Throughout the day on November 7, Damso invited his fans to listen to his new album, I liedat the headquarters of the French Communist Party, in Paris. Every hour, a hundred of them, each one more elegant than the last, handed their mobile phones to the flight attendants, who kept them in a bag. Under the dome of the building you can listen to the eleven songs with headphones. A week earlier, journalists were invited to a recording studio on the 20th.my neighborhood where the American producer Pharrell Williams lives.
The rapper has invested resources to promote his album, recorded in Brussels. He invites three artists, Angèle, Kalash and Kalash Criminel, with whom He has already collaborated and brilliantly repeats the experience. First he brings his colleague of Congolese origin, like him, Kalash Criminel, to discuss in his language, Lingala, and about the trendy South African electro, Amapiano. With, as a bonus, the whistles of street dance groups from Soweto (South Africa) and a religious choir in the background: a first success.
absolute masculine
A guitar-voice theme enhanced with sub-bass follows, with the sweet Angèle in the role of his lover with whom he tries to recompose the pieces and to whom he confesses, honest and clumsy: “I won’t tell you twice, I only have eyes for you, but that won’t make me a faithful man. » With the Martinican Kalash, the substance and form of the game stand out. Alphawhere they loudly proclaim their absolute masculine condition. There, their deep voices venture into shatta, music born in Fort-de-France, a subgenre of dancehall.
From the introductory piece, Chrome, in the end, damasautistwhere he brings together African percussion, a string section and techno, the Belgian rapper stands out in the exercise of style, without focusing too much on coherence, one rhyme leads to another, sometimes arbitrarily. Thus, in the chorus of Chromewhere he talks about the black activists Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Thomas Sankara, he repeats: “Nigga, there’s no respect, nigga, there’s no respect/ Like the one waiting for Ken to tell her he has an STD. » It’s a shame that the rhyme falls like a hair in the soup, assuming its rude and sexist absurdity… But, as the pieces confirm in the form of confidences Consequences AND damasautistwhere he claims to have Asperger’s – another lie, he was never diagnosed as such -, nothing is simple in Damso’s head.
I liedde Damso, Thirty-four cents.