Malheur, Malheur drops us into GIMS’s late-night walk through a city where danger hides in every shadow. He feels the world’s eyes judging him, remembers his father’s warning to look both ways, yet still senses enemies sneaking up from behind. The refrain “Malheur à moi, je suis né ici” (“Woe to me, I was born here”) repeats like a somber heartbeat, pointing to a place where guns pause only to reload and where equality is dismissed as a fantasy.
Amid the gloom, a spark of resistance glows. When speaking out is risky, GIMS chooses to draw his dreams, sketching visions of peace that ripple from mountains to oceans. The song is a confession wrapped in a hypnotic beat, urging us to confront injustice while holding tight to hope, even in a world that keeps insisting “c’est ainsi” — “that’s just how it is.”
GIMS, born Gandhi Djuna in 1986 in Kinshasa, is one of the biggest stars in French music. His family left the Democratic Republic of the Congo for Paris when he was just two years old, and he grew up in the French capital.
He first made his name as the masked frontman of the rap collective Sexion d'Assaut, one of the groups behind France's rap revival around 2010. Since going solo in 2013 he has become a chart-topping, stadium-filling artist who blends rap, pop and R&B, and he has worked with international names like Sia, Sting, Maluma and Pitbull.