• Last March, rapper Disiz unveiled his new album 

    L'Amour

    , which has since been certified gold.

  • While his tour is currently criss-crossing France, the interpreter of

    Rencontre

    is a full house.

    For its dates in Paris, the ticket office was even liquidated in a few minutes.

  • 20 Minutes

    met Disiz to come back to this success, but also to the theme of the album, love.

    The opportunity also to discuss his relationship with rap, from which he frees himself a little more with each album.

25 years of career and more than ten albums later, the rapper Disiz came back in force last spring with the album "L'Amour".

A remarkable return, now a gold record, which fills concert halls this fall.

An even more remarkable return when the artist does not hide having had to slow down in the face of the post-divorce chaos he had to face in his personal life, as evidenced by his

Heavyweight title

 : "It's a mess in my life, in my head, I want to redo my portrait".

In a café in eastern Paris,

20 Minutes

met Disiz to discuss his vision of love, but also his relationship with rap.

The tour of the latest album “L'Amour” resumed this fall.

How are the first dates going?

It's going really well, I'm very happy with it.

It's a kind of spring in my career where success blooms again.

It is transposed by rooms full of people who sing the songs from A to Z, even those which were not released as singles.

It's very pleasant to live like this.

I have already had this chance in my career, but this is special because I have all this experience behind me and I appreciate it all the more because I know that it is difficult to obtain.

Is it a new audience in the room or are there still a few faithful even after 25 years of career?

It's impressive because there is a part of the public that has followed me for a long time, another that discovered me with the album “Pacific”.

But the vast majority of the public, maybe two-thirds, come because they really liked the last album and they don't necessarily know that I have a whole career behind it.

A few weeks ago, the ticket office for the Salle Pleyel opened in Paris.

Quite a crazy phenomenon, the first two dates were filled in just a few minutes.

A third date was finally added.

Did you expect this success or at the start or did you tell yourself that a single date would be enough?

Initially, we thought we were going to fill the first date and put an option on the second.

We expected to complete it in one or two months, no less.

And then the second one left faster than the first one, so we decided to add a third one.

It was absolutely not planned and I had no idea there would be so much interest.

The success is also that of the album "

L'Amour

", now a gold record.

The public was able to discover a new Disiz, more sensitive, more sincere.

What did you want to show with this album?

I've always been sensitive, but what's different this time is the mask that falls off.

Before, I was sincere, but not totally sincere.

On certain subjects, I still had modesty which partly came from the life in which I was.

I was married and I knew that broaching certain themes was going to have certain repercussions in my personal life.

First of all, I had to accept and stop avoiding reality in my own life to be able to address certain subjects in my music and in my lyrics.

You devote an entire album to love - which is rather rare in rap - but also to other unusual subjects in this musical style: divorce, breakups, or even mental health.

This album, was it a kind of therapy or a way to raise awareness about these subjects through music?

At the start, I especially wanted to make the most beautiful record and the most beautiful music that I could make at my level, my expertise, with my experience.

In music, what I love above all is soul with artists like Marvin Gaye or Nina Simone, or even Prince even if it's not soul.

These are artists who touch me deeply because they are optimal everywhere: in interpretation, in emotion, in writing, in musicality.

Except that I had lots of barriers that prevented me from trying my hand at that register, because I'm the age I am, because I come from rap, which has complicated specifications to respect.

It was necessary to overcome everything to finally get there, it was my only goal.

But I did not claim to position myself as the great master of love.

What's interesting about this album is that there isn't just one vision of love, not just “the beautiful, the sublime”.

There are devastating breakups in

Tue l'amour

, but also more futile relationships in

Week-end lover

, encounters in the feat with Damso.

Did this album make you grow on your vision of love?

I'm still in my thesis on love, in a kind of research period.

There are things that are disenchanted, others that are further strengthened.

I continue to analyze, to seek, to try to understand.

We are somewhat educated in an idealized vision of love, in finding a part that completes us.

It's in the collective unconscious, a kind of social pressure.

I try to make sense of things, to see what it represents a bit for me.

I made very young, very engaging choices.

But what is certain is that I don't want to become an old embittered love, so I'm careful.

There is also the relationship with rap which changes in this album, with much more sung music than in previous albums.

If rap was one of your relationships, would it be more of an ex or more of an old friend with whom we don't share much anymore?

She's an ex, but an ex with whom there was so much love that we don't want to hurt each other.

We can always meet again to discuss, make a small piece, there is no problem.

But it's not really my age anymore.

I would feel ridiculous at 44 trying to rap and having a young lexical field, speaking the ghetto.

I can do it very well, I know it and I grew up there.

But me personally, I would have the impression of becoming ridiculous.

The new Disiz breaks free from codes, it now goes further than rap and pop.

How do you get to this job after all these years?

From now on, I do what I want as I hear it.

Through the work I did, I managed to find my own sonic texture, my way of making sound, which is borrowed from many things.

There's a lot of funk, soul, 80s music, a lot of experimental music.

I managed to find my trademark… and I had been looking for it for a very long time.

This mixture is the same work that a painter or a sculptor will provide in a workshop.

It's just a test.

You try, you try, you try… then you put in the trash and you do it again.

It's three, even four years of work.

From this album, was also born the label "Sublime".

What was the desire to create this label, a kind of independence?

I've always had independence, but I wanted to create the label I would have liked to be in at 20 in order to put my experience to good use.

The first reason is to protect the psychological environment of a young artist.

Me, it affected me enormously and fortunately I had this mentality and that I had been educated by my mother who has a psychological arsenal and an incredible will.

But I've seen a lot of people in my career come into the record industry, be on top and a year later no longer exist.

There have even been suicides.

So I created a label where the good things were placed at the center: the artistry and the mental health of the artists.

For now, they are two Rounhaa and Luther and they are very strong.

Two more should arrive.

Culture

“Moral panic”: Does listening to NTM make you want to hit the police?

Culture

Festivals: When jumping into the pit raises the question of the safety of the public (and the artists)

  • Culture

  • Music

  • Rap

  • Rapper

  • Album

  • Tour

  • Interview