In the panorama of rap genres, we knew the trap from Atlanta, the drill, originating from Chicago, and here comes the jersey which, as its name suggests, comes from New Jersey. Musical currents barely have time to mature when they are chased away by others and picked up by successful musicians. The world of rap is no exception.
“140 bpm is too slow for me. I rap to sounds at 160 to 170 bpm, otherwise I get bored. It must go quickly in the ears. One minute thirty, come on, I’m back. It’s done on purpose to get people to listen again. » Kerchak
Jersey, therefore, is music with a frantic rhythm, between 140 and 160 beats per minute (bpm), which has been ingested, reworked, reappropriated by certain French rappers such as Kerchak, Sto or Gambi. Their titles, like Sabor, Jersey Drill, Zaza, accumulate several million views on online video clip platforms. In the United States, in Newark, capital of the State of New Jersey and unloved suburb of New York, we speak rather of jersey club, because this rhythm was invented by DJs for discotheques. The samples come from pop, rap, R’n’B and are finely chopped.
One of the first hits is the U Got It, by DJ Tameil, in 2002, who played club music from Baltimore and house from Chicago, but it was a DJ from New Jersey, Uniiqu3, who, ten years later, would find a way to be able to lay down vocals on this frantic music. She will be followed by Cookiee Kawaii and Bandmanrill, a real star of the movement since 2021. In France, rap, which was looking for a new musical breath after the trap successes of Niska or drill of Gazo, threw itself on this music between hip-hop and dance music.
19th century slange century
Kerchak, 18, a well-behaved second-year BTS student who only shows up in his clips and interviews wearing a hood, admits, on the eve of releasing his first mixtape in early November: “French rap was going around in circles, we needed something new. We always want to do like the Americans. The English, they took everything. The French were angry. In fact, the jersey, we have revisited it so well that, if we listen to the sounds of French and American jersey, it has nothing to do with it. We brought something new. »
Also gone is the dancefloor side of American music, the French are more direct in their lyrics. “The American jersey is festive, because it is above all a music for clubs, continues Kerchak. Me, I create the contrast because, even if I have a posed image, that my music is dancing, what I say is hard and violent. »
His texts are embellished with the language of the street, even if it means recycling the slang of the XIXe century, notably Javanese or the language of fire, which consists of inserting the syllables “av” or “fire” in the middle of words. Kerchak does not speak the language of fire, but the language of ford ». There “ area » becomes the « zoguene “. Speed is also what characterizes his rap : “140 bpm is too slow for me. I rap to sounds at 160 to 170 bpm, otherwise I get bored. It must go quickly in the ears. One minute thirty, come on, I’m back. It’s done on purpose to get people to listen again. »
And that the number of streamings on each track increases. It is that he puts his operational management courses to good use in his musical career. Gone are the days when, at 10, he sang in his mother’s living room, a childcare assistant, the texts of Kaaris, another French rapper who had also digested another American musical movement, the trap. “And you saw where that got me?” », proudly points out Kerchak.
mix tape Trust (Blue Sky/Epic Label). Released November 4.