Hip-Hop en français is a collection of essays that take up the challenging task of covering francophone hip-hop culture (mostly music) around the globe. The task is challenging not only for its actual size – only geographically, the implication is a tour through nearly all continents – but also for the complexity of the issues involved, particularly the social, political and anthropological ones.

Reasonably, the first step one can take is to assemble a good team of authors. Editor Alain-Philippe Durand did so by gathering a group of very competent scholars, and often specialists of the topic. Among others (absolutely no disrespect towards the other authors), one may single out Jean-Marie Jacono, one of the most important musical semioticians around, who has been devoting a significant chunk of his scholarship to hip-hop music in France; Felicia McCarren, a prize-winning author for her book French Moves: The Cultural Politics of le hip-hop; and Karim Hammou, author of Une histoire du rap en France (Reference Hammou2014), one of the most complete works on the subject. The cast, so to speak, is promising.

In Durand's introduction, we learn that the book was conceived for a number of academic and cultural purposes, most of which encompassed by the explicit need to measure the scholarly distance between Durand's previous volume on the subject, Black, Blanc, Beur: Rap Music and Hip-Hop Culture in the Francophone World, published in 2002, when hip-hop studies, especially francophone ones, ‘were not really a thing’ (p. xix), and this new work, published at a time when the field is fairly legitimised. That means basically two things: dealing with the increased amount of research and approaches; and coping with the increased problematisation of what Durand calls ‘the eternal quests for identity, authenticity, legitimacy, and the dilemmas or paradoxes that reign in hip-hop culture’ (p. xx). Inevitably, the task calls for an interdisciplinary approach, with the editor pointing out how the volume ‘gathers essays written by anthropologists; ethnomusicologists; journalists; historians; museum curators; philosophers; social scientists; and literary, language, and cultural studies scholars’ (p. xxiii).

Does the book keep its promises? Yes, it does, particularly in that ‘eternal quests’ area, and specifically in how they relate to questions of ethnic identity, integration, racism, poverty, gender (the latter more in the background, unfortunately) and other prominent issues of this kind. Hip-Hop en français does a marvellous job of offering a credible picture of the socio-cultural complexity and idiosyncrasy of this area of inquiry. Moreover, when it specifically comes to the music (which, I repeat, gets the lion's share in this book, contributing, for the better and for the worse, to the mainstream identification of hip-hop music with hip-hop culture tout court), it deals a positive blow to the Anglo-American and anglophone dominance within Popular Music Studies, something which definitely needs to be reverted before it becomes an actual form of academic colonialism. The choice itself of publishing this book in English is meaningful in terms of fighting, intentionally or not, this dominance on two territories: internationalisation (studies on French hip-hop abound, but, malheureusement, are often only in French), and the topic of hip-hop culture itself, so often tied to the perception that it is, after all, ‘that thing black guys do in the Bronx’.

On another note, it is also pleasing to notice that this kind of studies is by now almost fully emancipated from the self-indulging epistemological (and stylistic) excesses of post-modernist-inspired approaches. The endless narcissistic wandering in the ocean of hyper-problematisation, regressus ad infinitum and ‘questioning the questions’ because ‘answering’ is so uncool, is here replaced by instances of solid research, genuine attempts at theoretical problem-solving and a reader-friendly inclination to clarity of exposition. And shall we also add how comforting it is that a volume like this manages not to use the word ‘Adorno’ at all?

Within all these encouraging aspects – and humour aside – it may be also worthwhile to emphasise what appear as shortcomings of the volume, most of them understandable anyway. Of the musicocentric nature of the volume we have spoken already. Whether this publication had to make the case that ‘hip hop culture’ is not just music (and dance), but a whole artistic and cultural movement involving plenty of visual, audiovisual and linguistic paths, remains to be seen. The field, as we said, is in constant expansion, and it may not yet be the time to campaign for more balanced views: we are still at a ‘the more the merrier’ stage, which is also what makes this book an enjoyable and important read. At the same time, I have to say that essays like Alain Milon's on graffiti or Charles Norton's on hip-hop-based education, stood out, exactly owing to their, so to speak, ‘less obvious’ nature.

Similarly, the collection suffers also from another understandable bias – France-centrism. Analogous conclusions can be made, here: it is predictable that a book like this would choose an image containing the Eiffel Tower for its cover, but – once more – to encounter such contributions like Catherine Appert's on Senegal or Maxime Delcourt's on Quebec was overall a more intriguing experience.

On balance, there is only one major lack that leaves much to be desired, and that to me constitutes a recurrent problem in Popular Music Studies altogether. It is what I call the ‘where is the music?’ problem. In the preoccupation that not a single historiological, sociological and culturological detail is omitted, Hip-Hop en français misses the opportunity to provide a proper musicological analysis of the musical repertoires – copiously mentioned in every essay of the collection, by title and author, but very seldom unfolded in their compositional, formal, technical and semiotic aspects. As refreshing as the absence of the mighty Adorno was, one now cannot hide the disappointment of not seeing one single score, one transcription, one chord chart. As I said on other occasions, this issue remains a major restraint to a full academic emancipation of popular music, and a testimony of a persistent complex of inferiority towards ‘art’ music: the idea that, after all, music as such is not so worthy to be analysed, but one should rather focus on the ‘phenomenon’. There is room for both, my friends.

These few reservations aside, Hip-Hop en français is an excellent collection, and an absolute must for any reader seeking a strong, insightful and state-of-the-art exploration of a field that deserves more and more scholarly attention.