The numbers or letters of HLM buildings have often given rap groups ideas for names: 7 in Evry for Koba LaD, 113 in Vitry-sur-Seine for the trio made up of Rim’K, Mokobé and AP and the Building B, in the 19th arrondissement of Paris, for Oxmo Puccino.
The latter, rapper, writer, actor (currently with Françoise Fabian in Marcel, at the Théâtre Le 13ème Art, in Paris), did not make it the title of a song or an album, but that of a program. broadcast on Culturebox and the France.tv application. In 2023, he begins the third season of this extraordinary show in terms of its format (over two and a half hours) and its diversity, highlighting the creative process more than promotional news.
In his building, he doesn’t just meet lads who listen to rap music on their phones, but a multitude of personalities of all origins, who play all styles of music. Oxmo Puccino and the production collective La Sale Affaire have certainly chosen as the setting for this musical program a hall with sanitized white walls, where the only note of color is the alignment of gray mailboxes. Each of the guest artists will stick their name on one of the boxes, as do the new tenants.
Indeed, here, the artists take the time to play, to exchange, to settle down. Forty-five minutes for each of the three artists programmed, with a good part of the concert recorded under live conditions and a conversation with the master of the place rather than a formal interview.
« Flowers »
On February 10, Nigerian guitarist Keziah Jones and producer Philippe Cohen Solal, co-founder of the group Gotan Project (which mixes tango and electronic music), presented their common songs taken from their EP Class of 89. After demonstrating his blufunk , a musical genre that street musician Keziah Jones invented in the early 1990s to drown out the noise of cars, the two artists improvise a duet with Oxmo Puccino, who raps one of his lyrics: “Artist, it’s not difficult, we try to make a sweater with ten strings / You paint songs at the decibel to find this thing that makes it so beautiful to us…”
Will follow, in the same show, the Franco-Algerian singer Zaho and the rapper of Brazilian origin Bianca Costa. On February 16, it is the twin sisters of Ibeyi who will give the reply to the rapper, who has no equal in putting his colleagues at ease, whether they are experienced like the group Sniper or novices like Souffrance, originally from of Montreuil (Seine-Saint-Denis).
Oxmo Puccino presents them on an equal footing with his “flowers”, as he poetically designates his social media followers, his fans, his viewers, those who have followed him for his twenty-year career and who are sure of his good taste. .
