Cicilie among the Parisians

Every night there are several soirées slams taking place. The scene has completely exploded since I started following it 8 months ago, and certainly since I had my first peek into it at a quite shabby bar in Rue de Bagnolet more than a year ago. The slam is still going on in shabby bars, but it’s also found its way big time onto the Internet.

Télérama, a French version of the British Time Out has put 6 nice videos on their site, here. I would particularly recommend Sandra and Le Slam (with the duo performing AC! En nos âmes et consciences which I wrote about here).

The bar Divan du Monde up in Montmartre (the cradle of Parisian slam) is having great slam soirées once a month hosted by Caroline Carl, and they put all the performances on internet: see here.

Last week-end there was some kind of hip-hop award going on, where slam was a category (which I’ve not heard anyone talk about). I’ll add the link here, because it includes one of my personal favourites Souleymane Diamanka. (The others are also worth checking out. Abd Al Malik represents a strange phenomenon, by the way. I think he’s great, but strangely the term slam were not connected to his name before it became an advertismenent asset…. Read an interview with him in Danish(!) here –thanks Monica, for the link ).

The reason why Souleymane is my favourite can be found on his site on myspace here: Le poète se cache… It’s sooo beautiful.

UPDATE ON SOULEYMANE DIAMANKA: All the lyrics from Souleymane Diamanka’s forthcoming album L'Hiver Peul (out the 10th of April), can be found here, together with an extensive biography, touring dates, extracts of the songs etc. The biography contains some information of the oratory arts amongst the people Peul in Senegal transmitted to the French suburbs obviously representing such a goldmine for an anthropologist that it’ll surely result in a new post soon. (It also appears that Souleymane participated in the inauguration of the controversial (ethnographic) arts museum Quai Branly (site in English!)…).

The 10th of April is also the release date for the anthology of poems written together with John Bansaï, J’écris en français dans une langue étrangère (“I write in French in a foreign language”).