Identité en Crescendo

It took Rocé four years to follow up his debut album, Top Départ, a record praised by critics and audiences alike, to the point of making him one of the few French rappers to win over people both inside and outside rap circles. Others would have carried on in the same vein without a second thought, just to ride the wave. He preferred to leave the track rather than go around in circles, and to take a detour to find new inspiration: a thirst for new horizons, to widen his field of vision, feed his pen from other sources and expose his ears to new sounds. He needed air, to the point of seriously considering giving up rap altogether.

"When I got into rap, it was music that went against the grain, a dissenting voice unafraid to assert its difference. Today it has become the voice of consensus." Unable to settle for this state of affairs, always looking for a voice of his own, he concluded that the greatest challenge before him was not to look for greener grass elsewhere, but to make his difference heard within the now hostile setting of a hip-hop scene stiffened by its clichés and codes.

So his second album would be a rap record, still built on the formula of beat + sample + flow locked to the snare, with deliberately basic productions that nonetheless allow every audacity (abrupt time signatures, disorienting loops, mismatched tempos) and direct writing that uses simple words to express thinking that is anything but simple. In short, a rap record that breaks radically with the rest of today's rap (it is its antithesis), free in both content and form, featuring guests who care nothing for rap's poses and taboos but who all share Rocé's approach: Antoine Paganotti, Magma's drummer, who on Aux Nomades De l'Intérieur disrupts the neat order of deliberately minimal, even rigid programming; Potzi, Paris Combo's guitarist, whose jazz manouche rhythm guitar lights up a record dominated by the drums-bass-piano triumvirate; Jacques Coursil, a free-jazz figure long thought lost to music, whose singular breath runs through L'Un Et Le Multiple; and of course the legendary Archie Shepp, the man behind Semper Malcom, Attica Blues and Blase, who after meeting Rocé and talking with him at length agreed to trade lines with him on two tracks, before returning the invitation for a few concerts.

A rap record, then, but not only that: its author's personality is far too rich to be confined by any straitjacket. He brushes the question aside: "Call it rap, slam, punk, it's none of my business anymore / When you put one of my feet in a box, do you know where the other one is?" (L'Un Et Le Multiple). A French citizen of many origins (Russian, Algerian, Argentinian, Jewish, Muslim), a white rapper, a Black student, from the suburbs and from Paris, he is all of this and much more: the sum of his many experiences, encounters, reflections and readings.

His album is called Identité En Crescendo, but it should be read as "identities in crescendo": "No one has to tell me which foot I dance on / Let France accept me as a multiple being and I'll sing France" (Je Chante La France). Just don't talk to him about integration; the word makes his skin crawl: "Having to integrate into a country that is already your own / Is sniffing around, chasing your own tail, staying a dog / I can't separate the cultures that made me one / Taking one part away removes the whole human being..." (Le Métèque). He also rejects any idea of belonging to a group or a tribe, choosing to say "I" rather than hide behind "we" or "they" (Appris Par Coeur).

Rocé prefers to sing his faith in the individual, in our ability to play with clichés and molds, in a humanity that expresses itself in a thousand and one ways. Where most of his peers stick to denouncing or observing, when they don't wallow in a victim's pose, he chooses to rise above.

Changing the world has been his ambition from day one, but now he also wants to bring in another vocabulary and other questions; in short, to "take rap out of childhood" by offering it new perspectives and ways out. To do so, he honed his words at length with his accomplice Djohar, co-writer of all the lyrics on Identité En Crescendo, weighing and reweighing every word, because he wanted to stand behind this album from A to Z and claim every sentence, every sound, every detail. The result lives up to it: a unique, singular record, free of any posture, throwing established patterns overboard, the uncompromising work of an "amphibious MC swimming against the current of the Parisian flow". Pure Rocé.