He started out as a rapper and seemed to have dropped out to go back to school and move on to something else. But he was caught up by a duo, proposed by a boy named Aurélien Cotentin, known as Orelsan, known as Orel. Together, they formed the Casseurs Flowters.
It’s 2013 and with their first tracks, they cut the hedges. Because with the Casseurs Flowters, the characters of two pleasure-seekers without glory or destiny burst forth, who decide to laugh at their immobility and a blocked future. Their record becomes the soundtrack of a youth, then a film, then a short program.
Six years ago, at the age of 38, Gringe launched himself with a first solo album that today, he seems to want to erase. The album that arrives today would therefore have started from a blank page. It tells of a slalom journey, tributes, mourning, arrivals and at the heart of this story, a kid whose life will change thanks to a group of friends he met in the capital of Calvados.
Why Gringe anyway? Because of that tattoo on his back, “Gringo”, and the friends who tease Guillaume by calling him Gringe.”And it stayed.“
Guillaume and Aurélien, Gringe and Orelsan
Guillaume Tranchant, before becoming Gringe, arrived from Bobigny in Caen as a teenager. Lost in this city, he first stayed locked up for a year, didn’t know anyone at high school, before getting closer to local radio stations and rappers, launching freestyles and connecting with the guys. A certain Aurélien heard him and met him in a club where he was doing an internship. “He showed up in a striped military outfit, I thought: he’s crazy, he’s crazy, whatever. He showed up and said to me: I’ve heard about you, do you want to do some songs together? And the group was born like that.”
Both of them move forward and progress, Gringe makes him raise his level of play, Orel teaches him rap.Orel, it was already obvious to him. And I always say: Orel, if he hadn’t been my friend, he’s an artist I would have listened to.“
For him, “Orelsan already had a clear, caustic writing style, a calm identity. Young, he already had a number of skills that you don’t necessarily have at that age.“. Gringe wrote by imitation with him, hence this teacher side, and the two never let go of each other. So, when he had the opportunity to do solo projects, Orel called Gringe back.”There, he offered me an opportunity to be able to exist more, to be able to put myself in danger, to get more involved, it gave me a sense of place.“But he didn’t yet have the desire to be a rapper, didn’t feel capable of taking center stage. As a backer, as a “Claudette” as Gringe and Orelsan joked, that’s his place, and the one that suited him at the time.
Flowters Breakers and Friendship
“We never lost touch with each other, we continue to look at what each other does.“As in Moralityextract from Song of the Sirens where Orelsan paints the portrait of a guy who lives his life like that, day by day, but is lucky to have friends who send him messages; because this guy is Gringe. He realizes that with this song, everyone will see what he is.It takes me a while to digest it before I realize that it’s a great song about friendship, and a friendly declaration of love.“
An electroshock too, because living with fifteen guys under the same roof, the gang is not used to talking about that. And Orelsan pushes him to get moving with this song, “at a time in my life when I was totally freewheeling“. The friend tells him in summary that he is worth more than that, but that he may not wait for him forever.
A project by friends for friends, a group created to make songs to have fun. The idea is to rap, to have fun, and the result is a success and a universal and unisex thing: because even girls get bored on their sofa telling each other stuff. “Courage, tenderness, reflection, are not their greatest quality”, as the first song of the album underlines.
“By doing it, we realize that we are relaying a kind of universal and unisex lifestyle, because at the same time, women were doing the same thing. And we have older people who told us: “But we also experienced that, not knowing what we were going to do with our days, registering for college to avoid going there, in these provincial towns.” And this character, this youth, as Rebecca Manzoni points out, existed in reality, but not in rap, not in cinema. Gringe realized this with the tour of How far is it?where they crossed paths “a whole youth that we rarely saw“.
They have “trick“to get out of this boredom. And the adventure lasted.”What was supposed to be just an album and a tour in the process turned into a short program on Canal, a film… We spent four years doing projects around the Casseurs Flowers identity! And it wasn’t planned. We didn’t plan for this craziness of friends to take us so far, and it laid the foundations for everything.“
Hypersensible, the new album by Gringe
Six years between The Moon Child And Hypersensitivethis second album, in our time, it’s a bit long. But the speed of Casseurs Flowters and Orelsan has passed, today Gringe takes his time and six years of writing if necessary. The album was born from a pain, if not from a dark period, an unwanted paternity; there, ideas, nebulous sentences fell into place and pieces began to be created.
Gringe’s album, his meeting with Christophe, who became a friend and to whom a song on the new album is dedicated, Live happily ever afterand his carte blanche, a freestyle by Gringe in Totemic received in one go by email from Rebecca Manzoni, Listen here to the discussion between Gringe and Rebecca Manzoni.
Musical programming:
- GRINGE – Boomer
- ORELSAN – Morality
- GRINGE – Overhang effect
- FLOWTERS BREAKER – Opening
- MANU CHAO – The Collila
- GRINGE – Goodbye BB
