DJ Mehdi: made in France is the documentary to watch urgently. I know, dear reader, that you don’t believe your eyes. How so ? DJ? Made in France? Anglicism, electro music, clubbing, rap? Although I don’t have a musical ear, I always have my ear on the alert. Out of frustration and fascination, no music puts me off, no sound disgusts me. Friends told me about this documentary and I immersed myself in it. And I came away as moved as I was hypnotized by a kid from Colombes who became prince of the city then king of the world, before dying in an accident in 2011 at the age of 34.
Where to start? By a kid raised in the first black Tunisian family in Gennevilliers, whose administration transforms all the first names from the country of origin into Frenchy first names? By a kid who, from the age of 11, tinkered, tinkered, made something to serve as a sampler? Who draws on all the music in the world to create their own? “There were no geeks in the suburbs,” says her cousin. Mehdi Faveris-Essadi is from the suburbs and already in the world. He produces sound for rappers and becomes a reference before puberty. Uncompromising, “radical” as Kery James calls it, he refuses to comply with the commercial dictates of his first record company and prefers to wait until the contract is terminated. And that’s success.
With the group Ideal J that he formed with Kery James since childhood, then with the hip-hop collective Mafia K’1 Fry, finally, this is the album The Princes of the City of 113. The album that brought rap into French families through the Victoires de la Musique and the song Uncle of the country which with irony and humor recounts the departure of the idiots on vacation. It’s another world, a world where self-deprecation had the value of integration. DJ Mehdi dares what no one has dared: he makes 113 rap to a sound from Kraftwerk, a German electronic music group from the 1970s that the rappers had never heard of, but they didn’t care after the first surprise, it’s good sound. And here are two worlds listening to each other and collaborating.
Go out of your way, get out The Heirs of Bourdieu like we shake garlic to scare away vampires, sociological studies truncated to stick to a militant reality, DJ Mehdi, through his sounds, explodes determinism, dynamites labels and offers the best counter-example to all theories smokers who would like to condemn the suburbs to violence and hatred, or celebrate them for violence and hatred only without wanting to see anything else, because that would break a well-established miserabilist narrative which pays off electorally.
Cosmopolitanism as it was understood in the 19th century
There is a certain idea of France in DJ Mehdi’s music; more than crossbreeding, it is cosmopolitanism as it was understood in the 19th century, this obvious idea that each human creation, whoever its designer, wherever it comes from on Earth, is universal. It is cultural appropriation, which knows neither borders nor a private preserve. What is created is created for all without discrimination. The opposite of multiculturalism which is only coexistence without links, without enriching exchanges between cultures.
And DJ Mehdi takes off towards electro. It’s a shock for his old friends: white house against black rap. Irony: house was born in the black neighborhoods of Chicago… What DJ Mehdi does is reappropriate the origin of the sound, making it his own. Fifteen years after he mixed electro and rap in France, Americans are following his path. He then became essential on the world’s electro scenes, he was the hit of the French Touch, collaborating along the way with M as well as with Diam’s. And because nothing is rejected, nothing is devalued, because nothing is hierarchical, everything is authentic and everything rings true, everything sounds specific.
When we ask his comrades from the day before yesterday and yesterday what made DJ Mehdi original, they all answer that with him nothing was impossible, nothing was unattainable, the world was vast. DJ Mehdi or a French destiny, which celebrates universal ranges which nevertheless belong only to him. It’s called style.
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