Introduction

Watch and listen to the song performed by Molare in the final round of the 2018 ClashMusical competition sponsored by the Ivorian media company Groupe RTI.

Which musical traits sound familiar? Which musical traits sound unfamiliar? Does the mixture of these traits sound familiar or different than you are used to? As you watch the video, notice the relationship between the music and the dance. Look at the types of movements and the amount of energy displayed by the dancers. This performance is coupé-décalé, one of the most popular styles of music throughout sub-Saharan Africa today and is from the Republique de Côte d’Ivoire (commonly known in the West as the Ivory Coast).

Republic of the Ivory Coast

The Ivory Coast is located on the southern coast of western Africa between Liberia and Ghana. Because this region originally encompassed both the Ashanti and Mandingo empires, the largest ethnolinguistic groups are Akan and Mande. Most people also speak some French due to their century-long colonization. About two-thirds of the population work in agriculture, primarily producing cocoa beans, coffee and palm oil. It is one of the fastest growing economies in sub-Saharan Africa thanks to its cocoa export. At present, about 60% of the population is under the age of 25. About 42% of the population is Muslim and there is still a large Catholic population due to the former colonization by the French. Much of the population also continues to practice parts of traditional religions, especially rituals including music and dance.

Alongside the many different regional types of traditional music and dance, several nationally recognized popular musical styles developed after independence. In the 1960s and 70s, gbégbé became popular as political commentary and documentation of the times. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, university students, upset about living conditions on campus, created a dance style called zouglou which became popular during the political unrest between 1999 and 2003. This dance consisted of throwing one’s arms in the air with angular movements, mimicking an imploration to God to help the university students that were suffering under the budgetary cuts in the education sector. This music would soon become one of the roots of coupé-décalé.

Coupé-décalé grew as a celebration of affluence, and the music is made for a contemporary dance floor. The focus is on the singer praising members of the audience, club owners, or dancers. The style borrows from the griot tradition in West Africa where the griot sings praises in exchange for money in the form of tips. It also features rhythmic patterns and dance structures from traditional Ivorian musical styles.

Traditional Ivorian Music

There is no one traditional music throughout all of the Ivory Coast. In fact, each cultural group has its own traditional genres of music. The cultural groups most noted for their music are the Baoulé, Dan, Senufo, Yakouba, Mande, and Akan peoples, and much of their traditional music accompanies specific dances with specific rhythmic patterns.

Masked dances, such as the Zaouli dance (below) of Guro people, are particularly common in the Ivory Coast. The word “mask” in this context not only means the physical object created to cover the face and parts of the body, but also the performing group of dancers and musicians. There are many different masks throughout the Ivory Coast, each having different appearances, constructions, instruments, and functions. Villages might have more than one mask, while the same mask type with similar appearances and the same name, will be common in multiple villages in the same region. The Zauoli dance became popular outside its initial region when it became a favorite of the former Ivorian president, Félix Houphouet-Boigny in the mid-twentieth century, and was shown nationally on television (Reed 2008 p. 229). This mask began gathering international popularity as it became included in several pan-African and global performance tours by groups such as Circus Mama Afrika. The 2021 performances of the group include the Zaouli dance. In 2017 UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, placed Zauoli on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity to honor its importance.

Dance masks are often sacred and bring their associated spirit to the community; the dancer wearing the mask literally becomes the spirit that the mask embodies. Individual performances themselves can be both sacred and secular, depending on the specific occasion of the dance. Dance in general has many functions, while specific dances have specific functions. The Zaouli dance wards off danger.

Dances can be performed at many different types of events. Dances are part of community events like ceremonies, celebrations, weddings, funerals, competitions, and festivals in their own village and neighboring villages. Dance events can also include tourist-oriented festivals, speeches by visiting government ministers, official political public relations functions, public company parties, and school openings. With their loud instruments and large gatherings they take place outside in central community spaces.

Many masks have specific rules governing performance roles. Drummers do not dance, but rather play specific rhythms that correspond to specific dance steps. For the Zaouli, only men perform. Because the drum and dance patterns are so specific, training is extensive. Older dancers teach younger dancers in evening training sessions and informal community dances, and younger dances learn in the dance rings they watch and imitate. At certain points spectators, both men and women, can enter the dance, but they need to know when those points are.

The Zaouli Dance

Click on this link to watch this video of several short clips from a 2018 Zaouli Dance performance. This Zaouli dance, like all Ivorian mask dances, is performed outside in the center of a circle. It combines improvised movements with very specific dance steps and rhythms. Throughout the different clips of this longer performance event, we can see the different roles that people play, including the main masked dancer, a central non-mask dancer, the instrumentalists, the viewing audience, and two members of the audience who separately each temporarily join the masked dancer. The instrumentalists include seven drummers playing different types of drums, including two djembes. The drummers are accompanied by a bell player and two flute/whistle players on pipes that continuously repeat short melodic patterns. Most of the time the audience sits, stands, and meanders about the outside of the circle, and the soundtrack includes chatter and conversations of the audience as background noise.

In the first clip of this Zaouli Dance performance, we see the mask dancer begin to move rhythmically, get up and wander in the circle a bit. The non-masked dancer cleans up the dance ground and encourages the masked performer to dance by dancing a bit first. During this introduction section, the instruments are playing to establish the speed and patterns of the dance. Around the two minute mark, the masked dancer begins specific dance steps, which coincides with specific musical patterns in the instruments. The pattern in the loud wind instrument (a whistle) is the easiest to hear. Even though this instrument has pitch, it still focuses on the rhythm rather than a melody. The whistle part, which is played by two whistles, has one pitch per whistle so that layer has two notes- and they are notated here with 1 as the lower 1 and 2 as the higher pitch. The notes are all of the same quick duration except at the end of the phrases where longer notes are designated with periods. Once the set dance patterns start at 2:07 the flute pattern is

1212121222.. 1212121222.. 12121221221.2.1222.

The dance steps coincide with this rhythmic pattern and are also in a specific movement pattern. When the flute alternates between the pitches in the first part of the rhythmic phrase, the dancer’s feet move in and out to the side. In the second half of the rhythmic phrases with the repeated notes or the longer notes, the dance steps are more varied, but always align with the rhythms and beats played in the drums and flute.

In the second clip of the Zaouli dance performance, the rhythm is full of breaks that are timed with the choreography very precisely. There are several segments where the whistle and drums accent notes, breaking up the patterns. These accents are matched exactly with the dancers movements, also accented. The second clip begins at 3:00, with the masked dancer walking a bit and listening to the instruments which are playing cyclical patterns. At 3:28 he begins to move his upper body and arms. At 3:40 he and the instrumentalists begin to break up the patterns by hitting the same beats. At 4:03 the dancer begins to move his feet, and again, he moves simultaneously with instrumental accents rather than recurring patterns. At 4:28 the instrumentalists return to their cyclical patterns, as the dancer moves around the circle. At 4:39 the instrumentalists and dancers break up the patterns again replacing them with accented beats and movements until 4:49 when they return to their patterns.

Musical Traits Connected to the 5 Ws: Zaouli Dance Performance

Because the music for Zaouli masked dances only exists to accompany the dance, the “why” and the ‘how” of the music connect most to the sounds. Masked dances are community events. They are performed in outdoor community spaces, which require – and can accommodate – loud instruments like drums and whistles. Each performance and each dancer determines the length of individual segments of the dance, and the cyclical structure facilitates this variable and varying length. The dance alternates two types of dance segments: The cyclical segments and the linear segments. The cyclical segments are built around dance moves and rhythms that are both built from repeated patterns. We see these sections of continuous dance in the first segment of the video, as well as in the third and fourth clips of the video in which audience members join the masked dancer. The use of repeated patterns facilitates audience participation at the appropriate times because repeated patterns are predictable. In the more linear segments the dancer and instrumentalists break up the cyclical structures with simultaneous hits on accented beats. The differences in the music in these different types of segments depend completely on the different types of choreography. Both the cyclical structures and the break structures of traditional masked dances are used in the new popular style of coupé-décalé.

Coupé-décalé

Coupé-décalé is currently the most popular new music style throughout Africa. It is a celebration of affluence, and the music is made for a contemporary dance floor. Like many popular musics, it sounds very modern but its roots are very traditional. The musical structures based on cycles, the relationship between audience and performers that we saw in the last chapter’s exploration of the griot culture, and the relationship between dancers and musicians that we see in masked dances like the Zaouli dance, are the traditional traits reflected in coupé-décalé.

Listen to the singer Molare perform for a live audience. Molare was one of the founders of the music and has continued to move the music forward. The use of patterns, particularly those of the vocal or whistle similar to those found in traditional music, was adopted in the sound of coupé-décalé which is set to loops with repeated rhythms played on the electric guitar and bass, or occasionally, a synthesizer.

As in the griot performances we discussed in the previous chapter, the musical focus of coupé-décalé is on the singer praising members of the audience, club owners, or dancers. As we saw in the second segment of the Zaouli dance, in many dances, the music contains numerous sudden breaks where the cycles of pattern stop. This tradition of breaks was carried through to the sound of coupé-décalé, although while the dancers in the traditional setting largely improvise their dance movements, coupé-décalé is often highly choreographed.

In Noushi, the language invented by street kids in the Ivory Coast, “coupé-décalé” means to “get rich quick by any means and then do a runner.”^[1] This phrase is an apt name for a music whose cultural context draws parallels to 1980s hip hop with its focus on the display of wealth, particularly by Ivorians living abroad who return home to show off their success. In fact, the music was actually born to Ivorians living in Paris in 2001-2002 who would gather in night clubs like the Atlantis and Alize to dance to the rhythms of popular music familiar to them, predominantly zouglou. Several DJs known for their flashy style began handing out large sums of money to audiences on the dance floor as a challenge to see who can create the most notable dance, a custom that became known as travail. Members of the audience would literally take the money and run, hence the name coupé-décalé. As DJ Molare explains, “We had to throw the money in the streets. They were not astronomical sums, but they were converted into small currencies to create the illusion” (Yesso 2020).

This group of DJs in the night clubs, led by Douk Saga, became known as Jet Set, the founders of coupé-décalé. Using a style used by griots of singing praises of audience members noted for their performances, in this case dance, Jet Set began recording their praises over a mashup of Ivorian zouglou, and ndombolo, a popular music from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. These recordings quickly found their way back to the Ivory Coast where they started the expansion of a new genre, one that has become the most popular music in sub-Saharen Africa today.

Coupé-décalé singers, who are most often DJs, are usually untrained and follow one of three stylistic roles. The first style features text-based singing where the narrative describes flashy lifestyles. The style borrows from the griot tradition in West Africa where the griot sings praises in exchange for money. In this case, however, the DJs sing praises of the club owners or wealthy customers throwing money about, or on occasion, exceptionally good dancers. As the tradition of travail developed, the DJs themselves became the ones throwing the money about.

The second role of the vocalist is to call out for specific choreographic moves on the dance floor. Many of these dance steps were developed to mirror moves made by professional soccer players. For example, “drogbacité” means to move as if you are dribbling a soccer ball like Didier Drogba, a player on the Chelsea team.

Finally, the singer may use onomatopoeias , words that phonetically imitate, resemble, or suggest the sound that it describes, for example, “meow,” or in the case of coupé-décalé might take on a more rhythmic sound like “krikatakrikata pan pan” (Fanou 2015, p 37.) Often, a DJ would become the singer and record the nightclub sessions, mixing their own vocal tracks with other recorded works, and in turn would create new compositions.

The group of DJs called Jet Set birthed coupé-décalé in 2001-2002 in the Paris nightclubs. The leader of them was Douk Saga until his untimely death in 2006, at which point, Molare became the heir apparent of the group. “My philosophy on earth is money, glory and women,” stated Douk Saga in a 2005 interview. This statement provides insight into the mindset of this pioneer of coupé-décalé. Born Stephane Hamidou Doukoure, Douk Saga held a bachelor’s degree in computer science but left the Ivory Coast for Paris in July 2000, shortly after a coup d’etat which made life uncertain for many Ivorians at home with numerous curfews and military occupation. Saga began an import/export business with big cars and busses between Europe and Africa, aspiring to start a car rental business. He never intended to become a musician, saying in his interview that he came to music by chance, and that “it was an act of God.” Saga and his comrades designed the music to bring joy to their oppressed people at home who continued to withstand regular militant attacks.

Saga and Molare were noted for creating media stunts. The cunning duo admittedly would leak some sensational, but usually false story to the media, for example an international arrest and imprisonment, drug overdose, etc., mostly in an effort to keep their names in the press and fans engaged in their personal lives. Some people even speculate that the controversy surrounding the cause of Saga’s death could well have been one of numerous media stunts played by Molare or other close friends in order to keep the Saga in the press.

Molare was born Soumahourou Morifiri to a wealthy family in the Ivory Coast but left to study in Paris in 1996. In 2001, he was the first of the DJs to return to the Ivory Coast to set up a record label called Molare Prod to help promote the new music. The label blossomed along with the music, providing opportunities for little known coupé-décalé artists living in the Ivory Coast to record. Molare Prod was the first of three Molare-owned businesses which would eventually become the “M Group.” In addition to the record label, other businesses focused on event production and artistic production. In December 2008, Molare produced the first coupé-décalé festival showcasing 127 artists.

Molare would go on to amass considerable wealth as a star owning multiple properties in several countries. While today he is primarily focused on his businesses, he does continue to perform world-wide and keeps two complete bands, one in Abidjan, the capital city of the Ivory Coast, and one in Paris, with 10 professional full-time dancers on his payroll. He has won numerous awards for best artist in multiple African countries, including Mali, Niger, and South Africa. While coupé-décalé is the most popular style of music in Africa, it is largely the performance of the vocalists, DJs and dancers that are important.

Watch the final round of the 2018 ClashMusical competition once again and notice how, like in the traditional dances, the use of breaks in the music is largely controlled by either the choreography or the vocalist as he improvises, particularly in sections with audience response. Listen also for key elements of African music like short repeated patterns, particularly in the bass and the synthesizer.

Musical Traits Connected to the 5 Ws: ClashMusical Competition

While Douk Saga, Molare and the other members of Jet Set created and defined the music, numerous other artists have spread the music across Africa. Today, coupé-décalé is the most popular music in sub-Saharan Africa. The themes continue to be related to affluence and dance as evidenced in this 2020 release “Kointabala” from Serge Beynaud. Beynaud is noted for his meticulous sense of production from costuming to choreography.

Early coupé-décalé focused on the “why.” The Ivorians in Paris were seeking to stay connected with their culture by gathering in night clubs and listening to music with familiar roots. In African culture, music and dance are inseparable so it is natural that the music was born literally on the dance floor.

As the music evolved, coupé-décalé, became less about the “why” and more about the “who.” Coupé-décalé celebrates those who have “made it” by their display of wealth and their ability to dance. Musicians, DJs, and dancers become cultural icons often challenging each other vocally and choreographically on stage. The music is less important in some ways, as evidenced by the heavy use of looping with less focus on melody, harmony and structural form. However, coupé-décalé still draws on traditional roots, primarily through the rhythms that draw from traditional polyrhythms over a compound triple meter and conventions like strong breaks in the music to provide opportunities for the dancers to create drama.

Conclusions

Consider again the beginning of Chapter 9 where you were asked to think about the familiar and unfamiliar sounds and dance moves in coupé-décalé. What seems more familiar to you now than when you first watched the video? Which traditional influences can you identify in this performance?

In this chapter we have explored examples of music in the Ivory Coast We analyzed the masked Zaouli dance, which has a rhythm focus and repeated patterns to facilitate a very interactive dance performance. This musical style aligns well with the function of community ceremonial dance with both highly trained, and audience member dancers. These masked dances are one of the influences of, and share stylistic traits with, the contemporary popular musical style coupé-décalé. Coupé-décalé music is based on loops, which is the computer version of repeated patterns. The function of coupé-décalé is to engage and encourage dancers in large community performances. The cyclical structures alternate with breaks where the music and dance simultaneously hit accented beats. This newer dance style celebrates wealth and success, and focuses on the wealthy successful artists performing it.

Finally

Before you leave this chapter, go to YouTube, and search coupé-decalé. Choose a few videos to watch. As you listen to the musical sounds, think about the musical traits you hear. How much musical variety and contrast do you hear within, and among these videos? As you watch the dance, think about the choreography. How much variety and contrast do you see within, and among the videos. What conclusions can you draw?

Works Cited

Fanou, Just. Old people: Out. Zouglou and Coupe-Decale as hymns of social resistance in Cote d’Ivoire   McMaster University, Hamilton, ON 2015.

Fischer, Eberhard. Guro Masks, Performances and Master Carvers in Ivory Coast. Munich: Prestel. 2008.

Reed, Daniel B. “‘The Tradition’ and Identity in a Diversifying Context” in The Garland Handbook of African Music, edited by Ruth M. Stone, Taylor & Francis Group, 2008. Pp. 216-236.

Yesso, Danielle 2020. “Les jeudis de l’UJOCCI : Face à la presse culturelle, Molare revient sur les débuts du Coupé-décalé” https://www.100pour100culture.com/libre-tribune/jeudis-de-lujocci-face-a-presse-culturelle-molare-revient-debuts-coupe-decale/ March 3, 2020.