IAM
L’école du micro d’argent

3LP Gatefold Album, Reissue
L’École du Micro d’Argent (The School of the Silver Mic) is an album recorded by IAM. The band became famous worldwide with this album, a classic in French hip-hop music. It was partly recorded in the USA, with some aesthetic influences brought by RZA of the Wu-Tang Clan. On the track “L’Enfer”, a sample from Lalo Schifrin’s music for Don Siegel’s movie “Dirty Harry” can be heard (the electric piano notes).

The album deals with very realistic and dark topics in a sometimes violent and often dark vocal performance. Though it contains few happy “ego-trip” songs, most of these ego songs deal with war metaphors and are sung with violent tone and rhythm. More than the ego schemes, the main topic of the album stay the criticism of French society: life in poor suburbs which leads to a reference to slavery, violence of the youth connected with the violence in television and movies, censorship, racism. At least three songs deal with prostitution, but in ways from irony and fun to violent and dark realism.

The album was a huge success in France. It was said to have sold 1,200,000 copies by rapper Akhenaton in his autobiography La Face B and 1 400 000 copies in a 2011 interview. Other sources tell of 1,500,000 copies. The album is officially certified diamond (1,000,000 copies at the time). In the months following its release, eight of its tracks were played on the rap radio station Skyrock, despite only 4 of them had a music video. The song “Demain, c’est loin”, too long to be played on radios, had a music video too. It remains the best selling French hip-hop album.