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"POLICE": Rap Music IN FRANCE and the PROSECUTION of Supreme NTM
On November 14, 1996, the french rap group supreme NTM was fined 50,000 French francs, given a six-month jail sentence (three months in custody and three months suspended), and banned from performing on French territory for six months. The court`s justification for this exceptionally harsh sentence was Supreme NTM`s attitude towards the police. At the root of this decision was a concert given one year before on July 14 in La Seyne-sur-Mer in the french Department of the Var:no assaults, robberies, or property damage occurred that night, but Supreme NTM, who participated in the concert, allegedly insulted the policemen present before performing one of their songs, "police." The ppolice unions sued Supreme NTM, who were found guilty of "flagrant verbal insults to the public authorities" -- the first sentence of this kind in France.
As may be suspected, all this did not occur by accident. Indeed, the judge, Claude Boulanger, a former policeman, was already known among his peers for the severity of his sentences. Likewise, Jean-Claude Marchiani, Chief of Police of the Department of Var, who requested the cancellation of a Supreme NTM concert scheduled for the Châteauvallon Festival, is close to both Charles Pasqua(1) and the Toulon judiciary.(2) To complete the picture, the Mayor of Toulon, Jean-Marie Le Chevallier, belongs to the extreme right-wing Front National, and the controversial concert of July 1996 was organized by the association "SOS-Racisme" as a protest against his election.
In fact, Supreme NTM's troubles over the song began several years ago. When the album"J'appuie sur la gachette" (I'm Pulling the Trigger)(3) was released in April 1993, a judicial investigation was demanded and Supreme NTM was summoned to the police station in Paris.
The sentencing of Supreme NTM was all the more astounding in that two months earlier, the extreme right-wing leader Jean-Marie Le Pen had claimed with complete impunity that he believed in the inequality of races and that White and Black people could obviously not reach the same level of civilization. Similarly, during the annual Front National meeting held in Paris in September 1996, the skinhead group Moloko Velocet sang: "one bullet for the Zionists, one bullet for the Cosmopolitans, one bullet for the Yankees,...