Marseille and Music go hand in hand…

By: Magnusson | May 2nd, 2008

France is Hip-Hop’s second market after the US in terms of album sales. And the very active Marseillais scene is second only to Paris’ but has been wildly succesful ever since its early beginnings. The artists in that city often have their own universes, crews and sounds. The pioneers of course being IAM, followed by the Fonky Famuily and more recently artists such as Psy 4 De La Rhyme anf their leader Soprano who is at the top of the charts in the country right now. If the artist of the phoceen city are often in their own personal universes, they’re often gathered by their love of marseille and they have been showing for the longest time.
First of all, IAM, the pioneers of Marseille Rap took the most famous anthemn from the stands, called “Ce soir, on vous met le feu” (litteraly “Tonight, we’ll burn you up”) and made it a hit song. The song never left the Vélodrome and is still to this day a fans favorite.

Once the anthemn was done, it became kind of a rite of passage for famous players to be invited in video clips, like NBA players would in a Jay-Z video. But somehow Matrseille artists took a page of that book and brought it to the next level. The more recent prince of that scene, Soprano, wants everybody to know who he reps and how he reps it. In his first single, “Halla Halla” which was last year’s summer anthemn in much of the country, the video is entirely shot inside the Vélodrome and he brings his whole crew from the catacombs of the stadium to the pitch itself, creating mayhem with his possee. At the end of the video, Pape Diouf has a small cameo and asks him to give him the stadium key’s back.

In his second single “A la Bien”, which is a real odee to his city, he invites The Cantona Brothers Eric and Joel who are seen in the beginning watching his previous video and defend him. Of course he meets them at the end and promises to invite them in his next video.

To finish with the Soprano episode and his love for all things Marseille, the first single off of his group Psy4 de la Rime’s next album features Marseille captain Lorik Cana and a bunch of other famous and anonymous people who are representing the french youth. Lorik is at the very beginning.

But Marseillais players popularity doesn’t stop at Marseille. Case in point, another new artist, from Paris this time, Sefyu invited Samir Nasri and mamadou Niang last year for his video “Senegalo Ruskov Molotov” which was also an ode to football worldwide. This beautiful video is shot between Dakar, Morocco, Algeria and France. Sefyu is interestingly enough a player who failed at Arsenal after a few months and left to go back to Paris and appears to know a LOT of actual professional players.

Seen as how Karim Benzema has his own song right now(Inara from the Lyon offside wrote about it a mlong time ago) I bet players are gonna be starting to rap soon. I’ll make sure to post Steve Mandanda’s first mixtape.