Assassin de la police

99% Invisible’s latest episode recounts the almost vain attempt at tracking down the origins of the popular song “Who let the dogs out”, which, mild spoiler ahead, turns out to have roots all the way back to the mid 1980’s. It ends up being a quirky exploration the artistic creation process, ranging from inspiration and remixes to the straight up appropriation of someone else’s work.

Molly and I live by the Panhandle in San Francisco. The neighborhood has its perks but I wouldn’t qualify it as lively. A couple of nights ago though, as we were ready to turn the lights off, we heard a song coming from the street that immediately set off memories straight from my teenage years back in France: it was the soundtrack of the movie La Haine.

The movie takes place in the 1990’s, in the distant suburbs of Paris, where cheaply-built high-rises host 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants, working class folks that were sent to live there three decades prior. This is a pattern that was and remains common in the surroundings of most large French cities: the geographic isolation and the progressive disinvestment of state and local governments led to segregation, mass unemployment, crime and an immense buildup of resentment. The movie tells the story of a moment in time where this frustration explodes into rioting. Early on, the following scene comes up:

To any French viewer at the time (and to me until 48 hours ago) the song being remixed here distinctly says:

Assassin de la police / Nique la police

Which in English translates to:

Assassin of the police / Fuck the police

The first half of that is a neat, if peculiar, turn of phrase that clearly conveys the anti-cop feelings of the youth living in the community where the movie takes place.

This is a song I would never have expected to hear in the streets of SF. But when I told the story to Molly, she countered that the song is actually not in French, but in plain English. It didn’t take long for us to track it down and settle it once and for all:

It’s the same song, but it’s also not the same song. For an entire generation of French people, the song is without a doubt recorded in French by a French speaker. Which is factually not the case at all. How you hear it will depend on which side of the ocean you’re from. “Assassin de la police” was really “That’s the sound of da police” all along. I was stunned—this was the kind of small moments of clarity that makes me question what else I might have been wrong about for the last decades.

Further digging turned up articles on French news outlets debunking the mass auditive hallucination French people have fallen victims to since 25 years ago. Conversely, we also found forums where English speakers are thoroughly confused at the insistence from French speakers that the song does not say what it says. It’s an interesting take on the history of a popular tune: a song can just be forked from the mainline and take on a parallel path, without the least involvement or control from its creator.

What’s interesting to me here is how the split is rooted in language. There was hardly any altering or editing, just a juxtaposition of lyrics which created the illusion of a new song in a different tongue. The DJ in that scene took an existing work of art and simply oriented it towards a completely different audience that he knew would be fooled by it. There’s genius here and I’m a little sad that I’ve only come to realize here so long after it came out.