Review Summary: I was wrong
You all know that kind of band. The kind you absolutely hate on first listen, but, as time passes by, you start to dig. The thing is, you don't really know why all of sudden you start to enjoy it. One day you hate them, the next you can't help but hum one of their tunes. The exact same phenomenon happened to me with PNL. And God was I not the only one. Many people first struggled with the two brothers' music, yet the duo found a huge resonance within the French rap scene. They helped popularize cloud rap in French-speaking countries, their first two records laying foundations for their third output,
Dans La Légende. Both released in 2015,
Que La Famille and
Le Monde Chico were respectively an incomplete first try and a more refined take on aerial and melancholic rap. PNL's next record would follow the same formula, but it succeeds where these prior two albums struggled.
Said formula is arranged around vaporous type beats supported by aqueous synthetic mats. The fact that they build their sound on beats found on YouTube may appear to be the ultimate sign of a laziness begat by too much hemp consumption. However, not having to care for beats construction allows them to spend a tremendous amount of time on voice processing. Vocals are constantly being processed using autotune, delay, and basically all tools available in the first digital audio workstation you could find, the ultimate goal being to bring melody into the two rappers' flawed voices – as they say themselves in their
Fader interview. PNL accommodate the autotune in a symbiotic relationship never heard of in France, evoking the hip-hop transhumanism of many American pioneers. One can be reminded of Frank Ocean in terms of sadness and emotion, Drake's spleen-ish rap'n'b, or the smoky mazes of A$AP Rocky's cloud rap. Contrary to their previous albums, there is less rapping and more singing precisely because the vocal editing tools are better and more vastly used.
Considering these tools as their very own way of instrumentalizing vocals, the two rappers opt for a slow but nervous diction, agglomerated in clusters of thick syllables metronomically asserted around the silences with an agility even more insolent as it mimics phlegmatic and numbness all the time. While we are used to separating the words from the music in rap, PNL reverses the phenomenon and appropriates the beats through the lyrics. The effect is startling, as the multiplication of onomatopoeia – they can repeat "Ounga Ounga" multiple times without the word having any meaning - seems to further impoverish lyrics that seem quite weak on first instance.
Indeed, it turns out the group's main criticism lies in their lyrical poverty. The themes deal with drug trafficking, money, family, and more generally the feeling of being different from most other people. Nothing original at first glance. The difference lies in the fact that they do not glorify crime or trafficking but simply describe the daily life of the "cités" with fatalism and a certain melancholy. PNL drag their spleen that constantly refers us back to their impossible desire for union with others because they are too different. There's something about them that didn't exist in French rap. This genre is not the most well-known for pouring one's heart out, and yet PNL evokes personal subjects. They live in a tough environment, but they never consider themselves as tough guys. Even though they deal with the same themes as many other rappers, there's a little extra soul in them that makes all the difference. IAM talk about French society, PNL talk about their feelings.
It's however not only this exposure that has enabled them to achieve the success they are currently experiencing. Their songs have something generational about them. They are in sync with the French zeitgeist and speak to a much wider audience than suburban youth. The reason their music echoed so much to the public is because they tell the story of the youth of 2016, a disenchanted period that everyone shares. At its core, this is crisis music.
As to be expected, many criticisms have come down on PNL. Atmosphere sometimes plays too dominant a role in their music, and although it might be a reason to love the group's music, it does not prevent writing weaknesses from being exposed. They indeed sometimes indulge in the abstruse of the undecodable and the insulting - they can shout in the middle of a verse "ah yeah yo pussy, you shut your mouth, you shut your mouth". French literature ladies and gentlemen. Gimmicks consisting of repeating onomatopoeias that make no sense at all are also a recurrent criticism of the band, accused of having nothing to say. Likewise, beats are matter of criticism, some of them being bare type beats not unlike the mass of generic Internet productions.
The group's style is therefore not universally acclaimed. Even more so, everything related to their aesthetic
has already been criticized. Although the younger generation isn’t put off by these "extremely poor" lyrics and type beats, PNL's success remains incomprehensible to their elders. Claiming that they don't rap properly, they are sometimes criticized as bad singers who have had one good idea, having fabricated a poetics of ugliness and unculture by definitively taking French hip hop out of the "chanson a texte" canvas. PNL is the ultimate affront to old school hip-hop.
But this provocation is what makes them completely unique: this is a total artistic proposal. They don't sound like anyone else and yet they have managed to bring together a huge share of the youth.
Dans La Légende hit #1 in France, Switzerland, and French-speaking Belgium, managing to pass the one million album sales mark. This remains an incredibly amazing feature knowing they did it without any major label supporting them. PNL rapidly and deeply left their mark on French rap, like very few contemporary rappers before them. If they haven't invented anything, they seem to have reinvented everything: the imagery of the gangster trying to escape his condition, the aerial beats, the abstruse lyrics. It's safe to say you will detest their music upon first listen. I can't blame you. The same thing happened to me. But this is one of the very few projects that can make you say, "I was wrong".
