Apart from the launch on Prime Video of Hellodocumentary on Diam’s career, those nostalgic for the former rapper got a pleasant surprise this Friday: the broadcast on the platforms of the film’s original soundtrack, dotted with unpublished texts written and criticized by the 42-year-old artist.
This feature film co-directed by Mélanie Georgiades (Diam’s real name), Houda Benyamina and Anne Cissé made the event last spring with a presentation in Cannes, before a week-long express screening in theaters at the end of July. The rap phenomenon of the early 2000s recounts what led her to abandon music to embrace a rigorous Islam and settle in Saudi Arabia.
Texts to the limit
the soundtrack of Hello consists of ten tracks, and Diam’s voice is heard on three of them: By running…, Increasingly Y I feel guilty. She talks behind the scenes of a hit that made her unhappy, to a hospital stay and a deep depression:
“By dint of running in all directions, my life had nothing left,” he says in the first text. “It seems we all run after happiness, but what is happiness in real life? Who is it, what is it like, where is it, when is it? I would find it in wealth. I had it, wealth. But happiness, I I have not found it”.
A definitely turned page
This is the first time since their third and last album (call for help, 2009) that Diam’s transmissions are similar to songs. But she has no intention of reconnecting with music one day, as she made clear while promoting the documentary. “Musical news doesn’t interest me”, he had declared in particular to the Parisianbefore commenting on the unpublished texts of Hello:
“For me it’s not music, it’s a cappella texts that I recorded because I wanted to speak directly to people. And my producers made a musical dressing. But today, really, it’s not my world anymore.”
He had specified that if music had been superseded, writing was still “central in (his) life”: “I really like to write (…) it seems beautiful to me, a pen, a sheet, a pen (… . ) It is something that touches me, everyone has their sensitivity (…) Writing today calms me down, while before it was very destructive”.
Source: BFM TV
