J’m’appelle* Johnny Rockfort / My name is Johnny Rockfort
J’suis né dans la Banlieue Nord / I was born in the northern suburbs
J’ai grandi sur les trottoirs / I grew up on the sidewalks
J’ai pas choisi d’être un zonard / I didn’t choose to be a ‘zonard’**
Ma mère est devenue folle / My mother went nuts
Parce que mon père buvait trop / Because my father drank too much
À quinze ans j’ai quitté l’école / At fifteen I left school***
Et j’ai pris le premier métro / And I took the first metro

Sans foi ni loi/ Without faith or laws****
Je veux vivre et mourir / I want to live and die
Sans feu ni lieu / Without fire or place
J’veux pas rentrer dormir / I don’t want to go home to sleep
Dans ma banlieue/ In my suburb
J’ai tout cassé / I busted everything up
Avant d’partir / Before I left
J’ai pas d’passé / I have no past
J’ai pas d’avenir / I have no future

[Sans foi ni loi
Sans feu ni lieu
J’ai tout cassé
Avant d’partir
J’ai pas d’passé
J’ai pas d’avenir]

Y a plus d’avenir sur la Terre / There is no future here on Earth
Qu’est-ce qu’on va faire?/ What are we going to do?
Y a plus d’avenir sur la Terre/ There is no future hear on Earth?
Qu’est-ce qu’on va faire? / What are we going to do?

J’ai jamais travaillé / I never worked
Mais j’me suis bien débrouillé/ But I still managed to get by
Un jour j’me suis retrouvé/ One day I found myself
À l’Underground Café/ At the Underground Cafe
C’est là que j’ai rencontré / That’s where I met
Tous mes amis d’aujourd’hui/ All my current friends
Quand je sais pas où coucher/ When I don’t know where to go sleep*****
C’est là que je passe mes nuits / It’s there that I spend my nights

Sans foi ni loi
Je veux vivre et mourir
Sans feu ni lieu
J’veux pas rentrer dormir
Dans ma banlieue
J’ai tout cassé
Avant d’partir
J’ai pas d’passé
J’ai pas d’avenir

Sans foi ni loi
Je veux vivre et mourir
Sans feu ni lieu
J’veux pas rentrer dormir
Dans ma banlieue
J’ai tout cassé
Avant d’partir
J’ai pas d’passé
J’ai pas d’avenir

Pas d’passé
Pas d’avenir
Pas d’passé
Pas d’avenir

* It is quite common in spoken and sung French to see words get “smooshed” together like this. ‘Je m’appelle’ becomes ‘J’m’appelle’, ‘Je veux’ becomes ‘J’veux’, ‘de partir’ becomes ‘d’partir’, etc.

** ‘zonard’ is a slang term for disaffected youth from la banlieue (the suburbs), often living on the fringes of “proper society”. The term comes from ‘la Zone’, a region around the inner city of Paris that was inhabited by  ‘les pauvres’ (the poor) at the beginning of the 20th century on the site of earlier fortifications that were torn down.

*** The word ‘quit’ comes to us via the French verb ‘quitter’. In English ‘quit’ is most commonly used in a work context, but at their root, both mean “to take leave of someone or something”.

**** The expression ‘sans foi ni loi‘ refers to individuals who generally don’t respect the standards and live by their own rules. It is generally applied to someone considered as dangerous and fearsome.

***** Generically, the verb ‘coucher‘ means ‘to lie down’. It is used idiomatically to also mean ‘to go to bed’ as in ‘Je vais me coucher.’ (I am going to bed.) and appears in the French for ‘bed room’, ‘la chambre à coucher’ (literally ‘the chamber to lie down in’). The verb for ‘to sleep’ is ‘dormir‘. ‘Dormir‘ is an irregular verb that is conjugated in the present tense as follows:

Image Credits:

By Laganart [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons