MC Solaar releases 'Prose Combat' — French hip-hop's commercial breakthrough

Why it matters

MC Solaar's Prose Combat came out March 30, 1994, on Polydor France. It is the Paris-raised, Senegal-born MC's second album. The first one (Qui sème le vent récolte le tempo, 1991) had been a French hit. Prose Combat broke past the French border. The album sold more than 800,000 copies in France, which made it the best-selling French-language rap album to that point by a wide margin. It also got Solaar onto the rest of the European pop conversation in a way no French-language rapper had managed before. The Guru of Gang Starr put him on a Jazzmatazz Vol. 1 track called "Le Bien, Le Mal," which is one of the only French-English cross-pollinations on a major American rap record of the era. Solaar's flow is patient, melodic, dense with internal rhyme, and obsessively focused on wordplay in a way French is particularly well-suited for. You should listen to Prose Combat once even if you do not speak French. The cadence will tell you most of what you need to know about why French rap had been waiting for him.