The trouble with French rap

Last Monday, a group of 20 French rappers released a video entitled ‘No Pasarán’. Evoking the Republican resistance against Franco in the Spanish civil war and before that, the resistance of the French against the Germans during the Great War, the phrase called for people to resist Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National. If last night’s second round election results in France were anything to go by – with the Rassemblement National finishing third – the rap did the trick.

The message is anything but subtle, set against a video montage of refugee camps, clips of fascist rallies, and Le Pen’s mansion in the affluent Parisian suburb of Saint-Cloud, to a refrain of a boxing match annotated with the words ‘Jordan t’es mort’ in block capitals. But if Jordan Bardella, the young turk from the French council estate who has risen to be Marine Le Pen’s number two, is depicted as wiped out in the ring, this begins to look fairly anodyne compared to the language used to describe Marine Le Pen and her niece Marion.