File Under French Funk, early 80s Boogie

French Boogie, Cultural Fringes, and a 1980s Compilation

Some genres only get their names later - French boogie is one of them. It’s not a label anyone in 1983 would’ve used, the genre floats between funk, post-disco, synth-pop, and early hip-hop, even new wave. In the U.S., the same thing happened with this style: too electronic for R&B radio, too funky for synth-pop, not quite hip-hop, not quite disco. It didn’t form a neat category then—it was something people danced to, not something easily filed in a record store bin.

This isn’t rare for music that never quite hits the mainstream.

Born Bad Records’ Chébran: French Boogie 1980–1985 - released in 2015

France’s Forgotten Funk

This is one of those styles that brings me back. I don’t know what you’d call it, but it fits with the uncertainty, the experimentation and the overall vibe of the early 1980s.

Born Bad Records’ Chébran: French Boogie 1980–1985 captures a moment that didn’t quite have a name when it was happening. These tracks weren’t part of an established genre—they were just funky, synth-driven, sometimes awkward, sometimes brilliant bits of pop music that flirted with disco, rap, and new wave.

The word chébran is a clue: it’s verlan (French slang that flips syllables) for branché, meaning “plugged in” or “hip,” popular in the 1980s, a slang used by French kids to show who was in the know. This compilation doesn’t invent “French boogie,” but it organizes it, names it, and makes the case that this oddball, groovy, fringe sound was a scene worth exploring by itself.

My wife described the genre as “music you’d hear in 80s movies,” which sounds about right. Almost any one of these tracks would make for a good action movie or wacky-moment montage.

To test my wife’s idea, I remixed some Rocky montage scenes with Krootchey. It kind of works, or at least cuts down the hypermachismo, while likely violating a handful of copyrights. Krootchey was an openly gay man in the early 80s, and a member of the Revolutionary Homosexual Action Front (Front Homosexuel d'Action Révolutionnaire). The song does something to Rocky that Bill Comti didn’t.

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Many stories at once

If you’ve been reading this page for a while, you’ve probably picked up that my music taste is eclectic—and that’s not just about sound. It’s what music says about a place.

Boogie - a strange, stylish slice of 1980s French pop, is definitely its own thing. But it also emerged alongside totally different scenes, like France’s homegrown metal movement. The gay Paris club scene of Krootchey coexisted alongside Sortilège’s sortilège and the same year as Cookie Dingler’s Femme Liberée, a song about how “liberated women” still need men to take care of them, more or less. It was also kind of nearing peak Wham!

Even within one country, completely divergent subcultures exist at the same time.

France isn’t a monolith—and nowhere else is either. One of the quiet themes running through what I write here is that no country is as easily understood as its export version.

Cultures are contradictory, layered, and messy. And you can hear that messiness in French boogie. It didn’t quite belong to any one genre or any one scene. It floated between low-budget TV, nightclubs, and DIY vinyl releases.

It was funky but a little off-center, both polished and awkward. And now, decades later, it sounds ahead of its time: diverse, genre-blurring, and full of personality.

This stuff is fun.

The style was born in Brooklyn basements and L.A. dancefloors, it crossed the Atlantic, but these weren’t copycats. French artists reworked it, stylized it, and made it their own.

What’s in a Name?

The title Chébran is itself a deep cut—a bit of French slang that reveals the compilation’s cultural DNA. It’s a verlan term (French slang that inverts syllables) for branché, meaning “plugged in” or “hip.” Verlan was huge in 1980s urban France, especially among the youth of Paris’s banlieues, and helped define the era’s streetwise cool. By naming the compilation Chébran, Born Bad ties it to a moment: when boogie wasn’t just a genre, it was a vibe.

Also, while verlan became popularized in the 1980s, its roots go further back and yes, American English has a few things like it, like pig latin, which nobody uses and whatever Snoop Dogg used to do.

He seems to have stopped.

Fo’ shizzle.

K

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