Watching Best Of Groove in 1996
A playlist to remember what it was to discover hip-hop, back when hip-hop was still an ocean away.
There used to be a time when America was still a distant land. The world wide web was a microcosm, mobile phones a nouveau riche impulse, so popular culture moved in slow motion across continents, and with terrible dubbing. Sure enough, the United States had already mass-exported rock & roll, junk food and Macaulay Culkin to the world, so the cultural firepower of the American dream was in full swing. But for impressionable kids like me, America always promised a new treasure, beyond the alluring goofiness of sitcom heroes and the transfixing ballet of NBA highlights. Hip-hop, the country’s greatest export of the late twentieth century, was that new mythical world gleaming in the distance.
In 1996, hip-hop was accelerating towards the center of popular music in the United States, but in France, the genre was still bubbling up to the surface. Local acts were breaking through, and singles from American artists like Kris Kross and Warren G had charted high enough to sparkle a generation-wide fascination, but for the most part, hip-hop remained a secret code waiting to be deciphered. At that time, I was fourteen, and I badly wanted hip-hop to be part of my identity toolkit. The music carried vivid cinematic visions and an irresistible cool factor. It was supercharged with self-confidence, a rare elixir that teenage life provided in very limited supply.
The music, too, was available in fragments. If you didn’t live near a cultural hub like Paris, if you didn’t have cable TV, and if your curiosity hadn’t already mutated into an irreversible obsession, you would have little sense of hip-hop’s driving forces. You would assemble a rough collage of hip-hop made of vignettes from the occasional gatecrashers—that one group crossing over to cultural inevitability, like The Fugees—and the help of unknowing mentors, generally a friend who let you make a copy of their Naughty By Nature album. With that relative scarcity, whatever record you put your hands on would become a cornerstone.
In this era, one TV show functioned as a window into hip-hop’s faraway land. Created in 1987, M6 was the latest station to be granted a broadcasting license in France. With the help of Parisian creative agency BETC, M6 branded itself as underdog TV (“the small station on the come up”). For regulatory reasons, M6 had to devote thirty percent of its programming to music. To meet the bar, the station packed its night schedule with long stretches of video clips, and became a destination by default for a youth demographic hungry for self-definition.
By 1996, M6 had already launched a one-off rap experiment (RapLine), a popular music countdown (Hit Machine) and an up-close talk show (Fréquenstar). The station used leftover night slots for emerging artists and bizarre stuff they couldn’t air during daytime. Every Thursday, the 1 a.m. slot was dedicated to alternative rock (Best Of Trash), while Friday was home to Best Of Groove, an hourlong flow of rap videos coming from the United States (mostly) and France. These programs offered a glimpse into a broader, messier cultural horizon, and felt completely unbound from editorial constraints.
The appeal of Best Of Groove lied in its semi-clandestine aura. It started after midnight, the forbidden zone where commercial breaks included fishy adult hotlines from France’s Minitel, the country’s attempt at inventing an Internet before the Internet. Assuming a certain degree of parental oversight, a teenager would have to record the program on a VHS tape, which gave videos a rough, granular quality (VHS turned any dark scene into an indistinguishable mess, something I want to believe was great for teenage imagination).
Best Of Groove also happened at a time when hip-hop—or the anonymous producer behind the show—was going through a gothic phase. Dr. Dre dressed up as some kind of demonic priest, The Pharcyde moved backwards like possessed dolls, B-Real emerged from the shadow as a bald-headed boogeyman, and Redman looked like he was about to kick the walls of his padded cell. French rappers had taken note. In France, cult group Assassin honed their own dark mystique: Rockin’ Squat, the frontman, was a faceless creature concealed behind make-up, dreadlocks and shaky camera moves. Assassin’s most memorable videos featured a mime artist straight out of a Stephen King novel and children riding a ghost train. This sinister mood was soon to be heightened by real-life tragedy. The year was 1996, and the biggest rapper in the word was 2Pac. His murder, in September, would turn him into a martyr and a spectral presence hovering over the pop landscape.
Today, virtually any recorded rap song in history can be found online, so I wanted to recreate, by memory, the randomness of the Best Of Groove experience. When I remembered a song discovered on the show, I added it to a playlist, hoping it would form some sort of cohesive statement about how rap could be found, back when rap had not yet flooded the gates. It brought me back to the thrill of not knowing. Not knowing what rap could be, and not knowing what would come next: a new favorite, a commercial break, or the end of the tape.
Ironically, the low-resolution quality of the Best Of Groove era has survived until today. On YouTube, many vintage rap videos are only available in grainy versions, and a handful are even ripped from old recordings of the program (“Je suis l’Arabe”, an indignant song from former Suprême NTM acolyte Yazid, is one of them, and nowhere to be found on streaming platforms). Even some of the blockbuster videos from that era look like their master file was lost in a fire. Once a technological constraint, low-resolution has become an aesthetic, digitally recreated in contemporary videos and Instagram filters. This fuzziness, in hindsight, is more than visual noise. It’s also a testament to the conflicting nature of that era—perishable yet strangely persistent, like adolescence itself.
Track Listing
Songs marked with an asterisk (*) are not available on streamline platforms.
The Prince Paul track is a stand-in for the incredible, nine-minute trailer video for A Prince Among Thieves, which remained for years my Holy Grail rap album after a showing on Best Of Groove.
01. DJ Muggs ft. Dr. Dre & B-Real • Puppet Master
02. 2Pac ft. Snoop Doggy Dogg • 2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted
03. Cypress Hill • Boom Biddy Bye Bye (Fugees Mix)
04. Delinquent Habits • Tres Delinquentes
05. Prince Paul ft. Breeze • What U Got (The Demo)
06. Public Enemy • Give It Up
07. Sens Unik • Paquito
08. Yazid • Je suis l’Arabe*
09. NAP • Je viens des quartiers*
10. Tout Simplement Noir • J’suis F
11. Dr. Dre • Keep Their Heads Ringin’
12. Westside Connection • Bow Down
13. Assassin ft. Supernatural • Undaground Connexion
14. Large Professor • Mad Scientist
15. Redman ft. K-Solo • It’s Like That (My Big Brother)
16. Ice-T • I Must Stand
17. The Pharcyde • Runnin’
18. The Roots • What They Do