MASTER GIMS. This Saturday, Gims is the guest of the Star Academy 2022 bonus, on TF1 and will sing alongside several students.
[Mis à jour le 29 octobre 2022 à 19h55] Gims in the Star Academy! The rapper is the guest of TF1’s second telecrochet bonus, Saturday October 29, 2022 and will share a duet with two students, Tiana and Enola… glasses on their noses. They are inseparable from the artist: since his beginnings, Gims has not taken off his dark glasses. But why does he never leave them? Certainly for image reasons, but also because her sunglasses “help her a lot” to conceal her anxieties. Having become his trademark, his glasses are for him “a security barrier, a camouflage”, he explained in 50 Minutes Inside in 2016.
And to add: “Without them I would feel very bad. It would be impossible for me to approach a concert or the stage without.” If Gims claims to want to hide behind his glasses, it is also to “find a balance” in success. “We suffer from fame, notoriety. We adapt, we play with it”, he summed up at the microphone of France Inter on Friday September 6. Obviously, it’s not tomorrow that his fans will discover Gims without his sunglasses…
Since his debut in 2002, Maître Gims has made a name for himself among the most popular French artists. Since his debut with the Wati B collective until his monumental concert at the Stade de France in September 2019, the rapper has had a string of hits. Three albums, a Victoire de la Musique for the song “Sapés comme Never”, crowned best “original song” in 2016 and several hundred thousand albums sold… The artist with the famous dark glasses seems unstoppable. Born on May 6, 1986 in Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Gandhi Djuna, his real name, arrived in France in 1988, then two years old. Coming from a family of artists, he released his first album in 2013, called “Subliminal” and which will make him known to the general public under the pseudonym of Maître Gims, a tribute to martial arts and Asian cinema. A confirmed artist, the rapper announced in March 2019 that he wanted to change his name: from now on, he will have to be called Gims.
It was a solo first for the rapper: performing at the Stade de France, in front of tens of thousands of people. A dream realized on September 28, 2019, a date that will definitely mark the career of Gims. And the audience was there. In France, he has millions of fans… and some that we didn’t see coming. Two days before his event concert in the gigantic open-air arena, the singer went to visit his “friend”, Isabelle Balkany, in Levallois-Perret. It was the latter who proudly shared a snapshot of their meeting, arm in arm, on her Facebook account. “The friendly visit of a Levalloisien … So happy, I who am not ‘Bella'”, wrote Patrick Balkany’s wife in the caption of the photo, referring to the tube of the one now simply called Gims.
At the Stade de France, Gims was able to materialize, on stage, the success of Transcendencethe reissue of the disc Black belt, released in April 2019, a year after his last album. A double winner for the rapper, who added 13 unreleased tracks to the original opus, already sold 600,000 copies, including a series of duets with other artists such as Vitaa, Dadju and Alonzo, Maluma, J Balvin and international star Sting on the song “Rest”. A masterstroke for Gims, who had already met the interpreter of Roxanne with Shaggy on the title Gotta Get Back My Baby.
The two artists have also shot the clip of their duo, in the Lyon metro. And if this collaboration will have surprised more than one, but which is justified in particular by the admiration that Gims has for his elder. “Sting inspires me so many things. For me he is one of the greatest melodists of this century”, confided the rapper at the microphone of France Inter in September 2019. For a quantified idea of the success of the album ” Transcendence”, without its reissue, Gims had sold in just one week 44,186 albums in physical, 32,083 in streaming and 5,113 in download, for a total of 81,382 copies sold. A consecration for the artist, who totals more than fifteen years of career.
Demdem Djuna is a young woman rather unknown to the general public. It was in 2005 that she met the singer, Gandhi Djuna of his real name. At that time she was still a high school student and he did not have the celebrity that we know him today. They would both quickly fall in love. “She was also a convert to Islam. We knew very quickly that we wanted to spend our lives alongside each other and start a family”, writes Master Gims in his autobiography entitled “Aim for the sky”. Gims quickly wanted to get married: “Religiously, I was a new convert. Marriage is something important in all religions”, declared the singer in a report broadcast on W9 in 2018. Only, their story of love had not been seen with a very good eye by the parents of the young woman. Demdem Djuna and Maître Gims marry the year of their meeting, without guests. The singer was 19 years old.
Since then, the couple have lived their love away from the media and raised their four children in complete discretion. It was not until March 2016, 11 years after their marriage, that Gims finally decided to reveal his wife’s face in a video, on the Périscope application, where we saw her driving a Ferrari. At the end of the year, Demdem Djuna is the heroine of her husband’s clip entitled “Give everything”. Before that, in 2015, the singer had declared his love to her through several hits: “Do you love me?” and “Sapped like never before”.
The one who experienced the first successes of her husband does not hesitate to defend him. In 2016, while Maître Gims competed in the “Song of the Year” category at the NRJ Music Awards, it was ultimately the singer Amir who won the trophy. A choice that did not please the young woman, who attacked the other artist directly. “Can someone tell me who it is?” She posted on Snapchat along with a photo of Amir, recalls Télé Loisir. “OK song of the year I want cousin, what are you singing?”, she then indicated before adding: “The joke, want to break everything”.
In the Djuna family, ask for the two sons and you will have two artists who have become heavyweights in the French musical landscape. If Gims, the eldest, born in 1986, has had successful albums such as “Black Belt” and “Transcendence” in recent years, his little brother is not left out. Born in 1991 in Bobigny, it was he who provided the first part of his eldest during his event concert at the Stade de France last September. But the two brothers are not the only artists in the family, since Darcy, the last of the family, has also distinguished himself in French culture with his mangas. If Dadju and Gims share the track “10/10” on the album “Transcendence”, Darcy collaborated with his big brother on the manga Devil’s Relics, released in November 2018. Note that all three are the sons of Djanana Djuna , singer of Papa Wemba’s Viva La Musica troupe and particularly popular in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the family is from.
“Proud to collaborate with Valérie Pécresse”. In a short video, rapper Gims showed his support for the candidate for the regional elections in Île-de-France, the two rounds of which will be held on Sunday June 20 and 17. In a clip of about thirty seconds, relayed on social networks by Valérie Pécresse, the artist promises “a lot of things to come, beautiful things in perspective to put talents forward”. And to add: “thank you very much, stay tuned, stay connected. A lot of things are happening: lots of positives, only good, only good! Thank you very much to Valérie Pécresse. Let’s go.”
It must be said that this is not the first time that Gims has appeared alongside the president of the Île-de-France region. In 2019 already, the interpreter of bella had joined forces with Valérie Pécresse on the occasion of the “Marathon des talents” (a competition for young artists), of which he is sponsoring the new edition. Significant support for the candidate, who has been at the top of the polls for several weeks.