Disiz: “I let my music keep pace with my personal evolutions”

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“I am blue flower”, assures Disiz. There is now no longer any doubt. His new album, the thirteenth of his career, is soberly and logically titled Love. It explores the different stages, complex and painful for some, leading to the search for sentimental happiness. Like a red thread, this quest is the narrative arc of the album, has a beginning and an end.

In twenty-five years of career, the rapper from Évry has gone through many states: rage over The goldfishalmost wacky on board gamespolicy on Disiz The Endmoving on the trilogy Lucid or even kaiju threatening on Disizilla. Do not fit into the boxes, never be where you expect. Disiz has traced a long road sometimes full of pitfalls, misunderstandings, successes and disappointments.

It is at the end of the ball that the musicians are paid, and even if his discography is still far from being completed, he can already claim a check worthy of his artistic audacity.

Product of its environment

The first reflex would be to qualify Love album cover. And yet. “There is no concept at all, assures the artist. There is a theme, it’s true, a guideline, but above all these are songs in which I indulge myself from A to Z.

For a long time, Disiz refused to explore this theme in depth for fear of not being heard, of being locked up in a box for the umpteenth time. During the writing of his past albums, he regularly tried to deliver his feelings and his love questions, giving birth to songs that never appeared on the final tracklists.

But at 43, detached from the constraints of rap, less looking at the image he sends back, here he is taking the plunge. “I have been beating around the bush for a long time. The proof, I wrote the title “Love Kills” almost twelve years ago. Today I can try anything. All. I won’t be good all the time, but that’s not the most important thing.

The red thread is also musical. Composed with producers LUCASV, unknown to the general public, and Prinzly (Damso, Laylow, Hamza, Kery James, La Fouine…), Love is deeply inspired by the music of the 1980s, the one that rocked and watered him with Prince, George Michael, David Bowie or Madonna.

He willingly quotes Alain Souchon, Laurent Voulzy and especially Alain Bashung, whose “delicacy”, “textual refinement”, “strength” he admires.

“It’s not their glory that makes me dream, but their musical power. I would have loved to be able to afford a bass being younger. But I am the product of my environment [il répétera cette expression quatre fois durant l’entretien, nda], there is a determinism that oriented me towards rap because it was accessible. However, I was as much impacted by Wu-Tang as by Michael Jackson. To allow yourself to practice music that you have forbidden yourself for years, here is a liberation.

The shitty stick

Hearing him speak, Disiz seems relieved. His previous album, Disizilladid not work as he hoped. “I was in a serious depressive state and in the middle of a divorce”, he confides. A complicated passage in his life but which had the merit of inspiring him, of forcing him to contemplate his emotions in order to better transcribe them into music. We would almost come to invoke the cliché of the therapeutic album.

“There will never again be a project under the name Disiz la Peste.”

What is certain is that in its themes, in its sounds, its production and its texts, Love is a fundamentally French album, borrowing more, and this is quite rare, from the heyday of French variety than from Atlanta trap. He willingly quotes Alain Souchon, Laurent Voulzy and especially Alain Bashung, whom he admires “delicacy”, “textual refinement”, “strength”. And dreams, all things considered, in its equivalent for French rap. “In any case, it is the artistic direction that I adopt here, the bet that I humbly take.”

There’s rap in Love, in many ways. In particular on the title “Encounter”, in duet with Damso, on which an important detail jumps to the ears: the mention, now rare, of his old stage name, Disiz la Peste. A blase that made him famous, with which he sold 250,000 copies of his first album The goldfish in the year 2000, and which accompanied the enormous success of his singles “I freak out” or “Ghetto Sitcom”.

“Honestly, this “La Peste” is a crap stick. I’ve always been called Disiz, but when I started in 1995 on the compilation Independent 91-93-13, without warning me, the guys credited me with “Disiz la Peste”. Disiz was my name as a graffiti artist. La Peste was just a nickname I owed to my teasing side. But it tattooed me, it marked me as a comic rapper. After my first album, it had become my best-known, best-selling name. I took it off, put it back, took it off, put it back… But there will never be a project under the name Disiz la Peste again. Why am I mentioning it in this piece? Because I knew it would please rap lovers. It’s like a wink.”

Too brainy or too curdled?

His relationship to the music industry was therefore complex from the start. After the box of “J’pète les pellets”, the fear of redoing a tube, of being imprisoned in a golden cage, the pressure of performance quickly diverted him from classic formats.

“Fifteen years ago, I felt a little lonely trying things.”

“I went from 250,000 to 40,000 albums all of a sudden, he remembers. I was told that I was only one “one hit man”, but I knew it was wrong. I let my music advance at the same pace as my personal evolutions. And inevitably, when his family life becomes tense, as was recently the case, his music changes and gives birth to Love.

Today, Disiz is certainly better understood. Times have changed, rap too. The latter opens its arms wide to pop, comes in an impressive number of subgenres and styles, becomes sprawling.

“Fifteen years ago, I felt a little lonely trying things. We were a few, make no mistake. But the perception of my albums by the media has often been painful. I was a rapper too intellectual for some, too curdled for others. Add to that the story of my miscegenation [une mère belge et un père sénégalais, nda]… When I saw that other rappers managed to be understood in this process, sometimes two or three years after me, it contributed to my depressive states. But today, I am no longer in it. Now it’s time for insurance, a surely appeased identity crisis, and a successful new album.