French rapper Xiao-Venom Blackara, better known in his quartier as XV, is a busy man this weekend. He has two pressing tasks: organising his first major concert and mobilising his neighbours and friends for the presidential elections in two weeks. That the two events will take place within a few days of each other is no coincidence.
“You have got to vote and you have got to learn about politics. The most dangerous thing in the world is ignorance,” says the rapper (24) from a rundown area of north-east Paris. “It is about having a say, about making sure our voices are heard.”
XV is not alone. With the hard-line right-wing former interior minister Nicholas Sarkozy still leading the polls and, according to surveys published on Saturday, strong and growing support for extreme right candidate Jean-Marie le Pen, French rappers are taking centre stage in the increasingly bitter battle for the votes of the nation’s wavering and uncertain electorate.
Yesterday’s Liberation, the left-wing newspaper, was edited by Diams, a female rapper whose latest album, In My Bubble, has sold 700 000 copies and who at every concert calls on her fans to vote.
“I read all the manifestoes, but I’m not going to make an explicit choice because I don’t want to influence people … to incite people to vote is to discover the country,” Diams (26) told the newspaper. “[However], if Sarko or Le Pen is elected, I’m getting ready for it to kick off.”
Motivation
Many of the rappers, some of whom have recorded short briefings on their records on how to vote, are motivated by the threat of a repeat of the elections of 2002 when a lacklustre left-wing campaign and a widespread sense of insecurity carried Le Pen through to the second run-off vote. “That was the great revelation,” said Olivier Cachin, author of several books on French rap. “It was a very precise break with what had gone before.”
This weekend Le Pen’s score in the polls is higher than at a similar time five years ago — boosted by a campaign, orchestrated by his daughter, which has sought to “de-demonise” him.
“We are tracking Le Pen carefully and his vote is rising in a way that is not dissimilar to 2002,” said one pollster on Saturday. Sunday’s polls reveal that Le Pen, who has been repeatedly accused of incitement to racial hatred and Holocaust denial, and the centre-right contender, Francis Bayrou, have further closed the gap on Sarkozy and Ségolène Royal, the Socialist candidate.
Le Pen is already confident enough to be preparing his strategy for a second-round run-off. However, the rappers’ efforts to get young people in France’s deprived banlieues to register to vote have paid off. In Seine-Saint-Denis, the department that suffered most in the riots of 18 months ago, a rise of 9%, double the national average, has been logged, with far higher levels in specific communities such as Aulnay-sous-Bois where the riots started.
Deprived areas with big immigrant populations in the south, such as the Var and the Bouches-du-Rhone, have also registered big increases, far in excess of those expected due to demographic growth. In Paris itself, it is the poorest 10th, 18th and 19th arrondissements that have seen the most new voters.
‘Listen to all’
Yet, though some rappers such as the bestselling Akhenaton have backed Royal, the new votes will not automatically go to the left. Another well-known musician, Doc Gyneco, has backed Sarkozy, whose liberal economic programme sometimes appeals in deprived areas that hope for more job opportunities for those without “the right diplomas, contacts or colour of skin”.
“Though his vision of France is worrying, economically there are some things in the programme of Sarkozy that look logical to us,” Feniski of Saipan Supa Crew said.
For XV, the critical element is “to listen to all the arguments to force the candidates to make the effort to persuade us. We’ve even got to listen to Le Pen,” he said. “It’s important to understand what the guy is saying even if you don’t agree with it. A lot of French people are going to vote for him and we need to know why.”
And the new mobilisation among France’s youngest and poorest is not necessarily a vote of confidence in the political system. “No one thinks that they are going to change the world,” said author Cachin. “It is a more a bid to avoid the nightmare scenario than to realise a dream.” — Guardian Unlimited Â