INTERVIEW : UMAN
Interview by : Benoit Collin & Sébastien Jobart
Pictures by : DR
on Monday, June 18th 2012 - 9 775 views
A soldier of the Belgian underground, Uman already has twenty years of career under his belt. Released in late 2011, the album "Umanity" is something of a patchwork of those two decades, between reggae, dancehall... and chanson. Regularly shuttling between Brussels and Paris, we intercepted Uman on one of those journeys. A chance to dive back into "Umanity", and his increasingly marked taste for singing. Uman is also working on a new acoustic album, hoped for early next year: "Everything is written and composed".
Reggaefrance / We hadn't seen you in the racks for a while, since 2007 with "L'Aventure c'est l'Aventure". Is "Umanity" the result of the work done since then?
Uman / "L'aventure c'est l'aventure" is a very organic album, produced with musicians. From 2007 to 2009, I defended it, but it didn't really come out in France. Making a record is an adventure, you invest yourself... That album took me three years. In 2010, we were coming to the end, I was into other projects. I need to be active or I get depressed! I got closer to Selecta Killa, from Brussels, who is very active. He is fifteen years younger than me, he's a bit like we were in the Bass Culture days... He has a radio show, he's on the lookout for new things. Working together, we influenced each other, I bring my thing, and he brings his freshness. I voiced loads of riddims.
The market has changed so much, record shops are closing, everything happens on the net today, and there had to be a transition period. A breeding ground developed on the net. I released "Umanizm 2", on the Jamaican riddims of the day. As a result, I received productions from D&H, from Gary (Empire), I was starting to collect quite a few tracks. And so I released the album "Umanity".
Did you want to mix genres?
I wanted to keep part of the writing of "L'Aventure c'est l'Aventure", which is perhaps little known in France but is a more intimate piece of work, with more personal lyrics, about my life, my loves, my doubts... And at the same time, I wanted to leave a bit of dancehall in it, because I like the sound-system scene, going to sing in cellars and mash up.
You seem to have a more pronounced leaning towards singing.
I'm taking singing lessons... My next album will in fact be strictly sung. Singing is a really natural pull for me. It's also a part of getting older. I love dancehall, but I'm past 40. And my audience is more like 25 to 45. They're not there jumping from the first song, like 18-year-olds at a Justice gig. If you go and see a rapper who's over 40 and a star, well, it takes the whole show for things to get going!
 Je suis plutôt anticlérical, anti-leader. Alors faire le prêcheur, ça me casse les couilles. 
Speaking of 40-year-old rappers, you opened for Joey Starr in Brussels.
It went really well. I'm realistic: Joey has a whole career behind him, which means he fills a hall with 30-year-old guys who will follow him anywhere. A guy like me, without that kind of base, getting 300 guys to jump around... No, my path is heading towards something more sung, more mature, where I talk about love and the concerns of an older man. But it's like sport or karate: I still get my kicks from making music, and from dancehall.
Will this sung album be released in France?
I hope so! ''Umanity'' is available in France through iTunes. It's distributed in four shops, but that's roughly all that's left... Then, to reach the Fnacs... They go through central buying offices, and only buy what sells... I hope to find a good distribution deal so that it comes out in France.
It's surprising, for a French-speaking artist, that the label doesn't make France a priority...
I signed with Pias in 2006, I think. I prepared an album, but reggae wasn't Pias's speciality. They asked their French subsidiary, who answered that they didn't know how to work my profile. Pias fell in line with their decision. By the time I got moving to find a French distributor, the album had already been out in Belgium for a year... So nobody was interested any more.
In 2004, you told us about the importance of reggae in passing on the intelligence of resistance. Today, do you still think this resistance needs to be organised?
Today, personally, I still think resistance is necessary. I live a life of resistance against a society that tries to box you in. I do what I love, I make music and I try to live off it. For me, that's already living freely. Then, with hindsight, part of my journey has been about distancing myself from the canons of reggae. That's the problem when you deliver messages: people follow you for that message and don't want to hear anything else. And I'm no priest: I'm rather anticlerical, anti-leader. So playing the preacher drives me up the wall. People expecting me to be a preacher limits my freedom, which is to do what I feel like doing. My core message is: ''Get drunk on freedom, set out to conquer freedom, and be free''. Take Réalité, for example: ten years ago I was in a very vindictive frame of mind, and today I'm more about observing things. The chorus goes: ''Caught in the chains of this mental slavery, reality catches up with me every day.''
Less hope, caught up by reality?
Less naivety, let's say, and more maturity... When you deliver messages, you quickly slide into populism, demanding things that can't be put into practice... My path is the opposite of a certain kind of demagoguery, and I fight my own demagoguery.
Did the financial crisis inspire your writing?
You don't write better when you're hungry. You write better when you're in love, or when your wife has left... The economic crisis highlights faults that are easy to point at. You easily find an echo in other people. But I fight my own demagoguery. So yes, it inspires me because it feeds my analysis, my view of human beings. But I'm not the one who's going to change the world. It's collective work and leadership doesn't interest me. But it has fed me: everything that fails is a source of inspiration for a caricaturist or a pamphleteer.
Belgium has finally found a government. Do you feel concerned?
Honestly, I don't see the difference... Well, actually, the difference is that throughout that period of instability, Belgium was threatened with having its rating downgraded by the rating agencies. Now that they've found a government, they follow those agencies' directives. They hit the unemployed, the retired... So stability, yes, but... Before, we still had social gains that we are now losing with this government. And we knew that having a government would bring that about.
You have to wonder whether a government was needed at all...
Heads of state these days? The economy is in charge. It was the economy that forced us to find a government. If we'd had to find a Belgian-style compromise on the problems that divide us, human problems... well, we'd have carried on! If it hadn't been for these demands of an economic nature, these threats of ending up like Greece, we'd have carried on. But we weren't going to become Greece...
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