Crunked-Out and Frenchified

Cuizinier, a.k.a. Cuizy Cuiz, a.k.a. Your Girlfriend’s Boyfriend, is a French rapper affiliated with the TTC crew. He loves southern rap, techno, old and new R&B, new wave, and boasting about how he doesn’t make music for boring lonely nerds but for party people. He and his other producers (who include Orgazmic, Tacteel, Kid Rolex, and a few others) have the same respect for other people’s music that pirates have for other people’s property.

This is going to be a rave review.

My hardcore rap aficionado friends aren’t going to like this, mostly because it doesn’t talk about blasting people into smithereens. Actually, maybe it does, what the hell, I don’t speak French. I wouldn’t put it past ‘em. But the point is that my friends need to chill, because this isn’t your average sort of simplistic end-capped AA BB CC Eurorap; the main hip-hop references here are Atlanta and Mississippi and Florida. Crunk sounds pretty incroyable in French.

This being a mixtape, there is a lot of just straight-up ripoffs of other people’s stuff. They basically just run all of Ciara’s “Oh” and then rap over it; the same is done to Lenny Kravitz on “L’Encule le Plus Cool” (“The Cool Asshole”) and Michael Jackson on “Right Here” and both Marilyn Manson and Sonny and Cher on “Ça Continue” and a whole bunch of other people that I can’t really talk about because it gives the whole game away. Trust me, though, when that extremely over-used soul sample on “Trés Chic” goes double-time house on your ass, with tricky double-time rapping en français, you will levitate. And any album where rappers called Paris the Black Fu and Teki Latex rhyme on “Pimp Under Glass” needs to be in your changer constantly for a year.

As if this piracy wasn’t stone cold enough, there’s a lot more here than “just” that. There’s an incredibly harsh screwed & chopped version of “Catalogue” here, lots of bubbly synth pop, African folksongs ripped off for love songs to filles named Melissa, and two versions of “Dans le Club” that sound nothing like each other. Cuizinier sings pretty credibly on “Elle Me Saoule” and drops an early L.L. smooth-guy rap on “Beaucoup de Toi”. Also, shoutouts to Johnny B. Rambo, the Genevan Heathen, for his hosting duties. He’s a great hype man, sleazy accent and all. It’s a cornucopia of fun.

Nothing else this year integrates more types of music, both smoothly and not-so-smoothly, than Pour les Filles does. DJ Orgasmic will probably start to show up on American albums as a who-dat guest producer, but he won’t be a who-dat to you, because you’ll already know what’s up. And Cuiz…well, he’ll probably blow up huge in Europe and around the world but labor in obscurity in the States, because there’s no way that someone this French will ever break through here. But that will be a shame. I’m doing my part to spread the word, but who the hell listens to me?

Look: you can enjoy this album on so many levels that it should be illegal. In fact, it probably is, due to the high amount of beatjacks here. But try to find it anyway, and then hide it from the authorities. This album is too much fun to get seized.