'Hip-Hop En Français'
05,1 I 2020 Archiv für Textmusikforschung Alain-Philippe Durand (ed.): ‘Hip-Hop en français’. An Exploration of Hip-Hop Culture in the Francophone World. Lanham/Boulder/New York/London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020. ISBN 9781538116326. 233 pages. Alain-Philippe Durand is not a new name in Hip-Hop Studies, on the contrary: In 2002, his essay collection Black, Blanc, Beur: Rap Music and Hip-Hop Culture in the Francophone World, the first comprehensive English-language study of rap and hip-hop in the French-speaking world, was highly acclaimed by critics. Today, experts in popular culture owe him recogni- tion for a second volume, also exclusively in English, which takes up the thread of the first, but spins it out in a new way. ‘Hip-Hop en français’. An Exploration of Hip-Hop Culture in the Francophone World includes a foreword, an introduction and 13 articles from a wide range of disciplines. Some of the contributors are the same as in the first essay collection, and in some cases they deal with similar questions, so that reading both books ‘crosswise’ gives rise to new perspectives on the current volume and, in retrospect, to new chronologies. Moreover, the contributors cover different – and often several – professional fields, from freelance researcher to university professor, museum curator, journalist, and even rapper and organiser of hip-hop concerts. This diversity of expertise, professional know-how and artistic experience allows for a highly diversified approach to the complex subject matter – possibly the only viable one, since rap and hip-hop refer to nothing less than “the aesthetic, social, intellectual, and political identities, beliefs, behaviors, and values produced and embraced by its members, who generally think of hip-hop as an identity, a worldview, and a ‘way of life’” (x, quoting Morgan and Bennett 2011).
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