Location

About the song

«Location» is a track by the French rapper La Fouine with two guests from a younger generation, Lossa and KLN. It is the seventeenth of the nineteen tracks on «Capitale du Crime Radio», the mixtape La Fouine released on 22 November 2024 on the Play Two label, and it lasts just over three minutes. No conventional music video was shot for it: the official clip is a visualizer posted on La Fouine’s own YouTube channel.

The title is a bilingual pun, and it is the best way into the song. In English, a location is a place, and on a phone you can share your location so that someone sees where you are on a map. In French, «une location» is a rental: you take a flat or a car «en location» when you pay to use it for a while. The hook plays on both meanings at once. The narrator asks a woman to send him her position, the English sense, and in the same breath boasts that the car he drives is his own and not a hired one, the French sense. For a learner, it is a perfect example of a faux ami, a word that looks identical in two languages but does not mean the same thing.

The lyrics follow the codes of French street rap. The narrator presents himself as bad company, the kind of man a careful person keeps away from, and he describes a relationship that keeps going into extra time, like a football match that refuses to end. Around the chorus, the three rappers talk about nights out and their excesses, drugs included, which the song names in slang; about growing up at the foot of the tower blocks; about being impossible to reach, because one of them says his phone can be located; and about the dream of buying up the luxury boutiques of the Avenue Montaigne in Paris.

The tone swings between bragging and bitterness. One verse remembers a woman who left too early, before there was time to tell her that he loved her. Another insists that the fortune they are chasing is meant for their mother, a classic image of French rap, where the mother stands for everything the street has not managed to spoil. The rappers also repeat that, in the eyes of others, they remain pariahs, people who are not welcome at polite society parties. That word, which French took from Tamil through Portuguese, is one of several in the song with a long history.

For a learner, «Location» is a dense sample of the French spoken by young people today. «Je» shrinks to «j’» before almost any verb, «tu» becomes «t’» even before a consonant, the negation drops its «ne», and «il y a» turns into «y a». The vocabulary mixes standard French with slang: «la daronne» for one’s mother, «le magot» for a pile of money, «les tarots» for prices. There are idioms worth knowing, such as «jouer les prolongations» (to drag on, taken from football), «ça sent le roussi» (literally, it smells of burning: trouble is coming) and «à l’occasion» (now and then). English and Spanish words slip in too, and one line even uses verlan, the slang that turns syllables around.