Premier Gaou

Magic System's first album flopped. The group had grown out of a sprawling Abidjan collective of more than fifty members, and by 1996 the four who remained, A'salfo, Goude, Tino and Manadja, were playing parties and local events across Côte d'Ivoire. Their 1997 debut Papitou and its single Momo went nowhere. They kept going anyway, and in 1999 the four musicians from Anoumabo went into Studio Soft in Abidjan to record fourteen new songs. One of them was 1er Gaou. A gaou, in Ivorian slang, is a naive person, and the song treats a classic theme, love bought with money, with humour and enthusiasm. It spread slowly, first across the country, then West Africa and other African cities, selling around 300,000 cassettes in Côte d'Ivoire and more than a million in the rest of Africa. Getting it into France was harder: no label there showed interest. The radio and TV presenter Ephrem Youkpo financed the album himself and, when the major companies refused to distribute it, handed it to Sonima in January 2000. The real breakthrough came in 2002, when a Bob Sinclar remix relaunched the song and introduced the group to the French public. Distributed in France by Next Music, the album climbed for months, and Fnac named Magic System its best-selling act in African music. Their success was also the success of zouglou, the style born on Abidjan's university campuses in the 1990s to describe society's troubles while making people dance. A song about being played for a fool turned four musicians from Anoumabo into stars.