The French Touch: France's Loudest Export

Somewhere on Earth right now, a DJ drops a record made by two men from Paris wearing robot helmets, and three thousand people who have never set foot in France scream along. Ten minutes later, the same crowd raps in French about the suburbs. Nobody finds any of this strange. It has been going on for thirty years.

Here is the part guidebooks keep missing: France has exported precisely two musics to the world. One makes the planet dance. The other tells the planet how the banlieues live. Neither appears between the crêpes and the Louvre in your average travel guide. Let’s fix that. This is not an obscure fact, either — it is the biggest thing France does to the world’s ears, hiding in plain sight.

The machines take over

• Daft Punk — Homework (1997) turned a Paris flat into a global dance floor, and Around the World proved five words could carry a career. Discovery (2001) did it again with One More Time, joy manufactured so precisely it feels accidental. Somewhere between the two albums, per their own telling, they stopped showing faces and became robots.
• Air — Moon Safari (1998), the lounge-astronaut record that made French hotels, lobbies and design magazines permanently cooler. Sexy Boy still sounds like walking into a party where everyone is beautiful and French.
• Justice — D.A.N.C.E. (2007), the rock-band interpretation of the touch: leather jackets, heavy riffs, church organs for the dance floor.
• Phoenix — the Versailles boys who sing in English and quietly became the coolest band at every festival on Earth. Lisztomania is the gateway.
• M83 — Midnight City, whose saxophone outro has scored every epic trailer since 2011. You know it. You have run to it.
• Cerrone — the grandfather. Supernature (1977) was French disco when disco ruled the world, and its DNA runs straight through everything listed above.
• Bob Sinclar — Love Generation (2005), the whistle you have heard at every beach club from Bali to Biarritz.
• David Guetta — the one who industrialized the whole thing, starting from the 2000s scene we cover in our decade retrospective; the world noticed a few years later and has not stopped noticing since.

The street half: rap that drew the map

• MC Solaar — the gentle poet who made French rap radio-safe in the early 90s; he resurfaces in our 2000s file, because institutions never leave.
• IAM — Marseille’s professors, whose Je danse le mia (1993) put the South’s swing on national repeat.
• NTM — the blunt instrument of Seine-Saint-Denis, the angry half of the founding generation. The initials, we will let you look up; your French teacher certainly will not teach them.
• Orelsan — the internet-era writer, turning Basique into a philosophy lesson over a beat and sweeping France’s Victoires awards while refusing to act like a star.
• PNL — two brothers, zero interviews, and a video shot on top of the Eiffel Tower; see our 2020 radio report for how deep they ran the country.
• Jul — Marseille again, the most prolific hit-maker in French history and, by most counts, the most-listened French artist of his generation. You will hum him. This is not a choice.

Two waves, one country: electro for the body, rap for the map. One came out of club culture and wholesale invention; the other out of the housing estates, with a library’s worth of anger and poetry attached. Both are unmistakably French, both are planet-sized, and both are invisible to the tourism industry — which would rather sell you an accordion. The country that queues politely for silent museums also produced the loudest party on Earth. Twice.

So before your trip, do some homework of your own: one Daft Punk album, one PNL album, one Jul chorus. It will teach you more about contemporary France than any guidebook — and, unlike the guidebook, you will still be using it at parties.