Werenoi had France's best-selling album of 2023
The secretive young rapper earns the title for best-selling album with 'Carré', according to the SNEP annual chart.
Hear ye, hear ye! The Syndicat National de l’Édition Phonographique [trad: National Guild of Phonographic Edition] - aka SNEP - has announced France’s best-selling record of 2023 is Carré by Werenoi. A secretive French rapper, relatively new in the scene, who still managed to roll over its competitors.
According to the SNEP, 17 of the 20 first entries are trusted by French projects and 14 of them are registered as R&B and hip hop. Similarly to what happened in the US during the last decade, hip hop has been on the top of the charts for a while. Since 2016, the SNEP changed its calculation method to take into account the streaming numbers, like Billboard did in the US. Thanks to streaming, French rap has been able to end the reign of variété over the French charts without the help of the main radio and television channels.
Admittedly, I don’t listen to a lot of French rap. This year on I Only Listen to French Music, I still succeeded to write about Hamza - who arrived at number 2, I was this close to not have to write anything new - and Aya Nakamura - who, at the fourteenth entry, is the first and only woman in the first 34 best selling records.
Normally, I always tend to like at least one album of French rap per year but I haven’t elected a winner this year. As previously mentioned in the last entry of 2023, I tried H Jeunecrack and it was okay. Since then, I have listened to the collaborative album from Isha and Limsa d’Aulnay (Aulnay is another city in the suburbs of Paris) because it ended up first on Goûte Mes Disques’ best albums list for 2023. It was also fine but not great.
Who is Werenoi?
It’s the question I’ve asked myself when I saw his name at the top of the chart. But no one really knows who Werenoi is. He hasn’t publicized his real name. We know he hails from the suburban city of Montreuil. A melting pot of immigrants and leftists, Montreuil is one of the half-dozen suburban cities regularly named “the Brooklyn of Paris” in French media. We also know the secretive Werenoi is relatively young because he started only in 2021.
According to my rap consultant, Werenoi is “popular among the youth”. His trajectory followed every right move in the rap game: he released some singles, then a mixtape, participated as a featured artist in a best-selling record from Lacrim, created his own label, sold a shit ton of t-shirts and packed a Bercy and a Zenith (Paris’ two biggest arenas). The best-selling album was only the next step.
Certified double platinum which means Carré sold over 200 000 copies (or had MILLIONS of streams), Werenoi first official album is a solid but unoriginal addition to the French rap pantheon.
Sandwiched between two mixtapes named Telegram, Carré is a cohesive album, scientifically engineered to appeal to the masses, with a broad mix of old and new school influences in the production (even including a bit of reggaetón). For your education, Carré [trad: Square] refers to a well-executed plan in French slang. It’s a miracle there’s no real dud in the 19 tracks of the one hour album but the record also lacks a couple of bangers.
His flow is the weakest link in my opinion. It’s hard to identify a significant trait in Werenoi’s voice. But what the dude lacks in personality, he redeems himself in versatility. Able to sing and rap with or without autotune, with a suave cadence or an aggressive aura, Werenoi shouldn’t need to invite guests on the album. But he still did it to boost the sales. As featured artists, you unsurprisingly find a quartet of heavy hitters with Ninho, PLK, Tiakola and Lacrim. Only the latter don’t have an album in the top 20 this year but a veteran is allowed to take a break.
French rap, despite its commercial success, still remains absent from the Victoires de la Musique nominations. But we’ll talk about that in a couple of weeks.