COOL CAT: KERY JAMES
Peeps over at CYBERAXIS wrote this fine portrait of my good friend and old bandmate KERY JAMES, allow me to copy and paste—
Kery James The Enunciator
Portrait of a hip-hop legend in the making.
He creates more drama with a single camera and and off-stage mike than a B-movie shoot-up in monochromatic shade. With the ease of an orator channeling a fire he has made peace with – Kery James lays into the sluggish beat of a track, marking his lyrical accents with the precision of a trained pugilist. The camera zooms in to frame a face straight out of our mythical past. He is Hounsou Djimon with the muscularity displayed in Janet Jackson’s “Love Will Never Do Without You”; or Shabba Ranks with sinewy hip-hop style. “Tight Grip”. Like Djimon and Shabba Ranks, James’ facial template is out of Liebovitz tribal scrap book.
He flashes white without a trace of blood but still evokes memories of the Maroons and Mau Mau – even when sporting a Tommy Hilfiger get-up. Stereotype? Perhaps, but it goes deeper than that. The nervousness surrounding James’ hard core stylings and Muslim beliefs is, rooted in a reactive subconscious and the perception of James as a particularly potent messenger. When he intones about “ma conviction”, the powers that be want to know what that conviction is, because all of suddenly the medium has a message – and where hip-hop is concerned, it can be perceived as potently subversive. (The same story played itself out with hard core groups like N.W.A. et al in the U.S.A. )
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Kery James Chronology
- 1977 – Born Alix Mathurin in Les Abymes, Guadelope, West Indies, December 28, 1977.
- 1985 – Comes to France and starts to rap
- 1989 – James begins rapping out of the Paris suburb of Orly. He gets noticed by MC Solaar who decides to feature him on his 1991 debut album “Qui Sème le Vent Récolte le Tempo”.
- 1990 – Kery James becomes a member of the Ideal Junior group with DJ Mehdi.
- 1992 – Idéal Junior releases the 12? single, “La Vie Est Brutale” on the French dance label On the Beat.
- 1996 – The James/DJ Mehdi duo shortens its name to just Idéal J and release the eponymously named “Ideal J” album.
- 1998 - The duo releases its second full album entitled “Le Combat Continue”.
- 1999 – Las Montanas, one of James’ childhood friends is shot and killed. Kery James places his career on hiatus and takes sanctuary in the Islamic faith that had been the matrix of his childhood years.
- October 2001 – Kery James comes out with the first solo album “Si c’était à refaire”. It breaks into the top five albums on the French charts. Although the album is self-titled, it marks the first time he has recorded with a major record company: Warner Brothers. The album is a personal testament, that also marks James’ turning from his more hard-core edge of the past.
- 2003 -Kery James reunites with Mafia K’1 for the album “La Cerise Sur le Ghetto”.
- 2004 – Kery records his second solo album “Ma vérité” which is released the following year.
- 2008 – James records his third album “À l’ombre du show business” which reaches number three on the French charts. By 2008, James had done a total of 54 collaborations with other artists which had started in 2001.
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If the French hip-hop exhibits the robustness, spit and polish of American hip-hop, it is because roots and origins. Latter day musical historians place the birth of French hip right about 1979, fueled by the colonial legacy of North African and Caribbean immigrants. This is about the time that American hip-hop was enjoying its first success soon after its own birth. The themes of racism and marginal existence in the HLM (habitation à loyer modéré) which are the French equivalent of American projects or ghettoes, basically resonated with Les Damnés de la Terre.
The rise of Kery James intersects with that of the first hip-hopper to make it big, MC Solaar, a Senegalese immigrant, who met James in 1989 and featured him on his first solo album in 1991.
Against this background, Kery James has emerged as something of a seminal figure in his own right by virtue of his grasp of the hip-hop genre. Rapping in a language that has a surfeit of soft consonants James has excelled at forging a style that is as hard as it is articulate. He doesn’t just trip out his rhymes, he spits them with the precision of an orator who wants you to get every vowel and consonant. And he does it with the gravity of a warden on execution day. So commanding is James’ demeanor on-camera that he often requires minimal props in his videos – holding court and cutting loose lyrics that seem to carry the weight Nostradamic quartrains. This is what Busta Rhymes was reaching for in his turn of the turn of the century opuses but never quite seemed to pull it off.
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