ABSTRACT
The big-sellers in France have included homegrown examples as varied as MC Solaar, Supreme NTM, Doc Gyneco and Saian Supa Crew, which, since the early 1990s, have established a significant place in mainstream popular music in terms of sales, play-listing and numbers of new releases. One view of the arrival of hip hop in France might be that it represents a further example of Americanization of ‘French’ popular culture, part of the eradication of cultural difference that more pessimistic analysts of cultural globalization have detected. Hip hop developed in the South Bronx area of New York in the mid-1970s, a culture of interconnected street arts including graffiti and dance as well as music, though it is principally in the form of the latter, known as ‘rap’, that it has been commercialized and distributed globally.
