French Hip Hop 2 Items

Released only on CD in 1996, this cult album from the gogo-acid jazzfunk-hip hop scene, which left its mark on an entire generation, is finally available on vinyl, with the added bonus of vintage remixes of DJ Dee Nasty's “Paris A Le Blues”. The album was also a huge success in Japan. With Lionel D., Dee Nasty, Omar D., D. Abuz System, Big Brother Hakim, La Malka Family... Mad In Paris was formed by the merger of two groups from the Paris suburbs, Créteil and Girgny, and took over the radio airwaves in 1996. A short-lived phenomenon, with just one album to their credit, they formed an ensemble of nine musicians and singers. The group scored a hit with “Paris a le Blues” on the eponymous album, which went beyond the hip-hop microcosm, as more mainstream radio stations, at a time when rap was on the rise, picked up on the Mad In Paris craze. They spent fifteen weeks in the top 50 at the time. It describes the malaise, the blues that stick to the City of Light, “from Barbès to Abbesses, from the Champs-Elysées to Les Halles”, pouring out its spleen. Thirty years on, it remains one of French music's most famous jaunts through Paname. A number of us in the editorial team have confessed that we bled this track back then, and while today the sound has certainly aged a little, because this rap no longer corresponds to our current standards or we certainly wouldn't listen to “Paris A le Blues” any more, Mad In Paris has shaped us all a little. In a more stealthy way, but in the same way as with Alliance Ethnik, we moved to these sounds that many called “groove” rather than hip-hop, a mix of urban music often blended from rap to funk. If “groove” is a catch-all term used by the media to cover all these influences, Mad In Paris belongs in the “rap” category. Because it was 1996 and we loved it.