First of all thanks a lot to people who sent me informations about
Barcelona.
"La Haine" is a film that went out last year and that had quite a
big success here in France. It was well made, no doubt about it, but
there has been quite a controversy about his goals and if it reached
them. You know, the subject is the life in the french suburbs, and
you get the usual amount of people saying that it does'nt "represent"
these suburbs and so on, especially since it had such a success and
there were conservative magazines making their cover on La Haine, with
a manual on how to speak like in the "banlieues" and things like
that. Add to that the fact that the director, Mathieu Kassowitz, is
not coming from these suburbs, and you get quite a big confusion for
not much... Anyway in my opinion the film was good, Kassowitz was
sincere in doing it, but I would'nt call it a "Do the Right Thing a
la francaise", as some journalists did, it did'nt impress me as much
as the Sipke Lee Joint :) did.
Anyway anyway, talking about music, I did'nt check out the comp Erik
is talking about, what I know is that it's not the soundtrack for the
film (in the film you get to hear to a Marley song if I remember, and
then a funny number by a DJ - who is actually famous I think, but I
can't remember right now who it is - and that's about all). The comp
is made of songs inspired by the movie, and you can find there "la
creme" of the french hip-hop/funk scene. If you want to learn more
about the controversy and in particular why NTM did'nt contribute to
the comp, and if you understand french, go and check out the La Haine
site at Virgin France:
http://www.virgin.fr/virgin/html/urban/haine/haine.html
They explain the situation in France, and you get some sound bits as
well.
And speaking of www sites, since there are a few guys here into french
rap, you can look at:
http://www.odyssee.net/%7Emalek/rapfr.html
a site for french rap done by a canadese. Since I don't want to make
self promotion, I won't talk about my small sites (yellow productions
discography at http://cermics.enpc.fr/~dh/yellow/yellow.html and Big
Cheese at http://cermics.enpc.fr/~dh/fromage/big_cheese.html ... :)).
Hope it helps, sorry for the long post.