Over the past few decades, however, Marseille's rappers have established a different kind of international renown. "We have been ambassadors of this city," Boss One recently said around a cigarette, taking a break from recording a new solo album.

But Boss One does not appear in the Marseille-Provence 2013 festival, which kicked off January 12 and lasts all year. Neither does Keny Arkana, a rising star in Marseillais rap who wrote a protest song called "Capitale de la Rupture." The year's major music festival, This Is (Not) Music, includes a few Parisian and Dutch hip-hop groups, a couple of them partly Marseillais, and two rap headliners that are American: Mos Def and the Wu-Tang Clan. Akhenaton, the iconic figurehead of IAM, has said there are "grave mistakes" in the year's programming. "They do theater and opera for 2 percent of the population," he told local news last summer, darkly calling the festival's ends impossible: a "trendy, hip" Marseille, Marseille "like Berlin." Toward these ends, those who run the festival risk excluding local rap-star bards.

Arkana sings, "I don't recognize my city anymore, I don't recognize my street... European Capital of Culture, If it were a joke, we wouldn't have believed it."

The Capital designation, annually awarded since 1985, is meant to spur second-tier cities. Marseille-Provence 2013 is a $875-million infrastructure investment as well as a $135-million arts festival, funded by European, national, regional, and municipal governments, but mostly local businesses. Marseille's Chamber of Commerce pitched its bid. The designation has accelerated a decades-long renovation to attract tourists and a creative class to the fallen city. Impressive museums have lately sprouted from Marseille's port, beside cranes and billboards that advertise a sleek, impending complex of forty shops and restaurants near where an overpass once shadowed the neighborhood. Other signs promise new condos. A recent headline in local paper La Provence speculated that the dock here for ferries from North Africa would become one for yachts and cruise ships.

"The city's transformation is a tourism and real-estate project," says Eric Pringels, an architect who worked Capital festivals in Brussels and Lille, France. He helped to organize a simultaneous festival known as the "Off," which posits itself as an alterna-Marseille-Provence 2013. "It's a poor city, Marseille, and to extract itself it has decided to play the cruise-ship card."

Despite its current facelift, Marseille bears the scars of France's colonial history. There are many cultures here, and not all are represented in the Capital festival. "There is the official culture, which the city and Marseille-Provence 2013 seek to promote, which is elitist," says Boris Grésillon, a professor in urban geography at the University of Aix-Marseille and author of Un Enjeu "Capitale": Marseille-Provence 2013, or A "Capital" Issue: Marseille-Provence 2013. "But alongside this official culture, there is another, parallel culture in Marseille, that of the kids from the fringes of town."