Somewhere in America: Rock, Hip-Hop, and Racial Capitalism in Laurent Chalumeau’s Fuck

Laurent Chalumeau is best known as a journalist who worked as the US correspondent for the renowned French popular music magazine Rock & Folk from 1983–1990. Chalumeau is also known, to a lesser extent, as a novelist whose Citation1991 debut, Fuck, has been praised by Virginie Despentes for having influenced her early work. Despite this esteem, Fuck remains an underexamined cult novel—this article offers its first extensive study. I demonstrate how Fuck captures l’esprit du temps of late twentieth-century America by analyzing its incisive critiques of the country’s longstanding practices of racialization and discrimination. I argue that Chalumeau uses racial satire to position the white consumption of rock and hip-hop within a historical continuum of American racial capitalism. Moreover, reading Fuck in light of En Amérique—a collected volume of Chalumeau’s articles on American music—ultimately reveals a provocative portrait of modern America as a capitalist landscape in which Blackness is a fungible commodity, a vessel for white exploration and exploitation. In a coda, I contend that reading Fuck today invites consideration of these issues from our contemporary period of racial capitalism, a time when hip-hop has reached global prominence and constitutes the predominant form of American popular culture.