From how we listen to how we share and appraise, it’s clear that the advent of the Internet as the world’s shared communicative node has fundamentally changed the way music reaches people’s ears. The barriers to creating and publishing music have gone from daunting to all but nonexistent, and Sherriflazone’s “AMIRI” would not exist without this paradigm shift. Hailing from Évry-Courcouronnes District 91 just south of Paris, the French rapper would have likely never encountered the still-nascent subgenre of DMV Crank without the power of social media.
DMV Crank isn’t even the movement’s official name. Locally known as “freecar music” (“freecar” refers to committing robberies in vehicles either stolen or with fake license plates, thus a “free car”), the genre still lacks its marquee crossover star or a major mainstream hit. Most of its buzz remains within its endemic area (Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia), and most songs don’t break the million-stream mark on Spotify. Influenced by Chicago drill and Atlanta-style trap, the DMV’s triangle-driven percussion, mid-2000s crunk-esque snare-clap combinations and lurching 808 patterns have distinguished the region’s music as unmistakably its own. Despite its lack of domestic commercial success, though, social media algorithms somehow brought the sound to France, where Sherrifazone has (hopefully) created another home for the new sub-genre of gangster rap to flourish.
Despite releasing only a week before this article’s composition, “AMIRI” is streaming at a much faster pace than most of the underground DMV movement’s hit songs. This success is especially interesting as, besides the language difference, “AMIRI” is a pretty bang-up imitation of DMV Crank instrumentals and flows. It’s repetitive and simple enough to be catchy without speaking French, which might be criterion number one for scoring a crossover hit in the Anglophone world. The lyrics, from what I could transcribe and copy into Google Translate, talk about his compatriots who will rob your mother and friends. While 74,000 Spotify streams in a week may not be much compared to established rap stars, the platform makes up relatively little of his buzz. A now-unavailable TikTok video previewing the song reached more than 220,000 views and more than 300 TikToks have been made using it as a sound. Another 88,000 streams lie on SoundCloud, the platform all of Sherriflazone’s music had called home until a week ago. This high rate of interaction so soon after release can be attributed to its infectiousness. The limit of my French is “Bonjour” and “Où sont les toilettes,” but I somehow understand him on a deeper level than words.
Daily Arts Writer Ryan Brace can be reached at rcbrace@umich.edu.