The Solaar Reissues, Volume 1: Qui sème le vent récolte le tempo
A look back at the groundbreaking debut of France's prime hip-hop ambassador.
A few months ago, I was invited by label Polydor to write about the long-awaited reissues of MC Solaar’s first albums. It was both an honor and a full-circle moment. The first tried and true hip-hop star in France, Solaar is a personal hero since my childhood, and the singular event that made me choose hip-hop as an ever-changing part of my identity. I have spent a lot of my time as an aspiring writer geeking out about his elusive career and his classic achievements (this oral history of Prose Combat, his second album, was a labor of love, and the probable reason why I got that call from the label.)
I have always had a deep affection for MC Solaar, even when he seemed to fade in the background of the French hip-hop expansion. For years, his first four albums had been kept in a locker, the result of a bitter and convoluted legal battle with his former record company. While rap was becoming the new mainstream, MC Solaar was at risk of becoming a legacy act without a legacy, despite the immense goodwill his name still inspired. The reissue of these albums was a great occasion to revisit their brilliance, and to try to convey their significance, almost three decades away from these early days when I would memorize every Solaar verse through constant repeats on my tape player.
The following was translated and adapted from an essay that accompanied the press release for the reissue of Qui sème le vent récolte le tempo. Two more will come for Prose Combat and Paradisiaque. All records are now back in stores, and for the first time ever on streaming platforms.
To narrate a Big Bang theory of French hip-hop, Historians can pick and choose among a few decisive events: the ripple effect of short-lived TV show H.I.P. H.O.P. in 1984, the trailblazing work of DJ Dee Nasty back when very few were listening, or the promises of the Rapattitude! compilation in 1990. All of these building blocks stumbled into the year 1991, when three groundbreaking debuts established French hip-hop as an irresistible force. There was … de la planète Mars, by Marseille collective IAM, Authentik, by duo Suprême NTM, and Qui sème le vent récole le tempo, the mission statement of a 22-year-old named MC Solaar. Careers started, classics were made, controversies came and went. But among these three newcomers, one artist instantly skyrocketed into the uncharted territory of hip-hop stardom à la Française.
MC Solaar was born Claude M’Barali in Dakar in 1969. He was raised by his mother, a nurse, in the city of Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, ten miles south of Paris. In another life, the young Claude could have been promised a career in professional football, but a nascent hip-hop culture decided otherwise. First a name graffitied on a few city walls, SOLAAR quickly transformed into the signature of an uppercase Master of Ceremony. On Radio Nova, the Parisian station that broadcasted the buzzing hip-hop scene in the late eighties, MC Solaar became a fixture on the Deenastyle show. He developed a reputation as a peerless freestyler informed by the New York rap grammar, the rapid-fire cadence of Jamaican raggamuffin and the joyful pursuit of any popular knowledge.
Solaar used his Deenastyle slot to introduce, somewhere in 1990, the verses of a song named “Bouge de là”. It would be released as a single during the summer of 1991, with a deadpan interpretation and a one-bar loop borrowed to British funk band Cymande. A tale of random street encounters and quid pro quos, “Bouge de là” became an instant hit. Prior to MC Solaar, there had been a few unheralded solo rappers in France (the only album of hip-hop pioneer Lionel D, Y’a pas de problème, was met with lackluster response in 1990). The craze around Benny B, a kid-friendly trio from Belgium, also helped the country get familiar with French-speaking rap hits. But MC Solaar was different: an object of pure fascination for the press, he proved to be both a reliable hit maker and a hip-hop auteur whose voice could resonate from school playgrounds to upscale dinners. In short, Solaar was a star.
Qui sème le vent… marked the blooming of MC Solaar as a unique hip-hop stylist. Throughout this first album, the rapper modulated his voice—in turns seductive, reflective, focused—like a real-time discovery of its nuances. With MC Solaar, words were both instrument and raw material. He loved the sound of words, their formal meaning and their hidden potential. To him, vocabulary was a boundless playground. At the time, a typical Solaar verse didn’t yet bristle with dizzying onomatopoeia and nods to French culture. This would gel on Prose Combat, three years later, but the rapper was already collecting assonances and tweaking proverbs with a childlike curiosity.
MC Solaar was, and still is, an everyday narrator. His songs were populated with next-door characters—Dominique, Armand, Caroline, Cassandre—whose quirks and inner lives were captured by his pen. Among these silhouettes, Solaar was always the quiet observer, settled on his own wavelength. Yet this notion of MC Solaar as a rapper-dreamer, which soon became canonical, is incomplete. Thirty years later, the album offers a reminder that Solaar was, above anything, a scholar of hip-hop ego trip and a competitive MC. He proclaimed his rank with imperial orders (“One have to give Solaar what belong to Solaar”) and a hefty dose of messianic self-confidence (“In the name of the Father, the Son and Claude MC”, he announced on the title track).
In the early nineties, FM radio in France couldn’t get enough of “Bouge de là” and “Caroline”, a song of lost romance crafted around a playing card metaphor (in typical Solaar fashion, when he thinks of a girl named Caro, he hears the homophone carreau, French for diamond). But for all its quirks, Qui sème le vent… was a record grounded in the hopes and struggles of its time. In between stylistic gestures, MC Solaar called out the crackdown on human rights, the environmental collapse and social disenfranchisement across nations. He was a pointillist with a concerned eye.
One of the first rap albums released by a major label in France, Qui sème le vent… was a record of first-time innocence, down to its musical backdrop. The instrumentals were orchestrated by Jimmy Jay, a precocious DJ and producer who, at barely 20, was dead set on building an infrastructure for the French hip-hop takeover. In the United States, sample wars were already raging, but the sound of Qui sème le vent… could still borrow its elegant loops, possibly free of legal clearance, in the confines of seventies R&B, funk and jazz. A Parisian cousin of De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest and the whole Native Tongues movement, Qui sème le vent… presented hip-hop as a cultural crossroad where soul and reggae, city and world, past and future could all meet and vibrate.
Behind the scene, a more subtle connection, but a fairly decisive one, was also drawn, this time between hip-hop and electronic music. Jimmy Jay was not alone behind the board. He was supported by two other music biz newcomers, producer Hubert Blanc-Francard and engineer Philippe Cerboneschi. Nicknamed Boom Bass and Zdar, they formed a hip-hop production team, La Funk Mob, that would be their training ground ahead of a future international career as electronic duo Cassius. With their contribution, Qui sème le vent… marked a meaningful chapter in the emergence of a beloved scene that the world would soon call la French Touch.
Qui sème le vent… ultimately sold north of 400 000 copies. The record even found an audience beyond France, a rare feat (to this day) for a rap album without English as a mother tongue. Follow-up single “Caroline” ended up being bigger than “Bouge de là”. The song spent eight months in the higher ceilings of the local Top 50, and became a signature chanson d’amour of the early nineties. At the 1993 Victoires de la Musique, France’s own Grammy Awards, MC Solaar snatched an unlikely win as Best Group. It felt like an oblique homage to the many creators who surrounded him in the Posse 500 One collective. Notable alumni included the dancer-rapper Bambi Cruz, the suave Soon E MC (featured on “L’Histoire de l’art”) and female vocalist Melaaz, a furtive but vital presence in both “Bouge de là” and “Caroline”.
This collective emulation was reflected in the freewheeling final act of Qui sème le vent... At this point of the album, MC Solaar wasn’t even sounding like he was really recording an album anymore. “Bouge de là” is followed by a three-minute coda, where Solaar just lets the words flow while the microphone records. Then comes “Ragga Jam”, the anti-war freestyle that revealed nineties favorites Raggasonic and an intense kiddie rapper named Daddy Kery (the future all-time great Kery James). It was a striking symbol: with Qui sème le vent récole le tempo, MC Solaar had burst open the interstice that would lead the French hip-hop scene towards mainstream recognition. That move done, Solaar wouldn’t enter alone. Soon, many others would follow in his wake.