While I sat on the floor in the Cabaret Sauvage music hall waiting for Massilia Sound System to take the stage for a rare Paris appearance, Concert, Le Cabaret Sauvage Paris 5 December , a young couple seated next to me asked if I had ever seen them live.
When I answered in the affirmative, they fired off a battery of questions: What was their music like? Where had I heard them before? Were they in for a good concert? The crowd at the Cabaret Sauvage brought together a multigenerational mix of longstanding fans like myself clearly identifiable by our greying temples , young people new to the group, and children shepherded by parents bent on transmitting their musical attachments.
I told my new friends what anyone who has had the happy fortune to hear Massilia in concert would: they are fantastic live. Presenting a Marseille-based reggae-rap group who sing in Occitan and rarely tour outside the hexagon to Anglophones, generally inclined to regard French popular music with condescension, if they think about it at all, represents an altogether more difficult task.
Those interested in learning more can now turn to the first book to appear on the group, written by journalist Camille Martel Massilia Sound System. Granted extensive access to the group and its archives, Martel offers an exhaustive chronological narrative, viewed through the lens of fandom. If anything tied together the eclectic fruits of this musical moment, it was a marked openness to musical cultures from around the world and a willingness to mix styles in search of new sonorities.
For their part, Massilia drew musical inspiration from Jamaica. As the group coalesced, its members embraced raggamuffin, a mix of reggae and dancehall that relies on electronic synthesizers for instrumentation.
