Words: Kevin Yuen
Artists are self-centered assholes. Bertrand de Langeron not only acknowledges this notion, he wraps himself in it, along with a slice of irony that’s sharper than a guillotine on Bastille Day. The Parisian native and art director for Ed Banger Records dubs himself So Me. “It’s a total ego trip,” he laughs. “It’s funny. Imagine a painter does a very big painting, finishes it and then looks at it like, ‘That’s so me.’ It’s an artist being…pretentious, so proud of his work.”
So Me, however, couldn’t be further from this archetype. The 27-year-old is reluctant to divulge the name of the private art college he attended in Paris (“I wasn’t a good student or anything…It’s not important”), remains relentlessly respectful to designers of yore (“I love this guy named Herb Lubalin”) and keeps from bragging about the graffiti crews he used to run with as a kid. A child raised on a buffet of European comics, So Me began his path towards Ed Banger during a serendipitous meeting with Pedro “Busy P” Winter at a party, where So Me was asked to design the website for Busy P’s management company. The next day, So Me showed him a rejected magazine illustration of a building with transparent walls revealing the occupants inside, which Busy P enjoyed. So Me ended up creating a whole city of structures in that style for the site. “The website gave life to his company,” So Me says of Busy P’s original objective. “And actually, gave life to me as a designer.” On the strength of that work, So Me found regular freelance jobs as a magazine illustrator for European publications such as Colette, Dazed, Sleazenation, and created a Nike campaign for France.
Despite all the new gigs, So Me stayed with Busy P, who eventually crowned him art director for his burgeoning French music label, Ed Banger Records. As art director, So Me has his hand in all the visual aspects of the company, from drawing every single record cover so far to t-shirt designs to press photos and videos, as well as some intangible elements. “I’m responsible for the graphics, but when we choose to do this or that with an artist, it’s also in terms of marketing,” he says. “And that is long before any image is being created…Everything’s intimate because we’re small and we can still do that.”
Thanks to So Me, the label, home to such artists as rapper Uffie and dance leviathans Justice and DJ Mehdi, strives to be as much a visual movement as it does an aural one. While So Me will churn out non-Ed Banger work on the side and perhaps throw a few international art shows, his immediate plans find him alternating between the drawing board and computer, working on the French label’s image. “I get the music for free just like everybody else,” So Me admits, in correlation to the public’s switch to digital downlaods. “Sometimes when I feel like an artist is real and makes the effort on the covers, I will go to the shop and buy the record. I think people are going to buy two or three records a year, maybe…We just try to be one you want to buy.”
