M’Tiss: “How many stories are there in a year? In a life?”

“In hip hop, you take something and you modify it, you make something out of nothing, like the Jamaicans do.

M’Tiss

What do you do if you know how to freestyle but you want to leave a trace?  These words, these lyrics, these faces, all these stories – where do they go after they come out of your mouth?

M’Tiss had a strong, simple idea: create a story a day. “I started to think about how to put it in a form, like a work of art. And that was the inspiration of a guy called David Govinski. He made a timeline and each date was part of black history. The first of January 1804, there was some kind of revolution and so on. So I used to read it and I thought of doing 365 days of freestyling with a good lyric and having a day for a song. It’s like every day you open the door to an exhibition and every day there’s a new piece of art on the wall.”

From 365 freestyle to 365 drops

To do this, M’Tiss revised all the lyrics he had and collected beats left and right. Then: to the studio. Then: on the road to create the first clips.

“The core was composed of three people with me: Stéphanie Saint, Grio Negga and Paul-André Robin. Grio brought a hip-hop touch and Paul-André Robin brought a cinematic perspective. It was interesting to have these two cultures.

We chose ten cities to go to each month. They were quite different, and we were in the middle, with people and all my equipment plus my clothes. As we did 30 clips per weekend, that was 30 bags in order. We had some fantastic experiences.”

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