Official Handbook of the French MC Universe

Last week I gave some background info on Rim’k, the popular 29-year-old MC down with the 113 and Mafia K’1 Fry posses. As long as I’m at it – and French rappers are coming out the woodwork for the fourth quarter holiday season – let’s turn our attention to Sinik. (This whole thing reminds of The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe miniseries, where you’d get those cool stats of superheroes’ origins, powers, height, weight and whatnot…)

This past Monday, Sinik dropped his third official album, Le Toit du Monde (or The Top of the World). Quite a few MCs here look like white guys at first blush and turn out not to be, and Sinik is one: his moms is straight French but his dad is African by way of Kabylie, a region of northern Algeria. The almighty battle-slash-beef (the French call them clashs) is part of European hiphop too for better or worse, and right now Sinik is involved in a skirmish with rival rapper Booba that’s entertaining for everyone involved. Both of these hardcore MCs have skills; with my limited comprehension of the rhymes, I really can’t call it. Maybe Booba has better beats.

Born Thomas Idir, the 27-year-old Sinik grew up in the low-income Paris suburb of Les Ulis and started rhyming around junior high school age. His moment of clarity came when he met a female MC named Diam’s, who’s got a cut I actually like with a whistle hook to it, “La Boulette” (meaning “the pellet,” as in a pellet gun). Sinik met Diam’s at 14, and she took him out of ghetto fame making mixtapes with a group called l’Amalgame into a real recording career with Warner Bros. Somewhere in there, he got locked up for a year. American style, nowadays homeboy’s got his own record label, 6-0-9, and acts every now and then, most recently earlier this year in Tel Père Telle Fille.

Bear in mind that France is only about the size of Texas – The New York Times once said Paris is the size of the Bronx – so an album going gold by selling 500,000 copies is impressive, and Sinik’s Sang Froid (Cold Blood) managed to do that last year. He’ll probably do it again, whether or not he takes out Booba. Guest MCs on Le Toit du Monde include Diam’s, Cifack and James Blunt. Sweat the technique below: Sinik’s lead single, “De Tout la Haut.”