Travelling Tropical Gangstas from France: An Analysis of Hardcore French Rappers Who Reenforce Their Hypermasculinity by Filming Music Videos in Medellín and Rio De Janeiro

Since the nascent stage of French hip-hop music, Gangsta-style rappers have emphasised their toughness and hypermasculinity by producing videos in disenfranchised areas in France. These types of self-characterisations in French rap play a vital role in reinforcing an artist’s reputational strength and are a method for establishing their personally styled brand. The interplay that connects a community with hip-hop constitutes two essential frameworks that shape and facilitate the Alpha Male viewpoint of many global rap artists. In recent years, several of the most popular French hardcore rappers are abandoning their longstanding rubric of filming in socio-economically challenged areas of France by travelling to locations overseas where they can create new narratives of auto-fortitude. By choosing to produce videos in faraway global locales, French hip-hop artists are realising the visual power that these foreign locations enable them in terms of re-branding their reputations. This is particularly true when rap consumers can associate or stereotype certain international locations with crime and deviance. In this sense, Brazil and Colombia have become favoured destinations for the production of music videos. Videoclips filmed in these two countries feature thematic cynosures of vice where rappers can position themselves as kingpins. These presentations are intentionally produced in zones that viewers might recognise from newsclips, programmes, or popular films. Socio-economically challenged places like the comunas of Medellín and Rio de Janeiro’s favelas give French hip-hop artists new stylistic techniques to bolster their self-narratives. This enables them to exude toughness in manners not available to them at home, such as cosplaying real-life gangsters and flaunting firearms in videos. This study deconstructs hypermasculine demonstrations as exhibited in several commercially popular music French hip-hop videos that were produced in Brazil and Colombia by examining the reasonings and contrasts of these narratives. For the hardcore rappers who produce content overseas, the choice to create videoclips in disenfranchised areas in those countries is fully intentional. The more an artist embraces a stereotypically provocative visual image with which viewers can identity based on these locations, the more fortuitous they seem, even when these same filmic destinations are negatively fetishised or misrepresented in the process. As hypermasculinity and male posturing continue to be an important components in hip-hop, it is likely that rappers from France will increasingly choose global locations where they will have the ability to bolster their self-narratives of virility in outrageously fictitious manners.