May 2020 | Sight&Sound | 35THE SOUND AND THE FURY:
RAP, REGGAE AND RESISTANCE IN ‘LA HAINE’By Steph Green
Among hip-hop fans and French cinema
aficionados alike, there’s widespread love
for a certain scene in La Haine featuring
the French DJ Cut Killer. We find him
inside an HLM (habitation à loyer modéré
- what we in the UK would call a council
flat), pushing a speaker towards an open
window, then mixing two unlikely tracks:
American rapper KRS-One’s ‘Sound of
da Police’ and Edith Piaf’s ‘Non, je ne
regrette rien’. The camera snakes out of
the flat, above a line of trees and through
the high-rise buildings, as the haunting,
jarring tune blasts out over the housing
project. A moment later the scene cuts
and settles on Vinz (Vincent Cassel) and
Saïd (Saïd Taghmaoui) in the street some
distance away, chatting as they try to
make out the tune, before cutting again
to the surreal image of a cow wandering
past them at the end of the street.
In 1993, clashes between street gangs and
the cops in the US had prompted KRS-One
to condemn police brutality in his ‘Sound
of da Police’. Cut Killer subsequently cut
the tune with the phrase “assassin de la
police” in place of the words of the title in
the chorus, taking advantage of their neat
sonic similarity. Edith Piaf is perhaps an
unlikely addition to Kassovitz’s banlieue
setting, but she too was a working-class
hero, whose rocky upbringing in the
Belleville district was not a world away
from the situation shown in Kassovitz’s
film. This Frenchwoman could, like
the film, have been described as gritty,
troubled and passionate. It’s worth noting
that in the scene, Cut Killer is sporting
a Cypress Hill T-shirt – a group whose
anti-police anthems such as ‘Pigs’ were
well known to contemporary audiences.
La Haine is both stylised and naturalistic,
placing the audience deep within its
banlieue setting, so that it becomes an
observer of what the then-president
Jacques Chirac had described disparagingly
a couple of years earlier in his career
as “le bruit et l’odeur” (the noise and the
stench) of such working-class areas. It’s
this layer of banlieue noise – piercing
police sirens, smashing glass, the
shouts of street fights echoing between
concrete high-rises – that blends so
effectively with the film’s soundtrack. The
combination of the two clearly evokes
the simmering brutality that in France
was ready to boil over by the mid-1990s.
Hip-hop and gangster rap had been big
in the US for more than a decade when La
Haine premiered in Cannes in 1995. But
in the early to mid-1990s it experienced a
more tangible cultural moment, driven by
coastal rivalries, violence and hysterical
media coverage. For La Haine, Kassovitz
recruited the hardcore rap collective
Assassin – a group that emerged from the
banlieues in the mid-1980s – to overseethe film’s soundtrack. This presented a
real opportunity to put French rap at the
forefront; to spit out a uniquely French
take on the passion and anger of gangster
rap. One member of the group was Vincent
Cassel’s brother Mathias Crochon. While
La Haine revels in references to the US –
American rap music, Cassel’s riff on the
“You talkin’ to me?” scene in
Taxi Driver – the soundtrack propelled
French hip-hop artists into the
international limelight, including
such figures as MC Solaar, Raggasonic,
NTM and Assassin themselves..
These French artists, often of African
and North African ancestry, rewrote
bleu-blanc-rouge –the blue-white-red of the
French flag – as black-blanc-beur, ‘black-
white-Arab’, and espoused a rap rooted in
diaspora and protest. And so, when a fresh
wave of riots exploded on the capital’s
outskirts again a decade later in 2005,
the then-minister of the interior, Nicolas
Sarkozy, found a scapegoat: not just the
citizens themselves, but the French rappers
who radicalised them. This resulted in
rappers facing legal action. MC Solaar’s
lyrics in ‘Comme dans un film’, a tune on the
La Haine soundtrack, foresaw this attack:
“Attention car le bouc émissaire change / Selon
les coutumes, selon les lubies” (“Be careful,
because the scapegoat changes according
to customs, according to whims”).
La Haine’s opening scene depicts real
footage of demonstrations and riots in the
banlieues of Paris over the previous decade,
set to Bob Marley and the Wailers’ ‘Burnin’
and Lootin’’. Kassovitz said that he wanted
city sounds to become a sort of music of
their own, “a growl, a layer of sound but
a natural sound”. In the original track the
intermittent wail of a siren pierces the
laid-back reggae beat. Petrol bombs, tear
gas and truncheons rain through the sky, as
Marley sings: “Could not recognise the faces
standing over me / They were all dressed
in uniforms of brutality.” Reggae has
historically been a vehicle for sociopolitical
commentary, so the tune was a natural
choice to introduce Kassovitz’s blistering
treatise on police-on-banlieue brutality.
While Kassovitz’s thematic métissage- hybridisation – gives voice to a diverse
group of people fighting for their rights,
these rich and varied cultural influences
on the film’s soundtrack add an extra
strand that helps tie these themes into a
bloodstained bow – as potent and powerful
a rallying cry now as it was 25 years ago.
‘ La Haine’ was a real
opportunity to spit out
a uniquely French take
on the passion and
anger of gangster rap
UP TO SCRATCH: DJ CUT KILLER IN LA HAINE LINING UP HIS MIX OF EDITH PIAF AND KRS-ONE