Introducing French musician Spleen
Spleen photographed by Raphael Lugassy (c)
Often referred to as an MC, French music-maker Spleen is actually one of the most atypical, and least categorisable, young artists currently operating in France. His only album to date, She Was A Girl, spans soul, rap, jazz, blues, folk and electronic experiminentation over a dizzying 22 tracks. The overwhelmingly positive critical response to that demo, and the album which followed, was in part down to the fact that Spleen seemed to arrive fully-formed, displaying a musical maturity and adventurousness that belied his lack of experience. ‘Before the tour, I hadn’t been making music for that long. I met Coco Rosie four or five years ago in Paris, in St Germain des Pres in a jazz club, and two weeks later we were recording La Maison de Mon Reve in a small flat in the 18th arrondissment.’
This chance encounter seems to have been an important catalyst, but there’s no doubt that prior to his work on La Maison…, Spleen had already recognised his vocation. ‘I began to rap because I don’t play any instruments and I have a lot of things to say, because of my origins and my position being a European guy but also a black guy, so not really in my place, my world. I needed to express myself and words are a good way of telling people what you really feel. I always try to use my voice as an instrument, to find the musicality in my voice, so after a few attempts at singing and rapping, I also tried beatboxing, making strange and original sounds with my mouth and it’s like that I started making beats.’
Spleen, as a personality and in his music, is an alluringly paradoxical combination of rootedness and rootlessness, and the flipside to the feeling of displacement he describes is a strong attachment to his Cameroonian origins. ‘My parents came to France to give me the chance of having a good education, to be free to do exactly what I want to do and not have to work on a farm in my village. When I sing and when I make money I have to think about my family, and about my grandparents living in a village without electricity, so when I come onstage I always have this idea of changing life, because I need to change my life first and then the lives of people around me.’ Equally though, there is no sense that he considers himself an ‘African’ artist, any more than he feels tied to, say, the French hip-hop. ‘I don’t like genres, they always divide people everywhere and I don’t want to be an ‘MC’ or a ‘rapper’ because I rap. I love Tom Waits, and I prefer Tom Waits to Notorious BIG, or maybe Tupac. It’s like Miles David, I’m the sort of musician who tries to find the best way to express a feeling. Sometimes I rap because I need to be aggressive, sometimes I sing because I need to be kind, and sometimes I just play instruments because you don’t always need words to express yourself. But I’m a citizen of the world. I just try to build something original without forgetting people from the past who were amazing, like Tom Waits, Mozart Beethoven, even The Roots, Bjork, Tricky or Massive Attack. I try to make a mix of all the stuff I listened to as a kid, and in fact I just create a mosaic of those things.’
