Why is JuL France's most popular musical artist ever?
NOTE: This essay on the French rapper/musical artist JuL is a bit different than those I’ve written so far, which have focused largely on a combination of political ideology and history. In general, I envision mostly writing along these lines because these are topics about which I’m usually most passionate. Still, my principal motivation here is to write about topics I believe are unknown or overlooked (at least for an English-speaking audience). Hence, my desire to write about JuL: unknown in the English-speaking world and under-appreciated in the French-speaking world.
In 2020, at the age of 30, JuL had already become the largest selling French language hip hop artist of all time. Indeed, given his relatively young age, he is almost certain to surpass Johnny Halliday’s previous sales records when he finishes his career. Yet, unlike Halliday, who achieved a certain degree of cross-cultural notoriety, JuL remains largely unknown outside of the French-speaking world. This is unfortunate, because I would argue that JuL’s cultural and artistic significance is already substantially greater than that of artists like Halliday whose records he is in the process of breaking.
Amongst French tastemakers, JuL (birth name Julien Mari) has been something of a controversial figure. Fiercely loyal to his hometown, Marseille, he has always remained distant from the France’s undisputed cultural center, Paris. Initially derided for his song’s often simplistic lyrics as well as his general lack of cultural polish, Mari has gradually gained the respect (if not the love) of France’s hip hop cognoscenti. Maintaining an insane work ethic that allows him to release two full albums a year, he has forged a truly unique musical phenomena over the course of the last decade.
Of Corsican heritage, Mari is white; but at the same time he hails from metropolitan France’s most peripheral region.1 He comes from a solidly working-class background, which means he is part of the largest single demographic block in the country. Yet while France’s white working class represents a plurality of the country, it nevertheless lacks cultural and economic power. Further, Mari grew up in a public housing community in Marseille where, as a white person, he was a minority, surrounded by Maghrebiens, Comorans, and other non-white ethnicities. Generally speaking, his background means he is capable of embodying an unusually broad cross-section of modern French society. Understood more specifically, it allows him to serve as a conduit to white youth while at the same time maintaining credibility with the nation’s non-white communities.
His biographical background is also important to emphasize in that I don’t think he could have created the distinct style he has if he had not grown up in a culturally peripheral context. Mari is arguably an example of Antonio Gramsci’s organic intellectual; that is, someone who does not describe social life “in accordance with scientific rules.” Rather, he express “through the language of culture, the feelings and experiences the masses could not express for themselves.”2 In other words, because Mari was unbound by an idea of what a musician or (even) a rapper in France should be, he was able to create a distinctly French urban pop music that has a unique ability to speak to the nation’s working class youth (white and non-white).
While his diverse, working class background has enabled him to re-imagine and combine multiple pop traditions, this musical formula only work because of his uncanny ability to produce danceable songs with powerfully original melodies. This ability was evident right from his initial breakthrough in 2013 with the single “Sors le cross volé” (roughly translates to “Take out the stolen bike”).
Both the video and the song lack professional polish; they clearly have been produced using a very small budget. Yet despite its rather cheap, underproduced quality, its sound is subtly powerful; once you have heard it, it doesn’t leave you.3 In this track, you hear some of the features JuL has developed throughout his career as an artist and producer: high BPM, stuttered, jerky rhythms, heavy bass, and a haunting melody that seems to combine sounds from European and African pop music.
While French hip hop has always very good (indeed, I’d argue today it is better than American hip hop), it has historically looked to perfect musical templates already fashioned in the United States. By contrast, from the very start of his career, JuL has not done this. Instead, he has progressively crafted a new decidedly French sound, combining influences that surround him Marseille: American and Parisian hip-hop, Eurodance, maghrebien pop music like Raï, latin genres like Reggaeton, French “variety” music, and so on.
“Sors le cross volé” as well as tracks like “Au quartier” (translated, roughly, “In the neighborhood”) from his first studio album, Dans ma paranoia, are good examples of the distinctive sound JuL was beginning to forge. But an equally important early JuL track is “J’oublie tout” (translated as “I forget everything” or "I forget it all”), also included on his debut album. Typically cited by fans and critics as one of his most important compositions, the song was never released as a single, nor did it have an official promotional video. Nevertheless, his then-label Liga One Industry uploaded a YouTube video containing just a static image backed by the song in 2016, two years after its initial release. By 2024, the Liga One upload has amassed 240 million views, an astonishingly high number for a video not backing a single and containing no moving images.
Like much of his earliest production work (and like the above-mentioned “Sors le cross volé”), “J’oublie tout” sounds cheap and underproduced. Yet at the same time (again, like “Sors le cross volé”), its melody is haunting and surreptitiously indelible; it is song that you find playing in your head days or weeks later.
What I think really makes the song stand out for his fans is the way its lyrics are animated by the vulnerable melancholy of his voice. Like many contemporary hip hop artists, JuL is just as likely to sing as he is to rap. In either case, the quality of his lyrics viewed alone are not always particularly high. But here, the sincerity of his voice elevates his words to something approaching profundity. When he sings, we believe he has lived the events he describes—whether he has or not. Unsurprisingly, then, it becomes a song that young people—but especially those whose backgrounds are like his—relate to quickly. As he intones in the song’s chorus,
Ce soir, j’oublie tout
J’cherche mon chemin, j’fais détours
Ce soir, j’oublie tout
Et quand je repense à ce jour
Je m’dis que la vie est courte
Qu’on partira tous un jour
Alors j’m’en tape de vos discours
Derrière le bonheur, moi, j’cours
(Tonight, I forget everything
I search my path, I take detours
Tonight, I forget everything
And when I think again of this day
I reflect that life is short
That we all will be gone one day
So, I don’t give damn about what you say
Its after happiness that I run)4
As noted above, JuL is a relentlessly productive artist, typically releasing two albums a year: usually one in May or June, and then a second in November or December. Because of this release schedule, his discography is by now staggering, especially for an artist who has only been active for about 10 years. HIs oeuvre spans a wide range of musical styles—various combinations of rap, pop, dance, afrobeat, reggaeon, latin, raï, and so on. Yet, if his catalogue journeys all over the musical map, he does ultimately have an identifiable style, first represented by tracks like “Sors le cross volé” but refined in subsequent releases, such as “Comme d’hab” (2015):
Or “La Bandite” (2019):
Or “M*ther F**k” (2020):
All three of these track capture the combination of dance pop and “street", accessibility and authenticity, Mediterranean sun and urban crisis that is central to JuL’s artistic universe. But perhaps the apotheosis of this aesthetic is 2020’s “Bande Organisée”. This track featured as a part of his 13 Organisé project, which brought together approximately 50 Marseille rappers to record a one-off album. In itself, the project demonstrated JuL’s clout inside the French (and especially, the Marseille) hip hop community, but also his substantial organizational and production skills. Not universally loved by critics, the album for me is a French hip hop classic and one of the better existing representations of the unique Marseille sound JuL has crafted. The song “Bande Organisée” is its most important representation, amassing over 500 million views on YouTube by 2024:
I must say at first I didn’t love it; I thought there were better, more lyrically interesting tracks on the 13 Organisé album. But after several listens, I do think “Bande Organisée” deserves its place as one of the most popular and important French hip hop titles of all time. Its broken, staccato beats, high tempo, dark, catchy melodies, and lyrics about Marseille street life make it a culmination of the sound towards which JuL had been building for nearly a decade.
I want to stress that it was difficult to make a selection of representative JuL tracks. I think the above examples do a fairly good job of conveying his sound. That said, I have not included a lot very good songs because they don’t necessarily represent in themselves the full combination of influences that characterize his music. In other words, JuL’s oeuvre includes many traditional hip hop tracks, as well as a large number of more explicitly pop songs. Really, there are too many to mention, let alone to include in a 2,000 word article summarizing his career.5 That said, if you are looking for examples of JuL as a more traditional rapper, consider searching out “Coup de Genoux”, “Ténébreux”, “Bravo”, “Que ça dure”, or “Entraînment”. If you are looking for songs representing the more poppy part of his oeuvre, consider: “Oh qu’elle est belle”, “En Y”, “Briganté”, “Je fais que danser”, “Le coeur avant tout”, or “Wesh alors”. More recently, his music has more explicitly incorporated African and Latin influences. Good examples in this vein include: “Oh qu’elle est belle”, “Mon sucre d’amour”, or “J’ai pris le mic.” But, really, these are just a starting point. I am still discovering new JuL songs I like 3 years after discovering him.
I’d also strongly suggest watching Rap Lume’s “La création d'un genre” documentary, which gives JuL’s music the level of analysis it deserves. Its in French, but you can turn on English subtitles if you watch it on YouTube :
It makes sense to think of Corsica’s relationship to metropolitan France as similar to that of Scotland’s relationship to England, or southern Italy’s relationship to northern Italy.
To a lesser extent, the video itself is interesting, as it combines an aesthetic derived from American hip hop videos with JuL’s working class mediterranean surroundings.
Note the importance of the original French to the song’s prosody. Unsurprisingly, the song loses much of it power when translated.
Indeed, I’m still discovering new JuL tracks I like from his back catalogue (to say nothing of the new 2 new albums he releases every year).