You can hover the text in red to get the original text
. That’s how Rochdi introduces himself and his -late- group Krystal on total eclipse, one of the track which define the most Rochdi’s style: on an unusual production composed with a techno sample from Laroux, he unleashes a flow with many images describing the rapper’s lifestyle. Work, sex, hell and Paris while we hear a scanding voice naming Rochdi’s band: Krystal. Moreover this is a featuring with some, at this moment, unknown rapper: Jok’air, from the 13th borough where the two rappers are coming from.
The 13th borough of Paris is unique in his style, it seems to be the result of two worlds fighting each other. If you come in from porte de choisy you may discover populars streets where lives mostly former vietnam war refugees with old and used blocks. But on the other side, close to the Seine there are corporate district where many companies are settled with a futuristic architecture and, thanks to the National Library Bibliothèque François Mitterrand, almost dystopian. And you can feel it, all Rochdi’s work is sweating from this atmosphere.
The epic tale seems to begin after Rochdi released an album with his band, and as the market is cruel, the album stayed under the radar and never been known by the average rap fan. Too dark ? Too street ? Nobody will really know what happened but that’s where the lyricist finds his anger to begin walking alone. Everything is compiled in rapport de guerre a street freestyle introducing himself. Rochdi raps his will to success : , If the beatmakers are too greedy I will rap only on side B”, but that’s also where he claims the loosiness of his life or . As he launched his career from the street, Rochdi operates a real mutation from the beginning to the end.
The first album: Hardcore, released in 2012 talks about itself. There are few featuring with hardcore frenches rap star like LIM, 16ar (From l’Skadrille) or Alk’pote. The album’s theme are about street violence, alcohol – No champagne here, only flasks of cheap alcohol drinked alone in small alley – or girls fucked in some dark place of Paris. Violently singed on rough classics boom bap beats – almost academics – the album offers some masterpieces as Hardcore, a violent Diptych using your sister on youporn as a cornerstone. This is the first warn about rochdi’s love for multiple parts tracks, as you can see with Drive-by on the same album. This first release is the naive description of a young rochdi, lost in his poor paris district with no idea about what the future is made of . But it already reveals the main themes rochdi loves and moreover about some of the things so specific about him, the love for long tracks with no chorus (Une ombre dans la ville) and an in-usual – not anymore now but wildly at the release date – use of house/electro beats with poesie en argot (Slang poetry) or total eclipse (éclipse totale) which we talked about earlier. The self named « Porn rap star », as you can listen on the tracks labelled the same way, talks about his relationships with women, we don’t know anything about them or few informations like name and if she sucked his dick or not. Julie is the only exception we will find in all his discography, but even here rochdi needs to use the sex to describe the loved one. However we can find some calm, but still sad, tracks, cutting with the brutality of the album: La veuve (the widow) or poussière de cristal (Krystal’s dust). With this album Rochdi delivers us a great first dive in his universe with an album Influenced by what was the standards at the year the album was released.
Rochdi’s track is full of obsession, traps and patterns. Patterns which are reflecting is the music itself, as if we had been trapped inside his head, always walking in Paris alleys. The second album presents some of them, like the atmosphere of the album. Hardcore was a rough album, drown in some violence Une ombre dans la ville can surprise with his melancholia and more smooth, ever maybe jazzy, instrus. Maybe it’s because of topics he chose, often about love and poetry -but not always ! – maybe it’s because rochdi is closer to his brothers, as Rochdi call them himself. Mike, Joubin, Madj and Le chat noir (The black cat) who are in featuring on 4 of the 13 tracks of the album.
Angoisses (Anguish) opens the album in medias res with rochdi’s thougts: . These are four verses about a sad life with no options and only one thing to grab: oneself. That’s enough for Rochdi to say he owns the future, and that’s what he will show us along the play of the album. The track keeps going in the idea of fucking music industry while living under a death threat as the rapper lifestyle is . Death coming right in the next track, as mentioned: someone died. Mes lèvres is a bitter track about life disappointing, regrets madj, feels like an epiphany, revealing at Rochdi that he need to keep building on himself, that’s why few words later we can hear . Everything can be sumed up from the chorus line, : human condition is futile and only art will free us.
As to enforce the idea Rochdi evolved since his last track, in Le Prince Des Ténèbres we can hear many lines about a new beggining : , , and insisting about the dedication Rochdi decided to give on the art: , and then . Until the death rochdi will stay in duty. Then come Mélodie du Calibre which impose a pace going faster and faster, capturing us in an oppressive dance in a night with rochdi. Atmosphere get heavier and heavier until… Lyriciste come as a breathing in this crazy night, sleep is laying on the beat as water in a river bed. Rochdi get unusually conscious : , conscious of his limits: , and that it may reach him hard: , . Death of his friend really changed the rapper’s mind, the shadow of this event on every track. Next track Desert Eagle works like an echo of Lyricistes preceding track Mélodie du Calibre as it work on a same rythm, simple on which lyrics are rough. We can notice the verse , more than a clever rhyme it’s a foreshadowing of what rochdi will encounter later in the album.
The album end on two antagonistic tracks: Une ombre dans la ville 2 et Les aventures d’un chien errant. Both tracks are about following Rochdi on his journey with his legs as well as his brain. But the mood of each is radically opposed: Une ombre dans la ville 2 as in his the previous one is a smooth walk about fragile parts of the life: love, familly, ending with a girl in the middle of the night. the second track, beginning with a girl in Paris night, is a crawling in the asphalt violence of Paris. Away from being a simple egotrip theses tracks see Rochdi growing. By his encounter with a poet teaching him , then at the end of Les aventures d’un chien errant the rapper get trapped, in a verse hot as hell, by a vicious girl – like he talked about earlyier in the track – in an ambush, with a men, armed and the whisky doesn’t help. The track ends like Rochdi said earlier: and by the same time, his life.