Despite its commercial successes, French hip hop seems short on ideas and creativity, is dominated by two camps and apparently has nowhere left to go. Live shows have been stymied by the threat and fear of violence. Of vision, humour or integrity there seems very little sign. What better time,...
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Despite its commercial successes, French hip hop seems short on ideas and creativity, is dominated by two camps and apparently has nowhere left to go. Live shows have been stymied by the threat and fear of violence. Of vision, humour or integrity there seems very little sign. What better time, then, for the small Paris Underground to stand up and be counted? Artists like La Caution, James Delleck and, yes, TTC. While too many minds restrict themselves to rapping about how they "cut you like a knife", institutionalised censure or the effects of globalisation, Tido Berman, Teki Latex and Cuizinier have chosen the path of originality. Or, more precisely, they have not had to choose. The three MCs of TTC don’t try to be original, they simple aspire to be honest. Or kind of honest, anyway.
"Ceci N’est Pas Un Disque" ("This Is Not A Record") finally offers the group the opportunity to let their imagination run freely over twelve tracks. As Teki puts it, the album is "about three entire lifetimes spent receiving incredible, overly saturated and extreme amounts of information from various sources such as interactions with people, school, work, the media, modern pop culture, etc... our interpretation of that crazy amount of information and the way it affects us, how it reflects in our way of dealing with our own feelings, expressing our emotions and just basically expressing ourselves through music." This leads to results that sound like Abba on the Paris Underground anthem "Pollutions", Company Flow’s off centre b-boy abstraction on "Subway", the noise of footsteps in the snow sampled on "Danser", Autechre"s electronic-rigour on "En Soulevent Le Couvercle", the twisted logic of David Lynch on "Reconstitution" and straight-up anti-cool-rich-kids satire on "Pauvres Riches.
With guests including Doseone and producers including DJ Vadim, "Ceci N’Est Pas Un Disque" is funny, sick, serious, heartfelt, kitsch, abstract, bumping, internationalist and very, very French all at the same time, with enough ideas to shame those who think hip hop has said all it can say.
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