This 1995 Rap Song About France’s Far-Right Politics Is More Relevant Than Ever

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This 1995 Rap Song About France’s Far-Right Politics Is More Relevant Than Ever

A hip-hop song called "Plus jamais ça" ("Never again"), recorded in 1995, remains a potent rallying cry against Marine Le Pen and her party.

On April 23, French voters will cast their ballots for one of 11 presidential candidates, then choose one of the two highest scorers in a runoff on May 7. Leading in the polls is the blonde, smiling, harmless-looking 48-year-old Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right Front National, who has built her political career on the idea that the government does more for immigrants than for Français de souche, a dog whistle literally translating to "French people of French descent." Among other frightening things, Le Pen has asserted that Algeria shouldn't have become independent from France; her campaign promises to end "divisive" initiatives to acknowledge French colonization's harmful effects. She's claimed refugees are bearers of disease, describing their arrival as "bacterial immigration" (a historically loaded idea to put it mildly), and she has equated Muslims praying in public spaces to the Nazi occupation of France.

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Le Pen's ascension to the national spotlight hasn't happened in a historical vacuum: The Front National, which began as a fringe extreme-right populist movement in 1972 under the leadership of her father Jean-Marie, made mainstream inroads by the mid-90s. The elder Le Pen, who famously claimed that Nazi gas chambers were "a detail in the history of the Second World War," won 15 percent of the presidential vote in 1995, placing fourth. Among the responses to this unprecedented event was a hip-hop song called "Plus jamais ça" ("Never again"), which addressed the FN's rise above street-level politics and the incipient return of the far right on a national stage just 50 years removed from World War II. Two decades later, its message about not repeating the mistakes of the past is once again relevant for the present.

Suprême NTM, or simply NTM, was one of the most prominent and distinctive French rap groups of the 90s. Founded in 1988 and disbanded in 2001 (the group has reunited for performances since), its two members were Kool Shen (Bruno Lopes, who is French-Portuguese) and Joey Starr (Didier Morville, who like many important black French protest writers—Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Patrick Chamoiseau—is Martiniquais on his father's side), both from the economically depressed Parisian exurb of Saint-Denis. The group stood out for its sound—characterized by 70s funk samples and Joey Starr's gravelly, dancehall-inflected roar—and for clever, inflammatory lyrics.

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France is a country of race- and class-blind political discourse couched in the obfuscating doublespeak referred to as la langue de bois ("wooden tongue"). As a result, it's long fallen to music to provide unvarnished responses to politics. NTM's words once earned them fines and probation. Today, these lyrics are part of the musical canon alongside the rabble-rousers of the chanson française tradition, like Serge Gainsbourg and anarchist enfant terrible Léo Ferré. Like many of their contemporaries, NTM skipped all over the sub-genre divisions between hardcore, conscious hip-hop, and party anthems. Their greatest hits range from the comedic, bawdy "La fièvre" ("The fever") to the spare and ominous "Laisse pas traîner ton fils" ("Don't let your son hang around"). But the group's bread and butter was always political contestation, whether lighthearted or dead serious.

"Plus jamais ça" is the first full track off NTM's 1995 album Paris sous les bombes ("Paris under the bombs," a reference to graffiti and not World War II). Over an ominous funk sax sample, Kool Shen and Joey Starr bellow the chorus: "Mais on est tous las de ce retour au même schéma," which translates to "we're all tired of this return to the same situation"—or, more simply, "not this shit again." It is the song I keep turning to when I think of the current political moment—not because it's the only French rap protest song or, indeed, NTM's only protest song but because it's so eerily incisive about the mechanisms through which the FN has once again clawed its way toward power. Kool Shen explicitly attributes the success of the FN to voters' amnesia allowing "the mistakes of the past [to] easily repeat themselves". Can anything but amnesia explain a far-right nationalist movement becoming so popular in a country that has actually lived under a far-right nationalist regime before (from 1940 to 1944) under which people were surveilled, terrorized, and massacred?

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Supreme NTM in 1995 / Photo courtesy of Legacy Recordings

But people don't just have amnesia about the era that politicians euphemistically refer to as "the darkest period of our history" ( la langue de bois strikes again). NTM lament the fact that when politicians reveal who they are, people never seem to remember. Kool Shen rattles off some facts about Jean-Marie Le Pen with an exasperated tone suggesting that he can't believe he has to reiterate this: "I remind you that he praises racial segregation / I still have to remind you that this man is not normal / and hasn't been since the loss of Algeria / which he never got over."

Ironically, "Plus jamais ça" could have been recorded in any election year since 1995. With all its reminders of the danger of Le Pen and what he represents and the evils of the period he's nostalgic for, all its warnings about history repeating itself—"honor, the motherland, conquest and colonies / we already know where that stupid shit leads," says Kool Shen—"Plus jamais ça" was doomed to constant relevance as French electoral history repeated itself over and over. In the following presidential election in 2002, Le Pen made it to the runoff against incumbent Jacques Chirac before losing in a landslide. Chirac wouldn't even consent to a one-on-one debate with his opponent because he didn't want to legitimize him, something that no doubt won't be possible for Marine Le Pen's eventual challenger.

But Chirac, who always expressed distaste for the FN without ever actually contesting its arguments, ultimately helped destigmatize the far-right party. Kool Shen snarls in one cryptic-seeming line from "Plus jamais ça": "I fight those who are bothered by smells and noises." This is a reference to a 1991 speech Chirac gave to members of his party, saying, "The problem isn't foreigners, the problem is there's an overdose." Chirac described a hypothetical situation of a French (meaning white) worker seeing black and Muslim immigrants receive government benefits: "if you add to that the noise and the smell, well the French worker goes mad," said Chirac.

"The past is injurious / but what's more certain for the future / is that we'll be dealing with this same climate."

This nauseating argument bears more than a passing resemblance to the ideas of Jean-Marie Le Pen, particularly to remarks he was condemned for under France's hate speech laws about "Roma who have… an irritating and, let's say, aromatic presence." Le Pen was fined under hate speech laws, but a suit against Chirac for his remarks was dismissed. Apparently, racism is easier to accept when it comes from someone with the urbane, upper-class demeanor of Jacques Chirac. And the racism of polite, cultured people is a gateway drug to the racism that's more visibly distasteful: By co-opting the FN's ideas to try to poach its voters (or indeed to reflect their own opinions more closely), mainstream politicians have lent the party legitimacy. Chirac bore part of the responsibility for Jean-Marie Le Pen making it to the runoff, then refused to debate him like butter wouldn't melt in his mouth.

Back in 1995, Joey Starr presciently concluded his verse on "Plus jamais ça" by saying, "the past is injurious / but what's more certain for the future / is that we'll be dealing with this same climate." And indeed, here French people are once again, about to make a decision to accept or reject the Front National. It's a win-win for Marine Le Pen: She's poised to either take the presidency or become the leading figure of the opposition, capitalizing on resentment against neoliberalism and the political establishment. Neither she nor what she represents is going away. In response, French music will need more versions of the frustratingly enduring message shared in "Plus jamais ça." Since no politician seems able to speak out honestly and effectively against fascist ideas, since the major newspapers depict leftists like Jean-Luc Mélenchon as dangerous while normalizing Marine Le Pen, it's going to continue to fall on young people to take back anti-elitism and populism from the far-right and continue to advocate against state racism in the streets, in art, and everywhere they can. Illustration: Marine Le Pen via Wikimedia Commons Follow Emily Lever on Twitter.