befuddled even hardened music critics. For at least a dozen years, the French hip-hop scene has been the world's most vibrant outside of the United States, yet it has been almost completely ignored by the American music press. And while rock critics have championed British grime, Brazilian baille funk, and other foreign hip-hop offshoots, they've completely missed the boat on IAM, Suprême NTM, Arsenik, TTC, Saïan Supa Crew, and dozens of other French MCs, who, in addition to voicing the disaffection of the French underclass, happen to be masters of the form—rappers of amazing skill, style, and wit.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.