Dominique Bluher. Camera Obscura. September 2001.
Thanks to Hugues Bazin’s book, La culture hip-hop, the existence of hip-hop in France has been brought to light as an authentic cultural movement with its own philosophy and moral perspective. Hip-hop brings together a number of artistic practices and styles: music (rap, reggae, DJing, human beat-box); dance (of which break dancing and smurf are the best known); and graphics (tagging and graffiti art). These street arts were developed in the suburbs of Paris and other large French cities as part of a contemporary urban culture defined by lifestyle, slang, and fashion. While hip-hop originated in American cities in the 1970s as a cultural response to racism, it only arrived in France between 1982 and 1984. While at first French hip-hop simply imitated American styles, subsequently it rapidly developed its own means of expression proper to the French banlieue.
While its artistic force is now indisputable with respect to music and dance (the artistic value of tagging remains contested), the hip-hop movement is less often recognized as a cultural and social movement with a philosophy, indeed an ethics. For the most part, popular audiences in France are unaware that Afrika Bambaataa, the “founding father” of hip-hop in the US (or more precisely the Zulu Nation, which constitutes along with the B. Boys one of the two essential poles of hip-hop) formulated a charter of around twenty laws of conduct. These precepts were to be observed primarily on the street and expressed through a street art that presents and conveys the aesthetic principles of hip-hop. Indeed, one of the primary characteristics of hip-hop style is that it be indissociably tied to a street ethics.
Legend has it that the birth of Zulu Nation was inspired by Afrika Bambaataa’s reaction to the death of one of his best friends, struck down by police officers during a fight with a rival gang from the Bronx. Bambaataa quit his gang and threw himself into music where he was quickly recognized for his originality as a rap DJ and mixer. Strengthened by this experience, he sought to generalize his musical aesthetic by creating Zulu Nation as a peaceful alternative, based on creativity, to the violence of gang life. The Zulu National ethic proscribes all violent acts and abusive conduct, drugs (which may neither be sold nor consumed), vandalism, or involvement in criminal activity. It advocates a resolutely positive attitude toward life and a profound respect for others. Zulus dedicate themselves to developing a positive energy in order to have the will to survive and to be “fresh,” that is, to make do in difficult socioeconomic contexts. Recognition of the other (or of difference) occurs necessarily through the acceptance of one’s self. One has to be authentic in affirming, and not denying, one’s multicultural and multiethnic identity so characteristic of contemporary urban life.
Respect for others is also expressed by channeling aggression, whether implicitly or explicitly, into a creative competitiveness defined by notions of rivalry and respect. As Georges Lapassade and Philippe Rousselot argue in their book, which is still the first and best study in French of rap: “This is the fundamental point of hip-hop culture; the word replaces the knife.” One is recognized by others neither through force nor wealth, but rather by the quality of one’s artistic accomplishments. One seeks to perfect one’s self, and to outdo others while nonetheless respecting other artists who have gained a certain notoriety. In this manner, it is equally unthinkable either to tag over someone else’s work or even to sign a tag or paint graffiti if one has not yet acquired a certain level of skill.
Beur Cinema
The hip-hop movement in France has not been accompanied by the production of independent films that claim to be the expression of a minority culture as, for example, it was with black independent filmmaking in the US in the 1970s and 1980s. On the other hand, there has been a lot of critical attention paid recently to both beur cinema and the banlieue film in France. One way of approaching hip-hop cinema, then, is to situate it in contrast with these two more well-known critical definitions.
In spite of the recent popularity of banlieue films and what is often called the beur cinema of French-Arab filmmakers, ironically French-Arab directors often dissociate themselves from the idea of a beurcinema by arguing that this label risks marginalizing their films. (For the same reasons, French women directors refuse to characterize their work as either feminine, feminist, or woman’s films.) While beur (verlan, with an apocope, for Arab) is more a popular term than a militant form of self-reference for young maghrebi born in France to immigrant parents, it nonetheless has a political connotation. The term originated in the 1980s in the context of the founding of numerous organizations, such as SOS Racisme, France-Plus, and Radio Beur, and in the mounting of rather spectacular political actions by young maghrebis; for example, the march for equal rights and against racism in 1983, and Convergence ’84. As Adil Jazouli emphasizes, the 1983 march can be considered as
the fundamental historical act in the construction of a collective action on the part of banlieue youth. Even today, this foundational act marks the nature of the political actions carried out by a great number of youth in the housing projects. Instead of cracking up, these young people preferred to march across France in order to see, to understand, to explain, and to talk of life in the projects …
Thanks to these marches, “the word ‘beur’ became emblematic of a certain recognition [by majority French society], indeed of a certain sympathy, with all the ambiguities that such ‘good intentions’ … can carry.”
Although beur cinema began to appear in this context in 1985 with the first films of Mehdi Charef (Le The au harem d’Archimede [Tea in the harem]) and Rachid Bouchareb (Baton rouge), these films are not properly speaking militant. They are characterized, rather, by the absence of a denunciation of racism and the need to attenuate the situation of young beurs looking to assimilate into French society. The refusal of the designation beurthus demonstrates the implicit desire of French-Arab directors to depoliticize their work in the attempt to associate themselves with either mainstream film or cinema art et essai, rather than with a minority cinema. From another perspective, French “minorities” (as defined either by gender or ethnicity) often adhere to a French republican ideology wherein integration and acceptance occur with assimilation, understood as a fusion without a display or claim of difference. Beur filmmakers, by definition born in France, thus consider themselves, and with reason, to be as French as the “French” born in France.
Consequently, or perhaps because of the reticence of the filmmakers themselves, there is some confusion as to whether beur cinema consists only of those films made by French Arabs. This would exclude, for example, films that are equally important for the emergence of beur cinema like Le The au harem d’Archimede, since Charef has kept his Algerian nationality even though he moved to France at the age of ten and grew up there. And how or even why one should distinguish these films from those made by North Africans who work only occasionally in France like Merzak Allouache before his political exile, or from other French films that feature French-Arabs like Serge Le Peron’s Laisse beton (1984) or more recently Anne Fontaine’s Les Histoires d’amour finissent mal en general [Love affairs usually end badly] (1993)? Alternatively, a new “genre” has appeared recently that is equally difficult to define and that has, in a way, taken up the definitional problems raised by beur cinema; namely, the so-called banlieue films of which La Haine [Hate] (diro Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995) is probably the best known.
Hip-Hop Cinema
In spite of these possible critical reservations, there are three or four recent films, two by beur filmmakers and two by a white French filmmaker, that could be considered as the first examples of a French hip-hop cinema: Hexagone by Malik Chibane (1994), Souviens-toi de moi [Remember me] by Zaida Ghorab-Volta (1995/96), and Etat des lieux (1995) and Ma 6-T va crack-er (1997) by Jean-Francois Richet.
The economic context, or mode of production of these films, is the first important point of comparison. The majority, indeed all films produced in France, might be called independent, if not alternative, since they are made and financed in the absence of a studio system and a network of distribution comparable to that of the US. Thus the independent films made in France are not necessarily the expression of an aesthetic alternative to the mainstream. And by the same token, perhaps neither beur cinema nor the banlieue film can be considered as French exponents of a hip-hop aesthetic, despite their references to the presence of an active hip-hop culture in music, dance, and art, which is expressive of an alternative urban, multicultural experience in contemporary France.
Exactly like French rappers, who created their own record companies for their first recordings, these directors put in place a parallel economy to make their films; Hexagone, Etat des lieux, and Souviens-toi de moiwere not only independently and self-produced, they are also low-budget or rather “no-budget” productions, produced with the budget for just a short film, borrowed equipment, and without professional actors.
Chibane financed his film through a cooperative association, Idriss, of which he was one of the founders and president, located in the Paris suburb of Goussainville in the Val-d’Oise. This association is perfectly characteristic of the actions pursued by banlieueyouth and illustrates equally well how hip-hop ideals can operate in a French context. In the beginning, Idriss’s objective was to organize tutoring and leisure activities for young people in the neighborhood. But after the death from AIDS of a friend and IV drug user, Chibane wanted to film the stories and lives of young people in the banlieue. The association thus became the support and context for an artistic activity that mobilized not only youth but also the inhabitants and shopkeepers of the neighborhood.
Alternatively, Ghorab-Volta created her own production company, with the telling name of Voleur Productions (Thief Productions), so as to produce a film for which she could not otherwise find the finances and subventions necessary for shooting under professional conditions. Seven years passed between the first draft of the scenario and the filming of her script, and three years passed between the first day of shooting and the premiere of the film. Richet also created his own production company with the equally telling name of Actes et Octobre, and was able to produce Etat des lieux thanks to money obtained from unemployment insurance that was multiplied at the casino.
These films were made, therefore, outside of or parallel to the (independent) system of production in France. As so-called no-budget films, they were made with very little financial support and were only finished and distributed thanks to the combative stubbornness of their directors, the help of more established cinema personalities who provided their support, the courageous commitment of certain small distribution companies like Cine Classic for Hexagone and Pierre Grise for Souviens-toi de moi, and finally, thanks to the support of an association of independent filmmakers, ACID (Agence du cinema independant pour sa diffusion), which was created, in fact, with the objective of enabling films that are ignored in the more commercial circuits to gain a national release.
Richet alone was able to complete Etat des lieux with financing from the television channel La Sept Arte, and the film was distributed by one of the most important independent distributors in France, MKL (Matin Karmitz, at the time associated with Lazennec Diffusion). By contrast, his second film, Ma 6-T va crack-er was produced by an established production house (Why Not Productions), even if he was still as much engaged, or indeed, enraged, by the problems of the banlieue.
This type of financing, or rather lack of it, relies of course on the participation of friends working for free both in front of and behind the camera. It would be too simplistic, however, to conclude that resemblances on the economic level produce correlations on the stylistic level, even if one cannot deny certain similarities, above all between Hexagone and Souviens-toi de moi, owing to their lack of financial means as well as to the inexperience of the directors and their crews. But these are only artificial similarities, for in fact the films exhibit very different aesthetic approaches. Hexagone belongs with those films that give priority to the scenario, and to psychologically well-defined characters inscribed in a determined social context that dictates their actions. Chibane’s desire to reinvoke a certain “popular realism” is confirmed by his second film, Douce France (1995). Souviens-toi de moi, on the other hand, privileges a mise-en-scene characterized by long takes of the body in movement, and the film is constructed around a strong, dramatic opposition between France and Algeria.
Hip-Hop Cinema versus Banlieue Films
The new “genre” of the so-called banlieue films has, in a way, taken up the definitional problems raised by beur cinema and is equally difficult to define. Are banlieue films defined only by their setting, or must one take their directors’ social backgrounds into account as well as their political point of view?
In this context, Etat des lieux is undoubtedly one of the most interesting contemporary films in France in that it is among the rare works today that are political in content as well as form. In fact, Richet refers explicitly to Soviet cinema of the 1920s—Dziga Vertov, and above all, Eisenstein’s October. A former worker himself, Richet creates a film that examines the life of a worker in the banlieue (as played intensely by Patrick Dell’Isola, who also co-wrote the scenario). And even if the film has a discernible narrative line, Richet never hesitates to change its tone and rhythm or to detour the plot in order to critique social tensions and contradictions. This is all the more striking since the possibilities for making political cinema in France are currently very limited.
Like most critics of Ma 6-T va crack-er, I feel Richet’s second film is less successful than his first. In spite of the important and contemporary subject matter and his intended political approach, in comparison with his first film the aesthetic strategies are clearly less convincing. Thus it is difficult to accept Ma 6-T va crack-er, which treats the drug conflicts of two neighboring gangs, as Richet intended it: that is, as a story of the “subproletariat.” Indeed the film risks misinterpretation as a call to riot and civil war. And yet one must certainly take Etat des lieux and Ma 6-T va crack-er into account for any consideration of the so-called banlieue films.
In this context, it is easy to establish a fundamental contrast between Etat des lieux and La Haine with respect to their relations with the spectator: La Haine carries spectators away, seducing and amazing them with its virtuoso framings and camera movements and its refined work on the black and white image; Etat des lieux requires an active spectator who can follow the jumps between scenes and the abrupt stylistic shifts. Richet forces the spectator to take a position—the reference to October is not a frivolous one.
In spite of the intrinsic interest of Richet’s work for discussing the question of banlieue films, I have always hesitated, and continue to have my doubts, about considering his work as what I call hip-hop films. I have included them, finally, but only because gangsta rap—a macho style that celebrates violence—has also been counted as belonging to hip-hop culture and has become its most widely known form, owing to battles with censorship and the police. Like gangsta rap, Etats des lieux and Ma 6-T va crack-er are characterized by a violence that is both aesthetic and political as well as by an intolerable misogyny and machismo. Perhaps these films most resemble our contemporary idea of hip-hop culture, but this is in fact only a reductive and highly mass-mediated image of hip-hop.
However, gangsta rap is only one dimension of rap music. According to Roy Shurker, one can distinguish between five major forms: gangsta rap, hard-core, reggae rap, female rap, and East Coast or Daisy Age rap. And rap itself, we should remember, is only one form of hip-hop culture, which also includes other types of musical expression as well as dance forms, graphics, slang, and fashion. For these reasons, I have reservations about including both gangsta rap and Richet’s films as expressions of hip-hop culture, because from the beginning hip-hop has been characterized by an ethic of nonviolence and respect for others as reflected in the “Principles of the Universal Zulu Nation.” This is why I feel it is important to emphasize the original conception of the hip-hop movement. Paradoxically, while Etat des lieux and Ma 6-T va crack-er seem to correspond most closely to what we might think of as a filmic expression of the hip-hop movement—incorporation of rap, staccato montage, stylistic melange, the appearance of rappers, break-dancers, and tagged walls in the mise-en-scene—I would argue, finally, that they represent only one possible, and controversial, offshoot of hip-hop. Alternatively, there are two films that at first glance do not resemble all the hip-hop cliches, that in fact do not even contain any rap music, but that prove to be, finally, much closer in spirit to the hip-hop movement.
It is with respect to this conception that I group Souvienstoi de moi and Hexagone together in contrast with the banlieue films that profit from the “tragic situation” of the banlieue to stage a mise-en-scene dominated by a violence and an aggression (thus perpetuating the same stereotypical image of a masculinist world) that results inevitably in an impasse.
Hexagone and Souviens-toi de moi
We may link two beur films directed by French filmmakers of maghrebian origins, which also have young beurs as protagonists, and whose action is set in the Parisian banlieues where Chibane and Ghorab-Volta both live. Hexagone takes place in Goussainville, while the location of Souviens-toi de moi is never explicitly named, though it is easy to guess that the action takes place in Colombes. Ghorab-Volta herself plays the main character, Mimouna, displaying in certain scenes a physical and dramatic quality that recalls the young Anna Magnani. Chibane also appears briefly in his own film, sparking a lively discussion of the unrealized assimilation of Arabs in France.
Hexagone tells the prosaic story of Ali (Karim Chakir), Staf (Hakim Sarahoui), and Slim (Jalil Naciri), three friends who live in Goussainville, a Parisian banlieue, whose daily lives are occupied with questions of unemployment, passing time, drugs, and relations with friends, girls, and their parents. As Slim (who accompanies Ali as narrator of the film) remarks, Ali is alone in having successfully struck a balance between school and the street. Ali studies computing at the university and has used his skills to obtain counterfeit certificates of employment from bankrupt companies for Staf and Slim so they will have a better chance at finding work or a paid internship. Staf, like Slim, is unemployed; he starts a relationship with a woman from Brittany (and therefore a blond, and white, “French” Frenchwoman), hiding his Arabic origins by passing as an Italian. Slim has a secret relationship with Nacera, Star’s little sister. She wants their relationship out in the open, but Slim resists, pretending that their parents would want them to marry, which he feels unable to do as long as he is out of work. Slim also has a sister, who is a friend of Nacera’s, and a brother who is a junkie and who will die from an overdose at the end of the film. The brother’s fate constitutes the dramatic frame for the film since, at the beginning, we see their mother consult a marabout, who advises her urgently to leave the banlieue if she wants to save her son.
I will return later to the image of maghrebian women portrayed in Hexagone, which is particularly interesting in the degree to which it contradicts the simplistic and cliched representation of beur women in the majority of French films. Beur women are more often than not relegated without exception to secondary roles, if not simply to brief appearances as supermarket checkout girls, prostitutes, or drug addicts. Souviens-toi de moi is exceptional in this respect because it is, to my knowledge, the only feature film directed (and released) by a beur woman, and it is also the first beur film to have a maghrebi woman as the main character. Souviens-toi de moi is carried from beginning to end by its protagonist, Mimouna. Mimouna is a young woman who still lives, along with a little sister and an older brother, with her parents who have immigrated from Algeria apparently for economic reasons. The parents speak Arabic, not only between themselves, but also to the children who, by contrast, respond in French, as is often the case with immigrant families. The mother is a traditional Arab woman, as signified both by her clothing and by the fact that she rarely leaves the kitchen where she occupies herself with the meals—she is introduced preparing couscous and serving tea to her husband. She often has violent arguments with the two daughters who have stayed at home (a third and oldest daughter has run away). On the other hand, the children fear their father. To carve out a bit of freedom, Mimouna pretends to work as a night duty nurse, when in reality she works at a cafeteria. (The mother is not fooled.) In this way she is able to pass her nights with her (white) lover, Jacques, to see her (white) girlfriends, or to go out dancing at night clubs. She has a tumultuous relation with her boyfriend who no longer seems to love her as before. He seems in fact to have started another relationship and yet does not want to break off with Mimouna. Their meetings often result in terrible scenes of jealousy.
As it is summer, Mimouna’s parents ask her to vacation with them in Algeria. (The brother refuses to go for fear of being held for military service; the little sister leaves for a vacation village.) Mimouna takes advantage of this time away to rethink her relationship with Jacques. The second, and last, part of the film takes place in Algeria where Mimouna rejoins her female cousins, to whom the film is dedicated. In contrast to the first part set in Paris—where Mimouna walks alone and free in the streets, and where her mobility is a sign of her independence—the Algerian scenes unfold behind walls, a fact emphasized by several long traveling shots. The fact of being cloistered in the house does not prevent the women, however, from establishing an intimate and merry community where they speak openly of their relationships with men, of the impossibility of having men as friends or marrying for love, but also of more quotidian topics such as the difficulties in finding a variety of fruits and vegetables, unlike in France. When we find her at the end of the film, Mimouna is walking along the Seine with her girlfriends to whom she confesses her decision to break off with Jacques, even if she might still love him a bit. Mimouna has matured, then, thanks to her retreat among women, who find gaiety despite their seclusion, and in making the decision now to be more self-reliant and to take charge of her own life.
Hip-hop, then, cannot be characterized primarily as films whose mise-en-scene is defined by break dancers, tags on the walls, and rap music. I have already discussed the economic conditions and the recent spate of banlieue films that end in a social, political, and emotional impasse. Without in the least softening their image of life in the banlieues, Hexagone and Souviens-toi de moi transmit a different message that—and rightly so—is also inscribed in hip-hop’s original philosophy. In spite of the difficulties they must confront, the protagonists of these two films maintain positive attitudes toward life; in neither film is life in the banlieues an inescapable fatality leading to a tragic conclusion. Quite the contrary, these films show above all that the protagonist’s problems cannot be reduced to those of the banlieues and the economic or social difficulties that confront them. The other significant emphasis of these films is that one must accept, and not deny, one’s multiethnic and multicultural identity; indeed, this double culture can be the foundation, as in Souviens-toi de moi, of particularly advantageous cultural and emotional resources.
In this context, it is also interesting to emphasize the attitudes of the young women in these two films. In contrast to men of the same age, none is unemployed; all have jobs, though this is certainly because they are less demanding and have more realistic expectations than the men. Mimouna works in a cafeteria, and even if her contract is not going to be renewed, this hardly seems to worry her. And although Nacera must ask her father’s permission to work as a salesgirl at the mall—work Staf describes as a “shit job”—she is not, like her brother, unemployed. Rather, she chooses, like her sister who works as a checkout girl, to earn her own way. Nor is any of the women implicated in drug trafficking. The fact is that, unlike the men, they are more self-reliant and willing to accept work below their qualifications in order to better negotiate a position in French society.
Contrary to what one might expect, these films do not imply that the new generation of maghrebi women is multiply oppressed by their cultural origins and by French society (being women, nonwhite, and lower class). In contrast to the men, they seem to negotiate more easily the crossing of cultures. Looking more closely, notably at Hexagone, it is the young men who, unemployed and thus more socially excluded, are revealed to be victimized by convention. And in fact the young men are responsible, even more than their parents, for perpetuating patriarchal traditions and for maintaining a double standard with respect to women. Slim’s attitude is particularly revealing: He has an intimate relation with Nacera that, contrary to her wishes, he keeps secret with the pretense that he cannot support them as a couple. She wants to break with tradition, but he does not have the courage. And when by chance Slim, on a night out with his pals, encounters Nacera among her girlfriends at a disco, he even calls her a slut. Her brother Staf is equally shocked when he hears the story, even though he spent that very night with his Parisian girlfriend. When Staf asks his father why he allows Nacera to work and to leave the house (because “this isn’t done among the Arabs”), the father, interestingly, replies that he sees nothing wrong as long as Nacera does nothing reproachable.
Therefore, the women seem to manage the difficult balance between Arabic tradition and French freedom, even if, or perhaps because, they do so slowly and quietly. They even seem to accomplish this with the complicity (though implicit and understated) of their parents. Alternatively, the men have more trouble creating a new image of masculinity in spite of the liberty they enjoy. They are profoundly trapped in a traditional macho image whose only alternative seems to be that of the weak man: a “jackass,” as the father in Souviens-toi de moi (who at first looks very traditionalist) calls his son for his “inability to control his sisters.” But in a discussion with his friends in Algeria, even the father confesses an understanding for the difficulties of his children growing up in France. The ending of Hexagone summarizes well this gendered opposition when Slim, realizing he has spent his best moments with Nacera, says that “woman is the future of man.”
In Souviens-toi de moi, Mimouna’s mobility is a sign of her independence. On the one hand, her mobility strikes a stark contrast to the confinement of her mother and to the cloistered spaces of the scenes in Algeria. On the other hand, it signifies that, far from being only confined to domestic space, Mimouna has appropriated for herself all urban space, from the center of Paris to the suburbs. In almost every scene, Mimouna runs, indeed rushes. And if one thinks of the rhythm of rap or break dance in these scenes, this association is not because of the staccato montage, but rather because of the beat carried by the movements of her body and the rhythms of her displacement, which are fueled by the same liberatory energy.
Contrary to beur cinema, where the home country signifies only an unknown people, language, and customs—Bouchareb’s Cheb (1990) is a perfect example—Ghorab-Volta’s Algeria is neither frightening nor traumatizing. Nonetheless, she does not soften her image of life in Algeria. The women are cloistered in the house, having neither the freedom nor the opportunities of French women. But this containment does not prevent them from establishing an intimate and supportive community. As Mimouna explicitly states, this vacation “in the sticks” allows her to return to her roots, regain her calm and also her strength. Far from being presented as two opposed countries, then, France and Algeria are shown to complement one another. For Mimouna, it is not a question of having to choose but of profiting from what the cultures of both countries offer her. Her character incarnates an attitude felt strongly by Ghorab-Volta herself, as she expresses in the press packet for her film:
What is vital for an individual’s equilibrium is that they renounce neither their origins nor their own culture; that they know from whence they come, where they are, who they are … and that they accept this. We have to stop this destructive and negative talk, which I have heard practically all my life, that is also expressed with a condescending tone, as if to a wounded animal: “You’re betwixt and between, trapped between two cultures, you don’t even know who you really are, you’re cut in two and spread across both …” I am not betwixt and between, caught between two cultures. I have two cultures. Yes, one can think like that as well. Thus I have twice the possibilities for living … I am twice as rich.
Here again this film distinguishes itself both from the beur cinema and the banlieue films by adhering to hip-hop’s philosophy of creating ethnic and cultural hybrids. Ghorab-Volta affirms her difference from her parents’ generation, but while the difference between generations is foregrounded in the film, it is not presented as an unbridgeable gulf. In this film produced by a young woman of twenty-eight, both the mother and the father are depicted as fully understanding the difficulties their children encounter in France.
One must elude this destiny that seems reserved for banlieue youth. And there is an alternative marked by the affirmation of difference(s) and self-acceptance, hallmarks of the hip-hop ethic. For instance, Ghorab-Volta wrote, directed, and produced this film in which she also plays the leading role. “I acted in my film because I had something to prove. I had to prove that I was capable, that I could play roles other than those of Arab servants, thieves, dealers, or checkout girls.” The film carries her signature, and with it, she affirms herself.
This affirmation of self, “to be authentic,” passes through the affirmation of differences and through respect for the other exactly in the way that hip-hop culture requires. Another preoccupation of the hip-hop movement is participation in the creation of a collective memory, and here Souviens-toi de moi and Hexagone both excel. The films fix part of the history of French Arabs and their parents in the 1990s and figure an image of their generation, one that permits maghrebi French youth to take account of their situation and to improve it while promoting the values and attitudes of hip-hop: nonviolence, antiracism, the refusal of drugs, respect for others, being authentic and fresh.