THErelsan and Stromae are the cultural champions at the end of 2021 and dominate the start of the 2022 school year. Not as rivals but as accomplices, singing, sometimes together, echoing words. They are crushing the competition, each with a new record and a maousse tour that awaits the end of the pandemic to flourish. Beyond their talent, the way in which they script the ingredients of success is a disarming tour de force between the zeitgeist and autobiography.
Let’s start with the numbers. Orelsan, 39-year-old rapper with long hair and white wick, has sold 340,000 copies of his album Civilisation between November 19 and December 31, 2021. It did better in six short weeks than any other record in twelve months. This dazzling is unprecedented. Reach one million copies, more than its previous opus, The party is over (2017), is a goal as crazy as it is reasonable.
Stromae has been silent since the album explosion Square root, in 2013, sold 2.5 million copies worldwide. Suffice to say that his new record, Multitude, scheduled for March 4, is expected as the messiah. He is raising the stakes himself. The tickets for the first three dates of his tour (60,000 seats in all) were sold in twenty minutes. A first song unveiled on the Web in October 2021, Health, explode the counters. A second, Hell, which he sung on January 9 in the middle of the TF1 newspaper, caused a lot of talk, before being put on the Internet three days later.
These data first confirm the overwhelming domination of a music that we call “urban” for lack of anything better, which combines melodious sung and rough rapped. In 2021, thirty of the fifty most listened to albums in France are rap. And most often French-speaking artists dominate.
If urban music is benefiting from the surge in streaming, the remuneration is uncertain on the Web. Also successful musicians have made of their name a brand declined in textiles, design or video games. Orelsan and Stromae play this business game but they are apart in their way of telling stories regarding society and intermingling their lives with it, while putting their fragility on the table. Their sincerity, real or feigned, is credible. She gives the impression that the man at home and the singer on stage are one.
Promotion Tool
The images filmed, for both, participate in this credibility. That of Orelsan is surrounded by six documentary films of forty-five minutes devoted to him by his brother, Clément Cotentin, to be seen on the Amazon platform, Prime Video, under the title Never show that to anyone. Many figures of urban pop have been the subject of similar films, such as Gims, Angèle, Nekfeu, Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, and soon Rihanna, Kanye West and Billie Eilish. As a survey of Society of December 16, 2021, these documentaries are like a promotional tool guided by a producer or by the musician himself.
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