zouk

zouk, popular dance music associated mainly with the Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique, as well as Saint Lucia, Dominica, and Haiti, all in the French Antilles (French West Indies). The music blends a variety of Caribbean, African, and North American music styles. It is characterized by frequent use of French Antillean Creole language, the prominence of electronically synthesized sounds, and sophisticated recording technology.

The French Antillean Creole term zouk was first used on the islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique to refer to nightlong dance parties. The collective label for the various types of Caribbean music played at such parties was mizik zouk. Included in the mizik zouk rubric were the Haitian popular music styles known as compas and cadence, beguine from Martinique and Guadeloupe, and cadence-lypso, a hybrid of Haitian cadence and Trinidadian calypso popularized in Dominica in the 1970s.

In 1979 Guadeloupean sound technician and bass player Pierre-Edouard Décimus and guitarist Jacob Desvarieux formed Kassav’, the group that integrated the diverse styles of mizik zouk, injected the mixture with a contemporary urban, studio-produced sound, and marketed the new music as zouk. With the overwhelming commercial success in 1984 of the group’s song “Zouk-la sé sèl médikaman nou ni” (“Zouk Is the Only Medicine We Have”), zouk was firmly established as a new and viable Caribbean dance music genre.

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Kassav’ found its principal audience among the French Antillean Creole-speaking population of Guadeloupe, Martinique, Dominica, and Saint Lucia. Within this community zouk emerged as an emblem of cultural pride, owing first and foremost to the music’s use of Creole lyrics. By projecting the unofficial common tongue of the region in a modern and cosmopolitan musical setting, zouk appealed to the ideology of créolité (“creole-ness”), a concurrent literary and cultural movement that strove to recognize the language and culture of the French Antilles as legitimate hybrids, both related to and distinct from their predominantly African and European (particularly French) parent cultures.

Aside from its use of the French Antillean Creole language, early zouk was distinguished from its Antillean relatives by its studio sound, including the extensive use of synthesizers, as well as by its female lead and backup singers, a precedent for which existed in calypso music. Moreover, zouk used instruments and rhythms that drew from local traditions, further elevating the status of French Antillean cultural practices. For example, Kassav’ used the distinctively Guadeloupean gwoka (or gwo ka) drums and drum patterns on its early recordings. This helped to bring attention and respect to an Afro-Caribbean drum dance tradition that had previously been disparaged as crude and uncultured. The more broadly Caribbean heritage of zouk was evident in the music’s guiding rhythm, a repeated pattern of two long beats followed by a short beat (a 3-3-2 rhythm, written, for example, as two dotted eighth notes followed by an eighth note in Western music notation). The rhythm was also heard in most of the musics that were played in the mizik zouk context. In zouk music the rhythm was usually carried by the hi-hat cymbals.

For French Antilleans zouk spoke back not only to cultural and political domination by France but also to musical domination by genres from other regions of the Caribbean. Although zouk possessed an undeniably local French Antillean character, it also had an international orientation that enabled it to compete commercially with foreign genres such as reggae, soca, and especially salsa, which enjoyed a strong appeal in the French Antilles in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Indeed, the founding musicians of Kassav’, although from Guadeloupe, were well connected internationally. Décimus had toured extensively in France and in the Caribbean beyond Guadeloupe, while Desvarieux had lived and performed in France and Senegal. The band’s later membership even more clearly reflected its international orientation. Martinican singer Jocelyne Béroard, for example, had previously performed with Cameroonian bandleader Manu Dibango. Martinican keyboardist Jean-Claude Naimro had performed with both Dibango and South African singer Miriam Makeba. The group’s horn section (including saxophones, trumpets, and trombones), moreover, consisted of Paris-based musicians with international recording and performing credentials. Such connections to African musicians and styles has remained an especially rich resource for zouk and for French Antillean music in general.

The success of Kassav’ opened a space in the international music market for zouk artists of diverse origins. Typically marketed as individual singers rather than as bands, these artists included Soumia, from France; Kairos, from the French overseas department of Réunion, off the east coast of Madagascar; as well as French Antillean singers Medhy Custos, Orlane, and Jean-Marie Ragald, among others. Along with this diversity of participation, substyles of zouk developed, including zouk love, with romantic themes and slow tempi, and the faster-paced zouk béton (hard, or “concrete,” zouk).

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In the 1990s singer Edith Lefel performed with a group that combined the danceability and popular touch of zouk with the sophistication and instrumental virtuosity of the Martinican band Malavoi, a group of classically trained musicians who had successfully blended French Antillean styles with jazz and Latin music.

Although the popularity of zouk brought new attention to Malavoi and other established French Antillean bands, such exposure also sparked debates about the cultural impact of commercialism and modernization on French Antillean identity. Indeed, zouk’s popularity and increasingly international sound have been seen by some as a threat to other styles of dance music, such as beguine, that embodied a more distinctly French Antillean flavour. Moreover, as zouk became more cosmopolitan, lyrics came to be sung in French rather than Creole. In other words, while zouk succeeded in putting the French Antilles on the world music map, it sacrificed some elements of its “creole-ness” for the sake of such global accessibility. Younger people in Martinique and Guadeloupe at the turn of the 21st century were less likely to know the varieties of social dances or music that their parents enjoyed, preferring zouk, for example, over beguine. Nevertheless, zouk continued to be strongly identified with the French Antilles in the early 21st century—despite its cosmopolitan character.