Sunday, September 14, 2008

691. MC Solaar - Qui Seme le Vent Recolte le Tempo (1991)

















Track Listing

1. Intro
2. Qui Seme Le Vent Recolte Le Tempo
3. Matiere Grasse Contre Matiere Grise
4. Victime De La Mode
5. L'Histoire De L'Art
6. Armand Est Mort
7. Quartier Nord
8. Interlude
9. A Temps Partiel
10. Caroline
11. La Musique Adoucit Les Moeurs
12. Bouge De La
13. Bouge De La (2)
14. Ragga Jam
15. La Devise
16. Funky Dreamer

Review

French hip-hop really hasn't got the best of reputations today, the reasons are varied. Firstly the language is almost never as aggressive as English and therefore is not as suited to Public Enemy/N.W.A. style angry rap. Secondly a lot of the Francophone hip-hop sounds similar in its more laid back rhythms and so forth.

MC Solaar is very much a part of the tradition of French hip-hop but he is also the most original of those artists. MC Solaar is creating a template, and as is usual no one ever beat the sheer quality of this template for French hip-hop.

The production work is superb, the use of samples ditto, the lyrics are little more than bragging, but the music is so good that you manage to overlook that. All in all a very different hip-hop album that would spawn a thousand imitators that never were this good.

Track Highlights

1. Qui Seme le Vent Recolte le Tempo
2. Victime de la Mode
3. Caroline
4. Bouge de La

Final Grade

9/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

The title is a pun on the French proverb "qui sème le vent récolte la tempête" (he who sows the wind reaps the whirlwind). It was released in 1991 and gained enormous success.
Bouge de là was the album's first single, which was hugely successful in France and went on to kickstart Solaar's career there. The song is based on a sample of The Message by 1970s English band Cymande.
Other popular singles from the album are Caroline and Victime de la mode.

Victime de la Mode:


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