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Only black rapper in the village has France dancing
The Times - Matthew Campbell, Paris
A QUIRKY song that appeared on the internet last month about life in a tiny French village has sparked a bidding war by record companies to sign up the young artist whose “country rap” is suddenly being hailed as all the musical rage.
Kamini, as the eccentric “rural rapper” is known, eschews the usual fare of French rap — the harsh world of the immigrant suburbs, where gangs of hooded youths beat policemen senseless and set fire to buses and cars.
Instead the 26-year-old son of a doctor from Congo takes a humorous look at life growing up in the only black family in Marly-Gomont, a village of 430 inhabitants in the northern region of Picardy.
The video of him dancing to a catchy rhythm in fields with sheep and cows has certainly put Marly-Gomont on the map: it has been seen by an estimated 2m people over the past few weeks, turning Kamini into a phenomenon of le rap and prompting offers from recording companies such as Warner and Sony.
Kamini certainly looks the part with his shock of hair, baggy jeans and T-shirt but the performance, in some ways, seems like a parody of the genre. Instead of the scantily clad women and gleaming, fast cars that most, self-respecting rappers include in their videos, Kamini’s features a Massey Ferguson tractor and a chorus line of plain-looking white locals clumsily trying to copy the movements of the star.
There is a serious side to it, too, as Kamini points out some of the contradictions of racism, getting one local in his song to say: “I don’t like Arabs, I don’t like blacks, but you, I quite like, although you’re black.”
The population of Marly-Gomont, sings Kamini in the video filmed by his girlfriend, is “easily 95% cows for 5% humans and among these, only one black family: it had to be mine, what a bloody nightmare”.
He recalls how he cried on his first day at school after being taunted by the other children, and gestures at the empty, green landscape dotted with cows. “I wanted to rebel, but there’s nothing to burn here. There’s only one bus, it’s for school.”
In August Kamini sent his video to a small recording company in Lille, where he works as a part-time psychiatric nurse. The company sent it to Paris. “Apparently, some young intern who liked it began sending it around on the internet to people he knew,” said Kamini last week.
Soon people were tapping their feet to it all over France. He appeared on television chat shows, becoming an instant celebrity. His website received 300,000 hits on the day after his first appearance and a growing fan club includes messages from people who claim children as young as 16 months dance to his video.
Some commentators have compared the hoopla surrounding the rapper to the success enjoyed over the summer by a song aired on the internet about France’s loss in the World Cup final to Italy.
However, a producer with the recording company in Lille said there was nothing ephemeral about Kamini, comparing him to famous French rappers such as Doc Gynéco and MC Solaar.
Kamini himself shows no sign of running out of inspiration. He said he had composed many other songs and was preparing to release an album. He will not reveal the title. But it is just as well French villages often have musical names
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