It’s the French rap surprise of the year. Two heavyweights of the genre, the rapper Gazo – more than 550,000 copies sold of his first two albums, Drill FR (2021) and KMT (2022), and Tiakola (300,000 copies of his first record Melo) –, publish this December 1 The melodrama is gangx.
A bit as if Clara Luciani and Juliette Armanet, or Etienne Daho and Benjamin Biolay released a joint work, comparing their writing styles, their music and their ways of singing. Except that with our two young urban music artists, raised in ASE (child welfare) homes for Gazo, and in the city of 4,000 in La Courneuve for Tiakola, the atmosphere is not not the same.
On November 21, the two rappers gave their first interview together, in the Parisian premises of the streaming platform Deezer, where they participated in the recording of a show. In a small room, six friends with the build of rugby players relax while a hairdresser finishes braiding Tiakola. Gazo seems to be falling asleep. He has reason to be tired. On November 16, Ibrahima Diakité, 30, played to a sold-out crowd at the Accor Arena in Paris and thus celebrated the success of his first two opuses: “I’m not sleeping well at the moment. he explains, too many things on your mind… This album release is like going back to school when you’re little, you can’t sleep the night before. I am impatient. »
Reference to their basketball idols
Gazo hasn’t done much of back-to-school, however. The artist left school in 6e and wrote his first rap lyrics on the back of his grammar tests. Since then, he has taken his revenge on the French language. Today, he tweaks it, simplifies complex sentences, enriches it with invented adverbs and flowery verbs. “I have my way of writing, it’s true. I stutter, I had to find a way to rap with my language tics. » Today his stuttering is gone. “He comes back when I get angry. »
Tiakola, 23, all smiles, went a little further in his studies. He stopped in 1ʳᵉ, and simply regrets not having been more diligent in English lessons: “I miss it when I go to parades, for example, he explains. I can’t interact with celebrities. I met Erykah Badu at the Bottega Veneta show, impossible to talk to her. » On the first track of their album, 24 34, in reference to the jersey numbers of their basketball idols Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal, the singer cannot help but mention the school setbacks : “It was double zero on our copies/Double zero now on our pay slips. »
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