On any given evening here in Bobo Dioulasso, turn on the radio and across the airwaves you'll hear the insistent beat of Coupé-Décalé music. Coupé-Décalé is a modern dance music which originated in Ivory Coast and with the Ivorian diaspora in Paris and is massively popular with the youth here in Bobo.
In Ivorian slang Coupé-Décalé means to cut and run, effectively to cheat someone and get away with it, and the attitude and style of the music resembles U.S Hip Hop, with the same ostentacious celebration of cars, gold chains and designer labels. The music itself draws on the soukous guitar sounds of Congo and Central Africa, accompanied by a driving rhumba rhythm provided by a drum machine, and lyrics in French and sometimes Dioula understood in both Ivory Coast and Burkina. Much like some Jamaican music, the stars of Coupé-Décalé are the DJ's who 'version' existing backing tracks, singing their own lyrics over the top.
Coupé-Décalé is all about fashion, and like any youth music new dances come and go which you simply have to learn. On saturday night as I sat out with friends, we watched our neigbours who had bought out their little hi fi system to the front of the compound and were blasting distorted Coupé-Décalé music to a crowd of excited clapping children, imitating the frenetic dances of the latest Coupé-Décalé.
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