Writing to survive, rapping to exist. Tarbes rap asserts itself with Souljawin, 27 years old, who returns to the stage at the Gespe ten years later. He reflects on his passion for music and writing, the release of his first album, and his future projects.
The first time he answered our questions, he was seventeen. Just before his very first concert at Gespe. We find him ten years later, at 27, with an album behind him, and a new concert planned for a hip-hop evening in the mythical Tarbes venue on Friday night.
Glasses, jacket, and black t-shirt, outside a café in Arsenal, he doesn’t seem really stressed a few days before the event: “It’s going to be great!” Because rap, Souljawin has been into it for a long time. Confidence came with time. From his teen bedroom where he posted his first videos on Facebook “with an old computer,” he reminisces, to the first studio-recorded songs “thanks to a family friend.”
However, he comes from a family of dancers, but “music prevailed, at home there was a mix of everything: French variety, Cuban salsa…” He quickly preferred rap. His inspirations? “Diam’s, Sexion d’assaut, then in the 2010s: Jul, SCH, Damso, Booba… They marked a generation.”
A “trinity,” and a first album
But everything really came together in recent years. Thanks to the collaboration with Yaovi, a “beatmaker,” who composes the music, and Sydrek who creates his videos. “The trinity is important,” smiles the rapper, who plans to work with these two other Tarbes artists in 2022.
“Before that, I worked alone, used beats from the Internet, and wrote on them. Now, we create a universe.” The result of long work “to create this album that truly represents me.” The album finally comes out in 2025, Radioactive, “made with the means at hand” in a small soundproofed room with mattresses, which “talks about what’s going on in my head.”
It takes almost six years to gather the twelve tracks, “some provide hope, others sadness. It’s about the chemistry of the human brain. It’s about an image, a moment in my life.”
“Music saves my life”
Because what inspires him are his own flaws, which have sometimes kept him away from writing: “I had blank pages several times in my life, I put too much pressure on myself. I don’t find writing easy because I’m very perfectionist.” But he came back to it: “Now I accept the blank page, because then I come back so much stronger.”
So he spends hours and hours writing, “when I was young I needed to say difficult things, in writing I could open up.” His lyrics are now more impactful, incisive, “on deeper subjects… Music saves my life.”
He will present some new songs on Friday night and now sees himself taking the stage more often. The rapper is getting ready with the support of the Gespe team for several weeks.
A passion he combines with a more “normal” professional life. But one thing is certain, Souljawin will continue his path in rap, in Tarbes or elsewhere, because “rap gives a voice to those who don’t have it, there is a gut-wrenching sensitivity. It’s the freedom to do what you want to do.”
Find Souljawin with other hip-hop scene artists on Friday night at Gespe.
