2 The soundtrack to rebellion: the 1970s
During the 1970s, music provided a platform for the voices of those at the margins of society, helping to put immigrants and their identities at the forefront of the political and artistic scenes. Following slightly different trajectories in Paris and London, rock, reggae and punk became weapons of choice in the fight against racism and, more generally, the marginalisation suffered by whole swathes of young people born to immigrant parents in Paris and London. Notting Hill Carnival, the Rock Against Racism gigs in London, the Rock Against Police concerts in and around Paris and the host of other artistic events which sprang from the antiracism movement are proof of the political power of music, and the essential role it plays in the history of migration and culture.
Revolution in the air
The Notting Hill carnival helped to anchor Caribbean music – reggae in particular – in the heart of the city of London. The Rock Against Racism concert series consecrated the London scene as a focal point for protest and fighting race-related injustice. The Rock Against Police concerts organised in Paris, then in the suburbs, showed the impact that the resonance between music and social struggle was having, on each side of the Channel. These artistic events that emerged around the defence of immigrant and minority rights amplified the protest role played by music. So a shift took place, from a context of protest by marginal populations, at the start of the decade, to holding large-scale concerts serving as flagship events for the many causes that were driving politics at the dawn of the 1980s. This came with a new urban geography, more institutional and even more spectacular, for example the concert organised by SOS Racisme at Place de la Concorde in 1985 or the Free Nelson Mandela concert held at Wembley Stadium in 1988.
The Notting Hill carnival, from festive to manifesto
The organisation of the Notting Hill Carnival was a reaction by London’s Afro-Caribbean community to a series of riots that took place in late August 1958. Gangs had assaulted a young woman, Majbritt Morrison, married to Jamaican musician Raymond Morrison. Within the activist world, the idea of responding to this violence by affirming a positive and festive Afro-Caribbean identity was gaining ground. The organisation of the first “Caribbean Carnival” in Saint Pancras town hall in 1959 owed much to Claudia Jones, activist and founder in 1958 of the West Indian Gazette, the newspaper of the Afro-Caribbean community in London. From 1966, the event became an annual happening, taking place in late August. Many obstacles were encountered in gaining acceptance of the event. The police tried several times to ban the Carnival, notably after 1976 where actual riots interrupted the end of the event.
From a musical viewpoint, the Carnival helped anchor reggae music in the heart of the city of London. It did in fact evolve from being a multi-ethnic event to a parade mainly influenced by the music of Trinidad, then by reggae, in the 1970s. A whole specific world developed around this musical style from Jamaica: the sound system culture. From using music as an instrument for affirming politics and identity, the Carnival turned into an international festive event.
The 1970s in France : back into the streets
In France, new protest movements emerged after May 1968. Alongside a return to the streets and the onset of new causes (women’s rights, gay activism, environmental movements), an immigrant defence movement appeared. This was primarily structured around working conditions, in the wake of the strikes of 1968, which many immigrant workers were actively involved in. Then housing conditions became central to the struggle, with the issue of the hostels in which many of them were (badly) housed. Lastly came the question of papers, which took stage front in reaction to the introduction of laws limiting entry into the country and visa renewal (e.g. the 1972 Marcellin-Fontanet memorandums, which made the granting of visas dependent on obtaining a work contract and housing).
The Mouvement de Défense des Droits des Immigrés resorted to artistic forms that lent themselves to protest movements, such as street theatre, concerts and music parades during festivals. The first Festival de Théâtre Populaire des Travailleurs Immigrés took place in 1975 in the gardens of a church in Suresnes, loaned by the CIMADE organisation. The experiment, repeated in 1976, 1978 and 1979, evolved towards being more of a musical event, featuring artists or musical formations such as Nass El Ghiwan, the singer Idir, Djamal Alem and Pierre Akendengue. The emergence of a new generation of foreign artists could be observed, in collaboration with French singers sensitive to the immigrant cause, such as François Béranger, Bernard Lavilliers or Claude Nougaro. In the same spirit, the creation of the Festival Africa Fête in 1978 was supported by symbolic figures like Manu Dibango and Touré Kounda.
Punk and reggae in the UK: a new youth culture
The origins of punk can be found in reggae and ska, in the UK. Just as rock’n’roll borrowed its rhythms from African American music, punk and its protest-based narrative drew part of its inspiration from the music of Jamaica… as it could be heard in London.
The two scenes intermingled, sharing producers, inspirations and the same musical styles at the core of a “reggae-punk interface” that foreshadowed their joint mobilisation against racism, a few years later. Take for example the feminist female band The Slits, who released their first album Cut (1979), a mixture of punk spirit and reggae groove (produced by Dennis Bovell, a reggae musician who worked with Linton Kwesi Johnson), or Donn Letts, DJ and maker of documentaries on British counter-cultures. The punk movement and reggae musicians shared a rejection of society in the Thatcher years and symbolised this era in which, as journalist Andy McSmith wrote in his essay No Such Thing As Society, there was “more politics in popular British music and political activism on the part of its performers than at any other time before or since.” The song “Ghost Town” by ska band The Specials is an illustration of this: it denounces urban violence and social destitution in the UK against a reggae bass line, in a track that promoted the two-tone style (imprinted with ska sounds and the energy of the punk movement) and that climbed to the top of the UK charts.
Paris, Counter-culture, French-style
In the 1970s, the term “counter-culture” was used to describe youth protest movements against the cultural domination enjoyed by the guarantors of morality and social norms. Post-68 ideologies, ecology, feminism, the search for new perceptive experiences with drugs, sexual liberation, rock music, discovery of the Third World, Black Panthers, defence of immigrants and fight against racism: western youth were shaking up their parents’ preconceived notions and dreaming of other worlds. This reversal of traditional values came with a freedom of tone that was not to everyone’s taste. The scandal that followed the distribution and success of the reggae version of “La Marseillaise”, recorded by Serge Gainsbourg in 1979, is a typical example of this counter-culture that loved to hijack national symbols. Ten years earlier, in August 1969, at Woodstock, Jimi Hendrix had performed an iconoclastic version of “The Star Spangled Banner”. That aggressively electric version became a counter-culture anthem that a whole generation hostile to the Vietnam War could relate to. In London, the Sex Pistols had hijacked “God save the Queen” on the occasion of the Queen’s Jubilee in 1977. So Gainsbourg was well in step with the times of the “no future” generation prophesied by the magazine Actuel and its director Jean-François Bizot in the early 1970s.
Anti-racism on the march
In France and the UK, rock and reggae became the preferred musical styles of the protest movement: whether it was protesting the established order or, more particularly, demonstrating against the racist words or actions becoming more common on each side of the Channel.
For 10 years already, the rise in right-wing racist narrative had been observed on the British political chess board. A 1968 speech by Enoch Powell, conservative MP, predicting “rivers of blood” if the UK continued to freely accept arrivals from the Commonwealth, had legitimized a reflex of rejection of those populations. Hence, the politicisation of immigration started ten years earlier than it did in France, with the creation of an extreme right party, the National Front, in 1967, and led to a revolt among artists concerned about this toxic environment.
In France, a series of concerts entitled Rock Against Police was organised in Paris, in denunciation of police violence against the descendants of immigrants. Although of lesser scope than the British movement, the mere fact of organising concerts echoing that movement shows the connections between musicians and social struggle, between Paris and London. These connections were consolidated by visits (Linton Kwesi Johnson to Paris, Rachid Taha to London) and publications (reports by the IMMEDIA agency in France, for example). But most of all it was the Marche pour l’égalité et contre le racisme, in autumn 1983, that confirmed the trend. The event, which started out from Marseille in October to arrive in Paris in December, did indeed come with its own “soundtrack”: listened to by marchers on their walkmans and shared during events at the various stopover points, it included Bob Marley and Renaud, who joined the marchers on their arrival in Paris.
Uprising in the city centre (1976-1978)
In the mid-1970s, the economic crisis struck those areas in UK cities that were primarily home to an underprivileged population: the inner cities. Between a rise in unemployment, budget cuts in government services and the breakthrough made by the British National Front, which particularly targeted the black community, the atmosphere was tense. Against this background, a veritable anti-racist uprising came into being with the formation of the Southall Youth Movement in 1976, created by young people of Asian origin following a racist crime. They proclaimed loud and strong: “Here to stay, here to fight”. That same year, the Notting Hill Carnival became the stage for clashes between youths and the police. In 1977, the battle of Lewisham saw a confrontation between National Front demonstrators and anti-fascist groups, united under the name Anti-Nazi League. But it was in 1978 that the uprising reached its peak, when the Anti-Nazi League organised a Rock Against Racism festival, with 80,000 people marching to Trafalgar Square.
The mobilisation of French working class districts and suburbs
In France, the concentration of immigrants and their children in the suburbs of big cities turned these neighbourhoods into a focal point for the emergence of protest movements against inequality, but also an extraordinary hotbed for groups and associations organised around themes of sport, culture, media, citizenship, welcoming new arrivals and mutual assistance.
In the early 1980s, this flurry of non-profit activity was particularly marked by the difficult relations between youth and police. The initiatives taken as a means of defence, but also and above all to publicise the situation, multiplied: creation of a media agency by and for immigrants (IMMEDIA) and mobilisation of mothers of young victims of violence in the heart of the French capital (Les Mères de la Place Vendôme, for example). Once again, music, and in particular rock, played an essential role in spreading the word about protest movements, with the organisation of Rock Against Police concerts (in Paris in 1980, then Vitry and in the suburbs of Lyon and Marseille). On the outskirts of the city, in the French banlieue, working-class districts and squats were no longer just places where people ended up after hitting hard times, but also spaces producing new artistic forms that were reinventing aesthetic codes. The development of squat culture and the taking-over of abandoned factories (the Palikao) sparked a whole new music scene, notably with the group Bérurier Noir.
Youth on the march
In the early 1980s, a whole generation adopted the codes of a new youth culture: dressed in denim trousers and jackets, they listened to rock or reggae and, in some cases, got involved in fighting racism. Until then, the anti-racist cause had been defended by historic associations, formed at different periods: the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme (LDH), created in 1898, within the context of the Dreyfus Affair; the Ligue Internationale Contre le Racisme et l’Antisémitisme (LICRA), created in 1928 during the period of xenophobic, anti-Semitic agitation that characterised the inter-war period, and the Mouvement Contre le Racisme et pour l’Amitié entre les Peuples (MRAP), created in 1949 by members of the resistance and former deportees. Since the introduction of the Pleven law of 1972, which condemned racial hate speech, these associations had been able to file a civil case in criminal court.
With the Marche pour l’égalité et contre le racisme in 1983, followed by the Convergence 1984, the anti-racist cause moved away from the courtrooms and traditional activism, invading the streets and concert venues… “La jeunesse emmerde le Front national!” (“youth says screw you, Front National!”) chanted the band Bérurier Noir, making the extreme right party that was enjoying increasing electoral success in the 1980s the prime example of that ideology.
