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This is a pleasant paradox which is more than welcome in the era of autotune rap: making something new with something from the past. By using old tracks, sonorities and beats from the 90s and beginning of the 2000s, contemporary rap singers of Ivory Coast have been shaking the movement and meeting a large audience at the same time. Two of them, Mosty and Mr Luck, seem to be one step ahead on the subject. And they do have something to say, which is to highlight when you listen to certain rap songs today.

Mr Luck decided to pay homage to Gnakpa, a popular Ivorian dance from the 90s, by releasing a song simply called Gnakpa and whose clip will bring you to the Parisian streets and underground with a big touch of Gnakpa dancing from the start till the end. But the song, that you can listen to here, is not only a basic reminiscence to that old tradition of Ivory Coast with no added value. The words, text and lyrics are actually making the link with today’s world and explaining why youngsters as well as the parents of those youngsters can easily feel concerned by the work of Mr Luck.

For Mosty, this was even more complicated given the fact that the young woman chose rap to express her subjectivity, a music that is not the easiest way to meet success when you are a girl in Ivory Coast, where rap is mainly associated to the male sex (like everywhere). She did not care and made it the way she is: by releasing her first EP Aya de Didiévi in the end of 2020, Mosty (whose real name is Nolwen Kouadio, another reference to music, not rap though) concretized her passion and gave a real sense to what she was doing in the beginning with small freestyle videos shared on social networks, which seems to be the best way to get famous now by the way. Spotted by Mr Béhi, who became her producer, Mosty made up her mind and mixed up old with new.

Take this song Faut Danser, an actualization of an old song from Meiway where references to the past are siding with more contemporary notes in the clip as well as in the lyrics. And to put in in a nutshell, Mosty and Mr Luck even recorded together: the song, MouMaMou, has been seen more than 700 000 times on Youtube.

Sources: www.pan-african-music.com