Everything started in summer 1983 where Joey Starr and Kool Shen were watching American hip hop dancers break it down in Paris. Joey Starr and Kool Shen started learning how to dance and defined their own style, smurf for Joey Starr and break dancing for Kool Shen. They then started painting graffiti, and were part of a graffiti writer group that was composed of DRC, TCG, 93 MCs and Joey and Kool Shen. After this period Joey and Kool got into the rapping industry where they were publicly heard on the radio for the first time in 1989 on radio Nova. Understanding the background of this group facilitates understanding the message behind its harsh lyrics. NTM is considered to be a hardcore rap group; the themes in their songs are mainly about social inequality and racism where Jean-Marie Le Pen is often used as a racist figure in their songs. Some political figures proclaim that there are too many immigrants in France as a 1991 survey indicated that 71% of the French population said that there were too many Arabs in France. Most French hip hop groups are represented by the youth, and this generation is the second generation of those immigrants and were born on French soil.