HERO ECHO
Rap, Poitiers
Open-minded, curious, and dead set on making the best music she can, Hero Echo is a rapper you just can’t box into one style, one look, or one scene.
But that didn’t stop her haters from trying when she dropped her video “Amazones” (2020) — a bold feminist statement that was guaranteed to spark reactions.
After the clip blew up online, sending plenty of insecure dudes into full meltdown mode behind their screens, far-right trolls flooded the comments with threats — all of them as racist and misogynistic as the last.
We sat back down with Hero Echo to revisit that whole episode, but also to dive into her musical world — one that keeps breaking artistic boundaries with unexpected writing angles and a wide range of activist themes.
Interview by Polka B. & Reda / Translation: Julie B.
How did you get into rap?
Hero Echo : I honestly didn’t really listen to rap at first, not until I joined a hip-hop collective. I actually got into it pretty late.
But I’ve always written since I was a kid — mostly poetry. I really wanted to give rap a try: being clear, speaking in everyday language, not overthinking it. Playing with rhythms and syllables, too. And it was love at first sight, more than 10 years ago! Now it’s all I write.
Little by little, I drifted away from the collective — it wasn’t exactly welcoming to women. I got closer to other girls and we started a group called les 4 sans crew. Like me, they didn’t really have any “legitimacy,” so we rapped in our bedroom… and we had a blast! Over time the group kind of dissolved.
Then one of the girls and I formed another group in 2015: les Chiennes Hi-Fi, a sort of electroclash, kitschy, pissed-off rap vibe! Very theatrical, really in-your-face! The whole point was to do whatever we wanted and have fun.
We used to freak out the dudes in the room when we played at pretty typical rap shows. That was around the same time as Vulves Assassines. And there were other groups too — Schlaasss, Ultramoule…
So after that you decided to go solo. Did you already have the idea of rapping politically charged lyrics?
People stick that “activist rapper” label on me a lot. With les Chiennes Hi-Fi, it was already happening. But honestly, we were mostly just flipping misogynistic punchlines upside down for fun. Still, I’ve always hung around anarchist circles, even before I started rapping. So it all happened pretty naturally.
Most people discovered you with the video for your track “Amazones”, released in December 2020. Can you tell us about it?
I’d written it way before that, but then lockdown happened. And on top of that, we’d already shot the video… but the director lost all the footage! We had to reshoot everything from scratch — total chaos. “Amazones” was actually born years earlier, because I was constantly clashing with the guys in the collective who kept putting me down. I was pissed, and the track just came out on its own — I wrote it in like thirty minutes.
When the video came out, you were hit with a pretty insane wave of online harassment. It was really intense — how did you experience it?
Yeah, it was intense. I was absolutely not prepared for that. I had zero big ambitions in music. In my head, I was still a beginner just doing my thing. But I had already performed the track live at la Grée (the ZAD at Notre-Dame-des-Landes) and I’d seen how strongly people reacted to it. So I told myself, “If I’m gonna bust my ass making a music video, it has to be for this track.” But honestly, I released it straight from the heart, with no agenda. It was just a fun project with friends. Everyone in the video is someone I know personally. It was just for the vibes!
And okay, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t expecting some pushback from dudes. I was actually kind of hoping for it, because the clip is pretty provocative… But definitely not this level of backlash. After seven days, I got hit with a neo-Nazi raid. For real. Friends called me and told me it was serious — like, some of the people coming after me had Interpol warrants on them for pretty heavy stuff. The friends who appeared in the video were freaking out and wanted me to take it down from my channel. It was wild. My friends were getting harassed too, because in the video everyone’s rapping bits of my lyrics, so I’m not really the only recognizable one.
Then they dug up my real name, posted photos of my husband — who’s Arab — there were death threats, even photos of my kids… It was a lot. I thought I’d locked down my personal info, but with social media everything ends up resurfacing one way or another.
Weirdly, what hurt the most wasn’t the far-right trolls — it was my friends’ reactions. There were so many misunderstandings. Some lines in my lyrics were easy to misinterpret, like when I say “honneur à notre race.”(« honor to our race »), I meant “women,” but yeah, it was super clumsy wording. And of course the fascists twisted it on purpose — they even started quoting that line saying they “agreed” with us. So yeah, I got a really harsh backlash from friends who were in the clip. That was rough. So rough that at first, I actually took Amazones off YouTube.
People talked a lot about the “bad buzz” around this video, but in the end, if it bothers the far-right, isn’t that actually a good sign?
I agree with you. But honestly, it went way too far in the media. I really could’ve done without that. I did an interview with StreetPress and it reignited the whole thing. Then Marianne called me, even Al Jazeera reached out! It was wild. I just wanted to be left alone.
And like I was saying, it was mainly people from my own scene whose criticisms hit the hardest. There was such a huge spotlight on Amazones that suddenly everyone started analyzing the video as if every detail had been meticulously planned. But nope, not at all!
I got criticized for not showing enough people of color, for supposedly having transphobic lines, for cultural appropriation… I mean, I just wanted to make a track with my friends — it wasn’t a casting session! But because the video was so visible, everything became controversial.
What hurt me most was that intracommunity violence.
But you still got a lot of support!
That’s true. But when you get slammed with that much negativity all at once, it overshadows everything else. I even thought about changing my artist name, or just quitting rap altogether.
But time passed, things cooled down. My friends came around and apologized. I started performing again with les Chiennes Hi-Fi, and people didn’t even know I was Hero Echo. And when we played Amazones, everyone started singing the lyrics. That’s when the switch happened. It gave me my energy back. The power of that track pushed me to keep going with music.
It was tough, but honestly… in the end, the far-right kind of acted like my PR team.
Your track “Imbaisable” — was it a response to the online trolls?
Yeah! That word was everywhere in the comments… it was perfect. I wanted to mock the troll energy and take the sting out of it.
But honestly, the track didn’t get that many reactions. They’d already moved on. That’s when you put things in perspective — their targets change constantly. These people clearly have very fulfilling hobbies…
At the same time, you never tried to ride the wave of that controversy. The tracks you released in the following years (like “Lunettes”) are super introspective. And musically, they sound completely different.
I’ve never thought in terms of buzz. I just want to make music I like. When I made Lunettes, I was obsessed with Laylow’s sound, so I got into that digital-trap vibe.
But yeah, it’s annoying because to a lot of people, I’m still “the girl who made Amazones.” Just to give you an example: I was booked for a festival, and France Info ran an article titled, “the rapper threatened by neo-Nazis performing at the festival.”
That’s also why I want to move on to something else…
Do you have a sense of who your audience is now?
Deep down, I think I’ve always wanted to win over the rap crowd. I had that impostor syndrome because I didn’t grow up listening to rap. I needed some kind of recognition. And honestly, it still drives me today. It’s kinda dumb, but that’s how it is.
To actually answer your question: sometimes people book me because of Amazones, and then when I start my set, it has nothing to do with what they expect. There’s autotune, it’s super visual, dark, sometimes even downright weird… It’s definitely not the in-your-face vibe some people come looking for.
Sure, I have tracks like Imbaisable and Saint-Jean, but that’s it! The rest is pure dark energy. And I can feel it — the audience gets a bit thrown off.
It’s a shame, because for me, talking about mental health isn’t any less political.
What are your goals today?
Just to keep making the best music I can. Keep improving. I’m still a young padawan. I want to try new flows, break down my own style…
What I do is current, but it’s not groundbreaking. I’m not Ptite Sœur, you know? I’m not trying to revolutionize anything — I just want to surprise people with sounds they might not have heard before.
Can you leave us with some tracks that have been with you lately?
The latest Luther album, Exit. I played it nonstop. I get really obsessive with music. Right now it’s Pretty Dollcorpse — I’m definitely about to put that on loop.