'The music industry kills artists': Damso, Belgium's biggest rap star
‘The questions that I ask myself about death aren’t about dying, they’re about death in this life.” Damso doesn’t really do small talk. Engaging and magnetic even through a computer screen, the 28-year-old Congolese-Belgian rapper is sporting a flamboyant shirt and a considerable amount of jewellery as he ponders the nature of existence. “There are people who are alive, but live like they’re dead,” he says. “They don’t strive to go further. But I know life is really short because I’ve seen people die just like that, in the street. So this question speaks to me: how can we be absent from our own lives?”
This is Damso’s first interview for an English-speaking audience, but we barely mention any of the achievements his team send over to illustrate how successful he is. When his fourth album, QALF, dropped in September 2020 without a whisper of promotion, it generated 14m streams in 24 hours, making him the most streamed artist in the world that day. “The music won,” he says simply.
Damso makes hip-hop for grownups as well as their kids; each of his four albums is easy to listen to, but also melancholy, stimulating and experimental. In francophone countries he is seen as someone in his own lane, each release devoured by an audience hungry for substance beyond rap cliche. An anglophone listener might recognise standard rap terminology such as “drogue” or “sexe” in the lyrics, but each of his songs reflects deeply on love, life and death. “I’m an archaeologist of sound,” he says. “I like to research and go into extraordinary themes. There are people who don’t like that and will say, ‘He’s not OK in the head.’ But I’m an artist, and we are all a bit sick, I think.”
One song that comes to mind here is Amnesie, about a girl he was in an intimate relationship with who killed herself. The chorus is: “I smoke to forget I killed her.” It is one of his most popular songs, but he prefers not to speak about it, though he did confirm in one interview that it is mostly based on a true story. Another song that comes to mind is the unsettling Julien, about the psychology of a paedophile and how society doesn’t deal with the issue. It includes the lines, “Julien is your neighbour, Julien is your husband.”
Damso’s intention is less about shocking his audience and more about confronting traumatic or illicit themes by bringing them into the light. “Having taboo subjects and things we can’t talk about is pointless,” he says, “because you just stay in a state of unhappiness. If we don’t talk we can’t develop anything, and it is through development that we can come up with solutions to advance and break the chains and cycles. Often a child who is abused repeats the same action, and it continues and continues. We do research for things like cancer, and lots of illnesses that we consider to be mental illnesses, but for something so serious, we do very little work around it.” A YouTube video with nearly a million views has psychiatrists analysing the Julien lyrics, so he is certainly opening up a conversation.
Covid-19 has forced many of us to grapple with existential questions, but Damso has been dealing with them
throughout much of his life. Born in 1992 in Kinshasa during a civil war, he remembers having to take refuge from rebels when he was about eight. “It was like a game,” he says. “You could be celebrating a birthday in the day, and in the evening you could hear shooting. That’s just how it was for a long time, so that’s why it was a sort of game. But there were corpses, so it was a weird game.”
His family fled to Belgium when he was about 10, and the dislocation was a shock: “There were nice people, there were racists, but everything was totally different even down to how people expressed themselves.” Throughout his adolescence, Damso played basketball while mastering beat-making and rap, but it was while studying psychology at university that he decided to seriously dedicate himself to music. “The life being offered didn’t speak to me: waking up at eight in the morning, coming home at five or later, and waiting for retirement. So I made a 10-year plan to be successful, and then leave.” The final year is 2022.
I’m struck by his unusually clear vision of the world, and perhaps it wouldn’t have germinated in a calmer context. His parents were unimpressed with the 10-year plan and kicked him out of the family home. “For them, it was nonsense, so I was in the streets for six months,” he says. “I just continued with the plan: I wrote, I signed to a record label, I did my first project, then the second album, third, fourth.” He says he had the titles of each album before he even began.
So far, he has exceeded even his own plans for commercial success – all four of his albums have gone platinum in France, some many times over, and three have reached No 1 – and from QALF onwards, he is releasing his music independently. “It’s a bit of a battle, because you get the impression that, in the music industry today, we kill artists,” he says. “In the sense that you have to come up with an idea that creates a buzz automatically, which puts a brake on creativity.”
This is where the final step of the plan comes into play: a camper van kitted out with recording equipment, driven far away from the influence of the outside world. He moots Ireland, Iceland or the middle of a forest. “For me, it is about making music for myself, going to the mountains,” he says, excitement audibly building. “I could sleep peacefully with everything I need to make sound.”
Meanwhile, there is other work to be done. One of the big steps in the plan was returning to Kinshasa, where he decided to launch QALF last year, keen to put a spotlight on the city he was born in and on the Democratic Republic of Congo generally. “I can’t go on about Africa without going there and giving something back,” he says, explaining that, while many artists in the diaspora mine African sounds for their work, back on the continent it is still hard for people to access their music, let alone see them perform: “All fans are equal, wherever they come from, and I want them to experience the music in the same way.” He is also involved in supporting miners in Congo who are risking death for the resources needed to make mobile phones.
This month he has released his first music video in two years, for the QALF track 911. It’s about a gangster dealing with his feelings, and the video features French model and actor Noémie Lenoir as his love interest. Along with the rest of the album it shows a slightly softer, lighter perspective on life compared with his previous work, and he speaks frankly about what love means to him now.
“It doesn’t make me uncomfortable; it’s just difficult to understand. Like life, we tend to understand love at the end. Old people understand love better than young people, because they understand life more; life and love are pretty much the same thing. Before, if I went out with a woman that I had sexual chemistry with, that was desire, but for me real love is when we build.”
That extends to himself, too, following years of relative chaos. “When one loves oneself, we have the courage to do things, we are free of our fears.” Was it difficult for him to learn that lesson? “It was very tough. It’s only in the past few months, not even a year, that I can say that I love myself … I could never see the good side of things. I had a perverse view of the world that spoiled whatever I saw.”
He says he is only now inching towards peace. “I made the plan not just for fun, but so that in the end I would have my success,” he says. “If I want to leave and go away, I’ll go, just me and my music, peacefully. Little by little the dark side …” He pauses. “Well, it will never really go away, because it is part of me, part of my internal balance. But I will be able to live with it a lot better. Before, I repressed it but now, no. I know that I have a dark side to me, but that isn’t a problem – it is just who I am.”
Like life, we tend to understand love at the end Damso
when Shakman suggested a live audience, even though it required countless phone confiscations and NDAs.
“It’s also a really interesting way to show an American century,” adds Bettany, a Londoner who now lives in New York. “You can feel the warmth of those Dick Van Dyke Shows transform into the cool cynicism of Modern Family and Malcolm in the Middle. You can track the culture of America during those eras.”
Feige says the series was inspired by Tom King’s 2016 comic book series The Vision, particularly its cover. “It envisioned the character of Vision living in the suburbs with a family of androids,” he explains. “Wanda wasn’t in that, but the covers were quite amazing. Vision standing in the doorway of a suburban house with a white picket fence and a mailbox. And that fascinated me because of my own fascination with the TV shows I grew up watching. Brady Bunch, Dick Van Dyke, Leave It to Beaver. The simplicity of those stories appealed to me. Having a problem solved in 30 minutes would bring me so much comfort when I was kid. It still does.”
“Marvel seems to be rewarded for taking big risks,” Bettany continues. “Reinventing what Thor was with Taika Waititi directing was a huge swing. And they’ve done it again with this. They didn’t want to just do the same old thing. What I will say is, as it progresses, our series has more special effects shots than Endgame, which is an unbelievable number of special effects.”
I mention this to Shakman. “It’s an amazing statistic and it is true. However, I will just say that we have a total running time of approximately six hours, and one of our two stars is very often assisted with CG in many shots. That quickly adds up. Yes, we do have all these VFX shots and, yes, we do have big Marvel set-pieces coming, but we will not be a bigger visual effects extravaganza than Endgame.”
One big new addition to WandaVision is Teyonah Parris as Monica Rambeau who, in some comic books, gains the title of Captain Marvel. Again, I try to prise out some information about her exact MCU status, seizing upon a comment she made about Covid preventing her from “preparing physically” in a gym. What sort of shape is she in, I ask – superhero shape?
“Enough to be able to run down the block without having to pause and take a breath,” she sidesteps. However, the inclusion of Parris does bring up a potential issue with WandaVision. Twentieth-century American sitcoms weren’t exactly bastions of diversity, and attempts to rectify this were often unwatchably clumsy. When Bewitched attempted to broach the civil rights movement in 1970, for example, it made the catastrophic decision to put its entire cast in blackface for an episode. Did the overwhelming whiteness of the form give Parris, arguably best known for playing the receptionist Dawn on Mad Men, pause?
“It was certainly on the forefront of my mind,” she says. “But I was offered the space to have the conversation. OK, we have these amazing classic sitcoms that I grew up watching. But, as you said, there are no people of colour there. What are we going to do to not just gloss over that? Marvel were totally in agreement, like, ‘Do we say anything or not?’ Just having the space to ask the questions and be completely flat out wrong, miss the mark, whatever, was lovely.”
Parris’s first appearance is jarring, precisely because we don’t expect a black woman to appear in such sitcoms. However, Parris suggests that this too might be deliberate. In the first three episodes, Rambeau’s presence is a total mystery. Nobody seems to knows her true purpose. “To me, it works,” says Parris. “First of all, you’re like, ‘Why is this person, who we think is Monica but aren’t sure, in this generally white space?’”
Another notable thing about WandaVision is that it finally gives Scarlet Witch her dues. Long undersold, this is a woman who almost ended the Avengers with a mind trick and then came tantalisingly close to ripping Thanos limb from limb all by herself, yet she has been perpetually overlooked in favour of flashier superheroes. I ask Olsen if she’s relieved that the character is now finally receiving the attention she deserves.
“I don’t feel like I’ve been underused,” she says. “I just think I’ve been used specifically. Wanda represents mental health more or less, that’s her journey.And now it’s fun to get to be playful and charming and mysterious, and all the other things that everyone else …” She tails off then regroups. “This is a really amazing opportunity for Paul and I – to have three times the amount of time you would in one of these films.”
It’s also an opportunity for Marvel to reassert itself after the collapse of the theatrical experience. Kevin Feige is excited about WandaVision’s potential to get the MCU into our homes at a time when we can no longer visit cinemas. Although he admits to bristling when the episodic nature of the Infinity Saga was first compared to television – “We would always go, ‘No, what you’re talking about? These are big, giant movies we’re making’” – he now seems more content with the analogy. “Television is so great right now. I’ll take that comparison.” It is the first of a planned slew of shows based on Marvel superheroes, including Hawkeye, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, She-Hulk and Ms Marvel.
Nevertheless, as a man who made his career masterminding billion-dollar-grossing movies with $300m budgets, he isn’t ready to make a permanent switch to TV. “Now that we’ve experienced being alone in our rooms for almost a year, there’s a desire to get together. And that’s what movies are for.” So he isn’t worried that giant-budget Marvel movies will become an economically unviable casualty of Covid?
“Oh,” he says. “I’m worried about the future of everything.” However, having seen WandaVision, that’s hard to believe. A worried man wouldn’t breeze into a whole new medium with something so daring and experimental. WandaVision is a series you can only really pull off if you have total, worldstopping confidence in your abilities. Marvel, you suspect, is going to be just fine.
• WandaVision is on Disney+ from 15 January.
We read books about the making of classic sitcoms – and had a fabulous lunch with Dick Van Dyke
Kevin Feige