Editing an album and defending it on stage is the routine of many musicians. Others, more unusual, make the task more complicated. This is the case of Wallace Cleaver, who is preparing to compete in the Olympia on September 13. The day before the release of his third album, THANK YOUIn June, the young rapper from Blois screened a short film in nine cinemas in France and Belgium.
A film produced by the SangFroid collective captures in poetic and bucolic images his raps that narrate his childhood, between the Saint-Laurent-des-Eaux nuclear power plant, his grandparents, his father’s farmer and his mother’s teacher, and his divorced parents. The melancholy of adolescence between bicycles, rhymes and games in the countryside.
In the film, Léo Gond, his real marital status 26, plays the role of a young man who returns to the places of his childhood to find his older brother disillusioned: “The short film is not entirely my story.explains. I don’t have a brother, but an older sister. The rest, on the other hand, is a bit me: the motorbike, the power station, the local cafes, the complicated family relationships, the figure of the grandfather. »
It is not easy, in the highly codified world of rap, to impose his refined music, his very sensitive lyrics that tirelessly thank his ancestors. The two grandfathers each have their own audio interlude on his record, one calls him from his residence to congratulate him, the other tells him, in patois, an episode of the Second World War. So, to convey the message, the rapper relies on the image: “I’ve always loved marketing and the way puzzles are created with creations, he assumes. That says something too. »
He discovered rap music through his maternal grandmother, an art school graduate, who spoke in classes to raise awareness of the media. In 2009, she took her grandson to interview rapper Oxmo Puccino who was playing in the region, and there was the kid, addicted to rhymes: “At 10-11 years old, He remembers, I find myself in front of this great gentleman, and from there I begin to repeat his texts: 365 days, Black fear, The lonely child… At home, my mother listened to a lot of blues and funk, and my father listened to French pop and rock music, from Bérurier noir to Renaud. »
“Growing up with Proust seems great to me”
As a teenager, he founded a group, Garden Club, with an American rap enthusiast who also lived in his countryside, and eventually continued his studies in Paris. He enrolled in literature to prepare for the school teacher competition. At the Sorbonne he met another rap group that introduced him to recording studios, the “open microphones” competition, but above all he discovered the work of Marcel Proust and set himself a new goal: “Writing to understand what we feel and how to relive it,” he sums up. “My teacher used to say that you should read a Proust every ten years. Seven volumes ago, I left for seventy years. Growing up with Proust seems great to me.” It’s so cool that in 2022 he released two mini albums inspired by it: In Search of Lost Time and In Search of Slow Time.
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