Towards the end of a miserable summer last year, Arthur Fils received a message from a friend imploring him to listen to a song. Fils was soon confronted with the sound of his own name. “My friend sent me the song saying: ‘Look, they are talking about you.’ I listened and I was like ‘Oh yeah’,” he says, theatrically mimicking his excitement. “That’s cool.”
There was a depressing irony to the lyric. The popular French rapper La Rvfleuze repeatedly referenced Fils in the chorus of Serrure #5, likening the noise Fils generates through his performances on the court to the rapper’s impact in his own arena: “Arthur Fils, j’fais du grah sur le court,” he rapped. In reality, Fils’s career was worryingly soundtracked by complete silence.
