Rapper Freeze Corleone in the music video -

YouTube screenshot

  • On Thursday, the Paris prosecutor's office announced the opening of an investigation into various video clips and songs by Freeze Corleone on the counts of provocation to racial hatred and racist insult.

  • Some of the rapper's lyrics are deemed “anti-Semitic” and “denial”.

  • Enigmatic artist, member of an underground collective, the rapper cultivates a certain opacity around his texts.

Until now, his name was little known to the general public.

And for a slightly more informed audience, he was presented a few days ago as "the rising star of French rap".

But since Thursday, the lights have been on Freeze Corleone, or more precisely on the lyrics of some of its songs.

The government has indeed announced that it has taken legal action over several clips deemed “anti-Semitic” and “negationist” by the rapper, which provoked the outrage of the LREM majority.

In a tweet published overnight from Wednesday to Thursday, Gérald Darmanin himself was indignant at "unspeakable" remarks.

Apology for Nazism and anti-Semitism ... These words are unspeakable.

At my request, the Ministry of the Interior is studying as quickly as possible legal remedies to prosecute their author.

I am already calling on Facebook and Twitter not to spread this garbage.

https://t.co/oKT645QejN

- Gérald DARMANIN (@GDarmanin) September 16, 2020

The Minister of the Interior thus relayed messages from La Licra on Twitter, believing that "impunity [should] end" and asking all the players including the major online music distribution platforms to "take their responsibilities. ".

Late Thursday afternoon, the Paris prosecutor's office announced for its part the opening of an investigation into various video clips and songs of Freeze Corleone of the counts of provocation to racial hatred and racist insult.

But what do we know about Freeze Corleone?

A pioneer of drill in France (a musical movement born in the early 2010s in Chicago), the rapper has released a dozen musical projects in ten years, and most recently the album

La Menace Fantôme

at Universal.

A very enigmatic artist, he has been evolving for several years against the mainstream music industry.

Mystery and collective 667

“I was born in Les Lilas, I grew up in Pantin and I did my high school in Dakar”.

Here is in all and for all the only sentence that

Les Inrocks

had managed to wrest from Freeze Corleone in 2017, for an article dedicated to him.

A fairly exceptional concession from the 28-year-old artist who refuses to speak in the press.

It is on the side of his relatives that the cultural magazine had ended up scratching a few snippets of information on his personality: “Freeze, he's a strategist, a guy who does nothing stupidly and who calculates each of his actions or each one. of its outings ”.

“It's a bit like Ra's al Ghul in Batman, a mysterious, clever, intelligent character at the head of the League of Shadows,” he added.

Apart from a few collaborations with well-known artists such as Alkpote or Alpha Wann (from the 1995 group), Freeze Corleone evolves within the 667, an underground collective set up on his initiative about ten years ago.

It is also called The Sect, the Death Eater Squad, or the famous League of Shadows.

Based between Paris, Lyon and Dakar, the collective is developing a whole parallel universe fascinated by video games, Freemasonry and the Illuminati.

“The peculiarity of the 667 is that the members take great pleasure in mixing pop-culture with esotericism, in making up references that speak only to initiates with images common to everyone in an imaginary world. popular ”, analyzes a Yard article in 2019 on the subject.

A conglomerate of influences and symbols at the heart of the problem.

Opacity and cryptic texts

As several specialized media have noted, the specificity of Freeze Corleone's rap is to saturate its texts with references and semantic experiments, irremediably leading the listener astray.

"It is intentionally cryptic in its formulation, which does not help the listener to interpret its texts and to understand the underlying ideas", develops Booska-p.com.

In September 2019, the Mouv 'site thus estimated that “his texts are not to be put in all hands, and certain recurring themes of his universe are to be taken with a lot of hindsight.

Accused by some of anti-Semitism, his discography is thus strewn with name-droppings and metaphors regularly going beyond the limits of the acceptable ”.

A reading all the more complex as the rapper refuses any interview and has therefore never taken care to provide explanations on his texts, nor on the content of his words.

This is the subject of the investigation for "provocation to racial hatred" and "racist insult" initiated by the Paris prosecutor's office, the investigations of which were entrusted to the brigade for the repression of delinquency against the person ( BRDP), and the Regional Directorate of Judicial Police (DRPJ).

In extracts from his clips broadcast on social networks and compiled in particular by the Licra, the rapper declares among other things: "I arrive determined like Adolf in the 30s", "every day RAF [nothing to give a fuck] about the Shoah ”Or“ like Swiss bankers, everything for the family so that my children live like Jewish pensioners ”.

Thursday evening, several accounts specializing in rap on Twitter, assured that some songs of Freeze Corleone had been deleted from YouTube in reaction to the controversy.

🚨 “Freeze Raël” and “Rap Catéchisme” were removed from YouTube for “content inciting hatred”.



The track "Rap Catechism" was also released from the Skyrock playlist according to the manager of Freeze Corleone.

pic.twitter.com/Mtp2z1vhDk

- Kultur (@Kulturlesite_) September 17, 2020

Little present in the traditional media, the rapper knew until then a relatively confidential success.

An increasingly solid fan community given the numbers achieved by his latest album released on September 11.

In 24 hours,

La Menace Fantome had

11 million streams on Spotifiy and more than 15,000 copies sold in three days, the Mouv 'reported.

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