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FouKi | Find your Zayon |

I discovered FouKi on long car rides with my brother in the countryside and immediately fell for his peaceful and melancholy voice that rocks and moves us.

Posted at 6:15am

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Despite the difficult times we live in, there is always an appeal to the sweetness of life in his music. I get the impression that listening to FouKi always makes us feel good and it’s a compliment that seems to make him happy. “When I first started making music, I often listened to artists like Koriass, and his voice is in the carpet, unlike mine, where you feel like I’m whispering in your ear,” says he, who runs Bar Le Renard is seated in Sainte-Catherine Street, in Montréal. I’ve tried this before, but it never worked, and eventually I discovered that being smooth and relaxed was my thing. »

This voice continues to envelop us in Zayon, the fourth album of the 26-year-old artist who, at a very young age and in a very short time, established himself on the Quebec rap landscape, notably by winning the award for male interpreter of das Year 2021 at ADISQ. It’s the one he says he’s worked on the most, surrounded by his accomplices QuietMike, Pops and Poolboy, Ruffsound, Adem Boutlidja, BYNON and Jay Century, during the pandemic’s forced hiatus that didn’t slow his rise. . “I’ve done fewer shows, that’s for sure, but I’ve had a lot of television appearances. »

We saw it at Bye bye, in couche tard bars and in Bruno Blanchet’s La mélancolite, for example, up to this amusing slip by Ginette Reno, who renamed it Funky at the last ADISQ gala, where he won the award for best Song for Copilote in collaboration with Jay Scott won. “It was funny. There are always little things like that, and want it, don’t want it, it’s a bit of luck, it gets people talking about it, it makes my world bigger. »

Business is going well for FouKi, who will be presenting two major shows to coincide with the release of Zayon, on April 8th at the Place Bell in Laval and on April 22nd at the Videotron Center in Quebec City. By not taking the lead and by not playing the bad boy, he bridges the generations, enough to say he’s “Ricardo’s favorite rapper” in On l’fait, the album’s third track in collaboration with Imposs.

Honestly, seeing kids, parents and grandparents connect with my music is one of the greatest compliments I can get. I need to keep having fun and it will make her happy too. There’s the In A Galaxy Near You effect, for example, which was meant for kids but ended up being enjoyed by everyone.

FouKi

But what would he have to say to rap purists who might find him flirting too much with pop to please Ricardo as much as women like me? “I want to do what I love. My music will always change, I don’t want to be a copy of myself. It’s my worst nightmare wanting to do FouKi again. I want it to be FouKi for sure, but to be able to explore new musical territories. Don’t always do gayé, you know. People may leave my kind of music, but it’s okay, I’ll find others. There might be some that come back eventually, but I can’t handle that. I make my music and that’s it. »

FouKi Find your Zayon

PHOTO CHARLES WILLIAM PELLETIER, SPECIAL COLLABORATION

FouKi

After all, in a small market like Quebec, where doing rap in French remains an affirmation (even if the language’s ayatollahs weep against the Franglais that colors the genre), you have to know how to cast a wide net, it’s not naive. “We are already lucky enough to be able to make a living from it, he believes. If I was doing heavy gangsta rap, we probably wouldn’t be doing an interview today. You have to be a bit mainstream, you don’t have a choice. »

artificial paradises

FouKi is particularly proud of this album, which he spent two years working on and taking the time to meticulously, where joy and nostalgia meet with a mix of musical influences. We sense a search for happiness in Zayon which gives the album its title. “It’s one of the first songs I made, reminiscent of the times when we were all at home during the pandemic. We had to create a kind of fictional paradise. It’s a bit like the Zayon, a paradise that doesn’t exist. There are two parallel lines in this album, a darker side and a happier side, that overlap nicely until the Zayon at the end. »

In Ségala, he remembers his crazy youth, “chilling” and buying “100 grams of hashish” with his friends on the plateau where he grew up – at FouKi there is still a lot of weed and it is always green. He’s even nostalgic for a time he didn’t know in the ’80s, an ode to the ’80s that has just launched with a music video in which he has fun dressing in the bright colors of that decade as he was born in the 1990s.

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Why is this generation so excited about the 1980s? The Stranger Things series is to blame, he says, but also because he believes music has broken down barriers during this time for those who don’t like the barriers between genres. “I would have liked to have lived in those years! »

FouKi even allowed himself a very funny song for the feast of Saint-Jean, together with P’tit Belliveau. St-Han Quinzou is a nod to our national holiday at the same time as the national Acadian holiday, as well as these local accents. After all, we always need new songs to celebrate, just like we always need new Christmas carols.

“Exactly! I’ve been doing Saint Jean Baptiste shows for a few years and it’s always a larger than life event. It looked like I would have to make a song for the national day and why not find a French speaking Acadian? I thought it was funny to have a merger of both parties, which for them is August 15th. Who knows, maybe this song will have 2 million streams per Saint-Jean and in 30 years it will be a young rapper singing it on stage! »

But where does he see himself in a few years? I don’t know. Apparently I don’t feel like thinking about it right now. Maybe I’ll go to India and become a Buddhist or join Bruno Blanchet in Thailand. Maybe I’ll still live on the plateau where I’ll have my statue. I know it doesn’t and I don’t care, whatever it will be.”

“Right now, I have zero problems,” he sings in No Stress, where he also claims “the music made everything right.” That says it all, doesn’t it?

On tour through Quebec from April. At Place Bell (Laval) on April 8 and at the Videotron Center (Quebec) on April 22.

The album will be released on February 17th.

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