Biography

Médine Zaouiche is a French rapper born in 1983 in Le Havre, France. His father is of Algerian origin.

Rather than writing a long text about Médine’s early life, I have decided to simply link to two songs, which are autobiographical and that explain, I think, quite well Médine’s life and also serve as a very good contextualization for his work.

The first is « Arabospiritual », where he talks about his childhood, his relationship with Islam, and the release of his first few albums. This song is part of the album Arabian Panther, released in 2008.

Here is the Rap Genius link if you want to follow along with the lyrics as well as look at the annotations.

The second song is ‘Biopic’, another autobiographical song but one that is more about the history of the Din Records label, and his journey with his friends and collaborators.

This one came out in 2012, as part of the Made In EP.

The music video contains a lot of footage from when Médine and his friends were younger:

I think that together, these two songs do an admirable of not only succinctly summarizing Médine’s work and life but also contextualizing his continued interest in rapping about Islam and fighting against prejudice.

Here is the Rap Genius link.

I have included this post before my discussion of his actual work, if only because a biography usually serves as an introduction, but I think that it will be much easier to understand the songs if one is already familiar with his body of work, especially ‘Biopic’, so it might be worthwhile to come back to those songs after having read the specific posts about his albums.

Read next: Discography