c deuxième gaou ki est niata ohhahh

This is my fav track from a mix picked up in lil senegal, in the porn/luggage selling place across from africa kine. Its a little old school sounding, afrobeat meets zouglou with badass lyrics. I always thought it was interesting that Magic System considered themselves zouglou, despite being the biggest group involved in the popularization of Coupe-Decale. Their older work is clearly zouglou, tho it often blends, zouglou less choppy/dancey on the more lyrically driven side of things.



Magic System - Premiere Gaou

musings on place/space:


Magic System - Un Gaou a Paris



Yode et Siro - Quel est mon pays?

media linkz

I'm going to miss all these songs!!!



Obama coupe-decale created by dj Kadhafi based in the Bronx @ club Zoodo, a center of nyc francafrique. Its website is in french but you can manage. They occasionally bring in some pretty big Ivorian stars, check them out!

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Iran Negah is BACK online! An Irani video site w/ an array of cool vids from revolutionary anthems , beautiful silent documentaries about the Bakhtiari tribe of Persia in 1925, bling cell phone youth culture, etc..

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Some dj went and made a Lebanon repping creamy house track incorporating techtonik moves and using those big yelle letters to spell out BERUIT

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Galsen youth teching and insane skating across Dakar

Afrika Youtube extravaganzathon

French tecktonik meets Algerian rai meets Ivorian coupe decale meets Guinean Afropop meets Hip Hop in Mokobe's song 'African Tonik'.

What?! They made a new sexier video! (with way better sound) I was originally going to post this video with my commentary, got bored with the idea, but now decided to do it anyway with my comments from the old video b/c im LAZY:


:01 aiight with a french accent.
:09 yeediii yedeeii - tu te rapple? ouiaa but what is this word?? Hes referencing Mohamed Lamines chorus of 'un gaou oran'.
:18 old people schtick. yesssss.
:19 trancy araby technoey noize loop. rai/arab pop/eurobeatttt. I'm sure theres more of this, but where? amazing!
:41 Coupe decale style. yessss. oh wait, I barely recognized him all glossed up, thats DJ ARAFAT.
:50 again, Mohamed Lamine! to me, vocoder = rai so when all this t pain vocoder/autotone love swept up lately ive been sorta hoping rai might surface strongly up somewhere. yesssss. Lamine has some fun rai only vids.
1:05 harp/kora kicks in and Mory Kanté pops up. his voice style is that baba maal / uber mali/ senegal/ guinee/ gambia / the western sahel sound that can be be echoy, sweet and dizzying in mbalax or uber soul gutting in its folksier rootsy deserty "blues" expression (think Xala soundtrack, not Tinawaren) anyway, yesssssssss. Kanté is old school afropop.
1:28 chubby singing kid. very meme - y. very internet. also, he stole kanyes glasses!
1:41 fat people replace old people.
2:28 GAY! yeah we are all in spandex dancing like fools, but were not gay, ok??? see? look men touching oops ew. NOTE: this part is no longer in the new video, looks like somebody said something? or maybe cuz it obnoxiously stopped the flow?
2:37 again that nice noize. thnx to all involved in this techno/trance & hip-hop love affair fad thing.
2:47 fat people replaced by tecktonik lessons! yesss
3:05 um.. who invented this ridiculous urban day glo style? when / where did all that electroclash get hip hop filtered into this aesthetic? everybody mentions it, has anybody written more about it?
3:06 keffeyis attack! weird that its in a "rai" vid. or is it more duh than wow?
3:31 awww drumming kid
4:00 full dance party commences
4:05 again... wtf is Lamine sayinnnnnggg? :( so far I can't find lyrics yet.
4:27 cest ca! (qui a la verite)

It seems like Mokobe is continuing along the lines of his 113 rai'n'b fever work. RIM'K also released a solo album last year with an interestingly titled single "l'Espoir des Favelas", showing shots from across france of it's "favelas" mixed w/ shots of brazil and algeria.

The rai'n'b mixing seems natural, like if everyone in paris is mixing their national musics with hip hop, why not just start blending them all together? He does seem to have his hands in a ton of this years amazing stuff. I recently saw him pop up in a Alex dioufaniokhobaay video, whom AfricaHit.com calls "le bow wow senegalais" :


Alex also shows up in this video with AKON, showing his crazy popularity in senegal, i haven't seen much footage of him there:


Speaking of senegal's music gods, how sweet is Youssou's dramatic intro to his live dvd album? part fantasy, part real, he emerges:

Coupé-Décalé

After rolling my eyes at the Fader's mini presentation of Coupé-Décalé, especially the comment "I could get all anthropological and delve into the context of it but other more knowledgable people have already done that" with a link to this wikipedia article with only a wee little paragraph on Coupé-Décalé.

I've seen a lot of write-ups which describe it as a 'hot new scene' (umm at least 5yrs late) & after searching the anglosphere for better sources i found a serious lack of info. I know that new documentary is coming out which will prolly give people a better sense of the music's context and history but i figured id try to help out by adding some francophone knowledge to the mix and give Coupé Décalé its own wikipedia article. It's very adhok right now, im hoping people add and edit to what i started.