Homo Logobiens3 Comments

di Hugo Wilcken (The Wire #314, April 2010, p.14)

Logobi is a new sound brewing in the Paris suburbs. Its chopped-up beats, tinny electronics and wobbly sonics might put British ears in mind of Grime and UK Funky, but Logobi started off as the latest iteration of Coupé Décalé, a dance music style developed in Paris in the early noughties by Cote d’Ivoire immigrants. Early Coupé Décalé was minimalist with a bling ethic, celebrating the West African immigrants who’d ‘made it’ in France. Logobi speeds up and confuses the beats. It’s a harsher, hugely energetic sound that takes in a range of influences, from Euro House and hiphop to the Angolan-originated kuduro.

There’s a Logobi dance and a Logobi look. You’ll see the ‘Logobiens’ gathered at the Forum des Halles, Chateau d’Eau metro station and other Paris hotsports with their old school boomboxes, engaged in friendly dance battles.

At the moment the music is a DIY affair, with instrumentals of varying quality cobbled together on basic computer software by kids as young as 14. Will it lead anywhere, or fizzle out by summer? A well-known French producer of African music I contacted was sniffy about it. Badly mixed, the work of a few DJs in the Paris suburbs, although he didn’ know who. But it’s the bricolage and the anonymity of it that I find interesting. It is, in a sense, post-record industry music. You won’t find Logobi albums in the record store. You won’t hear it on the radio and you won’t see it in the press (although it’s been picked up by some World Music blogs, notably the well-respected Masala). But you’ll find hundreds of videos on YouTube, uploaded by the Logobiens from their phones. You’ll find the music on Facebook and on dozens of blogs on French blog hoster Skyrock.com, most of the tracks simply labelled ‘logobi instru’. (The one you see most bandied about is by The Zaza Twins, a couple of DJs from Lyon).

One way this Web 2.0 space seems to be working among diaspora groups is by cutting out the dominant European culture as the necessary middleman. Although Logobi originates among the kids of Cote d’Ivoire immigrants, you can see it on the Youtube videos moving sideways into other diaspora territories. There are Comorians doing it, Guadeloupians doing it, there’s even a video of a couple of Vietnamese teenagers dancing the Logobi. All of Paris’s multicultural mix, in other words, apart from the indigenous population itself. Similarly, the web is also facilitating and intensifying the back-and-forth between Paris-born kids of immigrants and the motherland culture. In that sense, Logobi is a microcosm of the rise of West African electronic music in the noughties, through the constant dialogue between diaspora groups in Europe and their relatives back home.

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