The rapper, Issa Lorenzo Diakhaté in real life, was convicted over the lyrics of “Haaland,” a track he performed with Luciano, where he appeared to identify with the author of the July 14, 2016 attack on the Promenade des Anglais.
The verdict has fallen. Freeze Corleone, Issa Lorenzo Diakhaté in real life, was sentenced to 15 months in prison with a suspended sentence for terrorism advocacy on April 27, in Nice. And this, for his song Haaland, featuring the German rapper Luciano. A song in which Freeze Corleone seemed to align himself with the author of the July 14, 2016 attack on the Promenade des Anglais, where 86 people died.
“In defense I’m Kalidou, you’re Lenglet/Burberry like an English grandfather/I enter rap like a truck bombing at full blast on the…”, he rapped. Lyrics that sparked outrage upon the track’s release in 2024, to such an extent that several victims of the attack were heard during the preliminary investigation before filing complaints. Freeze Corleone will also have to pay 2,800 euros in damages to each civil party and will be barred from entering the Alpes-Maritimes for three years.
“Dieudonné du rap français”
If Jean-Claude Hubler – founder of the victims’ association Life for Nice – had said he was “horrified” upon hearing this song, the Nice public prosecutor, Damien Martinelli, stated during the hearing that “art can and must shake us”. He went on to label the rapper as the “Dieudonné of French rap, referring to “a nauseating ideological foundation and a willingness to provoke within a mercenary logic”.
This is not the first time Freeze Corleone’s lyrics have drawn the attention of the courts. In 2020 he was already the subject of an investigation for “incitement to racial hatred” following the release of a clip in which he said: “I arrive determined like Adolf in the 1930s” or “every day I don’t give a damn about the Shoah”.
That episode had cost him his collaboration with Universal Music, although the investigation was later closed without further action.
