Serigne Mbaye Gueye alias Disiz, métamorphoses d'un rappeur-chanteur
After a blazing start in rap in the 2000s with his angry hit "J'pète les plombs", then a period under the radar, Disiz managed to resurrect himself in 2025, carried by a duet with Theodora.
This resurrection materialized at the Victoires de la Musique awards, where he was crowned male artist of the year on Friday night.
Like "Le poisson rouge" (The Goldfish), the title of his first album, Disiz swims against the current in the French musical ocean. Unconventional, he surprised everyone by returning, far from the hard-hitting world of his early work, with "melodrama," a melancholic pop song with retro sounds that evokes heartbreak and personal wounds.
"It's raining bleach / It makes watercolor / On the colors of life without her," sings Disiz alongside Theodora, the phenomenon of the year 2025, in this track that is soaring to the top of the charts and playlists.
It gives new visibility to the rapper-singer and his 14th studio album, "on s'en rappellera pas", a collection of sensitive tracks, more often sung than rapped.
At 47, Disiz wants to prove that artistic renewal is possible when music is made with heart. A new audience is praising him: the artist has just performed six sold-out concerts at the Olympia.
- Wide gaps -
Having arrived on the rap scene some twenty years earlier, Serigne M'Baye Gueye - his legal name - grew up in the Paris region. In Évry, in the Épinettes district, he hung out at the large shopping center in the area, devoured radio programs dedicated to rap and listened with passion to a generation of stars named NTM and IAM.
"And I wrote, I wrote, I imagined myself as a rap star," he recounts for Konbini.
As a teenager living in poverty, he recorded his first demos in a local studio, mainly frequented by rock musicians. "My songs were really bad," he says in this 2018 interview.
His beginnings in the group Rimeurs à gages, then with his project "C'que les gens veulent entendre (Bête de bombe)" released in 1999, attracted attention.
Known at the time as Disiz La Peste, he joined the One Shot collective, under the guidance of the bosses of Marseille rap: this group specially formed for the soundtrack of "Taxi 2" received a good critical reception.
The film was released in 2000, the year Disiz exploded onto the scene with his first album and especially "J'pète les plombs", which brought him to the attention of the general public. The song depicts an angry, desperate man who has lost everything ("my wife, my kid, my job").
Despite a promising start, what followed proved more complicated. Struggling to capitalize on his initial successes, he went to Senegal – the country of his father, who was absent during his childhood – where he recorded several tracks.
"The main theme, I realize today at my age and after everything I've done, is childhood. What you experience in your childhood is predetermining for what you will be later," he analyzes in "Clique" (Canal+).
Between successes and missteps, Disiz gradually mutates, abandons "La Peste" and even "Peter Punk", another nickname during his electro-rock phase, and claims a "more instinctive music, without putting a label on it".
His return to the forefront of the scene testifies to the longevity, but also the vicissitudes, of his career. The artist offers music perfectly in tune with the times, at the crossroads of genres and references. His own are eclectic, evoking Tolstoy, Nina Simone… and Mario Kart.
He likes to take risks: in 2005, he collaborated with Yannick Noah on "Métis(se)". Twenty years later, he recorded a duet with Laurent Voulzy, entitled "surfeur".
A divorced father of five, the artist has also tried his hand at cinema, played Othello at the Nanterre-Amandiers theatre in 2013 and has written two novels.
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