MC Solaar, the rapper whose founding albums vanished after he beat his label in court

MC Solaar

Photo: LACMIART (Serge Marie Aubry) / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	March 5, 1969 Dakar, Senegal
Occupation	Rapper
Known for	Zaï Zaï Zaï Zaï
Awards	4 Victoires de la musique · Académie française

For close to twenty years, the rapper France held up as proof that hip hop could be literature was unable to hand a new listener his own first records. MC Solaar’s early albums, the ones that carry Bouge de là, Caroline and Nouveau Western, sat in a legal freezer after he took his label to court. He won. The records disappeared anyway, out of the shops and absent from streaming services, while a younger generation of rappers kept naming him as the model. A catalogue quoted by everyone and released by no one is the hinge of his career, and it explains why his late work feels like a sentence finally being finished.

Claude M’Barali came into the world in Dakar, Senegal, on 5 March 1969, the son of Chadian parents: his father was a translator and English teacher, his mother a nurse. The family left for the Paris suburbs when he was six months old and settled in Saint-Denis, then Maisons-Alfort and Villeneuve-Saint-Georges. After nine months with an uncle in Cairo at the age of twelve, he passed his baccalauréat in 1988, studied languages and philosophy at Jussieu in Paris, and tried out his first verses on the show that Dee Nasty and Lionel D hosted on Radio Nova, introducing himself as Claude MC. Solaar was his graffiti tag before it became a name.

With the DJ and producer Jimmy Jay he made Bouge de là, built on a sample of Cymande’s The Message, and it became one of the first French rap singles to reach a mass audience. The debut album Qui sème le vent récolte le tempo arrived at the end of 1991 and went platinum, at around 400,000 copies; Caroline climbed to number four on the Top 50 the following year. In 1993 Guru of Gang Starr brought him onto Jazzmatazz Vol. 1 for Le bien, le mal, a first for a French rapper. Prose combat, in 1994, sold 100,000 copies in its first ten days in France and was certified double platinum. Its single Nouveau Western borrows from Serge Gainsbourg’s Bonnie and Clyde. At the Victoires de la musique in 1995 he was named male artist of the year and its clip won best video.

The partnership with Jimmy Jay broke up during the Prose combat tour. For the next record Solaar turned to the Funk Mob, Boom Bass and Philippe Zdar, later of Cassius. He delivered two discs to Polydor intending them as one double album; the label released Paradisiaque in June 1997 and issued the second disc on its own a year later under the title MC Solaar. He sued. The courts found that Polydor had broken the contract, and the ruling, upheld on appeal in 2002 and by the Cour de cassation in 2004, barred the label, by then part of Universal Music, from exploiting the first four albums it still owned. With no deal, the records went out of print. In 1998, the year that second disc appeared, he recorded the live album Le Tour de la question at the Olympia, sat on the Cannes competition jury under Martin Scorsese, and received the Grande médaille de la chanson française from the Académie française.

At Warner he served as his own artistic director for the first time. Cinquième As, released in February 2001 with little-known composers behind the beats, opened with Solaar pleure, a turn back toward harder rap, and Hasta la vista became his first number one in France. The album sold around 600,000 copies and went double platinum. Its booklet pays tribute to the Senegalese boxer Battling Siki, a world champion who faced racism in the French press, and songs such as Les colonies link colonial exploitation to the present, and Lève-toi et rap traces his parents’ road to a Paris suburb. In 2004 La Belle et le Bad Boy played in the final episode of Sex and the City. Mach 6 followed in December 2003, with orchestral parts recorded in Moscow, and Chapitre 7 in June 2007, which won the Victoire for urban music album of the year.

His polish has always cut both ways. The press and the cultural establishment adopted him almost at once, and that embrace made him suspect inside rap: other rappers accused him of making his peace with the system, he was left off the Rapattitude compilations that mapped the early scene, and the media cast him as the reasonable counterweight to the more confrontational NTM, a role he never claimed. The charge misreads the records. Migration, colonial memory and the Black experience in France run through his lyrics from the start; what set him apart was register, a taste for wordplay and understatement over provocation. Less flattering is the decade of near silence after Chapitre 7, and the irony that his legal victory took his founding work out of circulation just as music moved online.

Géopoétique ended the silence on 3 November 2017. Led by the single Sonotone, it was certified platinum within a month and won the Victoire for song album of the year in 2018. In June 2021 an agreement with Universal brought the early catalogue back: the first albums were reissued on vinyl and CD and placed on streaming services, with MC Solaar folded into Paradisiaque as the double album he had wanted all along. He has since joined Soprano on Le grand bleu, Bigflo & Oli on Bons élèves and Oxmo Puccino on Ne pas m’aimer, and recorded Tout se transforme for the French soundtrack of Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. In 2024 he spread a new album across three releases under the title Triptyque: Lueurs célestes in March, Éclats cosmiques in July and Balade astrale in December, then took it on a long tour.

This year his past and the artists he shaped keep meeting. In February Zaho released Comme Caroline, an answer to his 1992 hit on which he raps, as the first single from her album Versatile. On 18 September Warner reissued Cinquième As for its 25th anniversary, with a second CD of rare versions and a limited export vinyl titled Fifth Ace. With Youssoupha, who has often named him as a model, he has built the Supersonic Social Club, a ten-musician show that reworks both men’s songs as hip hop, soul and jazz, first tried out at the Nuits de Fourvière festival in Lyon.

He was in a relationship with the singer Ophélie Winter in the late 1990s, married Chloé Bensemoun in 2003 and had two children with her, Roman and Bonnie, before the couple divorced in 2012. Since 1997 he has been a regular in Les Enfoirés, the charity troupe that raises money for the Restos du Cœur.

The Supersonic Social Club comes to the Philharmonie de Paris on 21 November and to La Seine Musicale in Boulogne-Billancourt on 30 November. A rapper once accused of being too refined for hip hop will play a concert hall with one of his heirs beside him, which settles that old argument in his favour.

Selected Discography

• Qui sème le vent récolte le tempo (1991)
• Prose Combat (1994)
• Paradisiaque (1997)
• MC Solaar (1998)
• Cinquième as (2001)
• Mach 6 (2003)
• Chapitre 7 (2007)
• Géopoétique (2017)
• Triptyque : Lueurs célestes (2024)
• Triptyque : Éclats cosmiques (2024)
• Triptyque : Balade astrale (2024)

Tags: singers, hip hop, MC Solaar, Cinquième As, Géopoétique, Jimmy Jay

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