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The most streamed artists on Spotify this year in France, Germany and Italy are rappers. They dominate the charts in their countries but are almost entirely unknown in the Anglosphere. Are we missing out?
Let’s start with Jul, the Drake of French rap. As with the Canadian, records tumble whenever the Marseille star, real name Julien Marie, picks up “le micro”. He has sold more records than any other French rapper and topped Spotify’s annual streaming charts six times since 2016. His albums are huge affairs, even longer than Drake’s marathons, and he releases them more frequently too. This year he has launched no fewer than three, containing 63 tracks in total and lasting 214 minutes. That works out at a song every six days or so.
“Studio, studio, c’est ma vie,” he raps in his latest whopper of an album, La route est longue (★★★☆☆). He uses the first person a lot in his songs, a Drakean act of solipsism, but without the same boastfulness. Humility, hard work and integrity are Jul’s values, held up as a bulwark against haters and fakers. He raps in a supple voice with singsong musicality and guttural emphases that resemble verbal static amid the flow. The music is more colourful than his single-minded lyrics might suggest, a Marseille good-time sound that looks more to Africa and Latin America than the US. The style isn’t varied enough to sustain the Proustian length of his albums but yes, Anglophones: we’re missing out.
Alas, the same isn’t true of Apache 207, Germany’s most successful rapper. Real name Volkan Yaman, he hails from the industrial city of Ludwigshafen. His album Gartenstadt (★★☆☆☆) has an eye on the high-end alienation that The Weeknd has made his own: “Breaking Your Heart” is almost “Blinding Lights” in German. Apache is a gruffly direct rapper who sings with fist-clenched emotiveness. But the songs are at once overwrought and formulaic, ending with the mystifyingly big hit single “Komet”, a scrunched-face duet with veteran rocker Udo Lindenberg.
And so to Sfera Ebbasta, the most listened-to artist on Italian Spotify for the third successive year. The Milan-based rapper’s X2VR (★★★☆☆) is unabashedly commercial pop-trap in which Ebbasta glories in a rags-to-Rolex lifestyle of wealth and women. Trashy, but his languid rapping is highly listenable (less so his wheedling singing voice). Also “Ciao Bella” features a scene-stealing cameo by a young star of Italian rap, Anna. I suspect the non-Italophone world will be hearing more from her.