Booba, is a French rapper. After a brief stint as a break dancer in the early 1990s, Booba partnered with his friend Ali to form Lunatic. The duo released a critically acclaimed album in 2000 but disbanded in 2003. Booba has since embarked on a successful solo career, selling more than 10 million discs over his career and becoming the most legally downloaded artist in French history. Booba is praised for the quality of his flow and beats but often criticized because of the controversial nature of his lyrics. He has also established the rap label Tallac Records, and developed a line of jewellery.
Maître Gims and more recently just Gims (sometimes stylized as GIMS), is a Congolese-French rapper, singer and songwriter. He grew up in France and currently lives in France and Morocco. He is a former member of the hip hop group Sexion d’Assaut and released his first major album, Subliminal in 2013. The album sold over a million copies in France and peaked at number two in the Syndicat National de l’Édition Phonographique. His other two albums follow: Mon cœur avait raison in 2015 and Ceinture noire in 2018 reached number one in France and Belgium (Wallonia) and peaked in the top 40 in various European countries, including Denmark, Italy and Switzerland.
He has topped the French singles charts four times, including once as a featured artist, most recently in 2018 with his song “La même”. The song was the most performed in France in 2018 and it helped Gims become the most performed artist on French television and radio for the same year.
In 2018, he was the 7th most performed artist in the world on Deezer. During his career he has worked with several international artists such as Sia, Pitbull, Lil Wayne, Stromae, Maluma, Sting and others. He has sold over 5 million records, including 3 million albums since the start of his career.
In 2020, he won the International Artist of the Year in Distinctive International Arab Festivals Awards after his featuring in Mohamed Ramadan’s song “Ya habibi”. On 17 September 2020, Netflix released a documentary about the last ten years of his career titled Gims: On the Record.
