| A faithful and precious friend in the landscape of song, and not only of the season. He is also a referee of elegance, associated with detonating one-man-show skills that provoke hilarity not without depth in the audience. Wit, we repeat. Textual precision, undeniably. Alexis HK pursues his balancing act without resorting to expedients. In Olympian stride, this return of the dandy balladeer.
If the French language is once again so well courted, the handsome freedman allows himself to break a few locks here. A hipster record, moving, alive, with a hospitable groove. It is adorned with a hip-hop influenced production and a strong vocal elasticity.
This is perhaps one of the biggest lessons to be learned from its sixth delivery of adult mail: the knowledge that buying a thick carpet can be so crucial as to shape the spine of a record. Bobo Playground, a provisional title with a definitive twist. The forty-something songwriter, used to exchanging fake album titles with his close friends, has this time been picked up by a choice obviousness. The fault or thanks to a message from his girlfriend, after receiving the photograph of the famous everyday object: "It's good, we're really super bobos".
Since it conforms to an assumed reality, Alexis HK decides to make it his poetic and musical playground. There's no round of observation when the eponymous opening song, packed with a weighted pulse of mia, is tackled. A razor-sharp plan of attack and witty remarks aimed at this "well-to-do, sometimes scapegoat" and "favourite target of the reactionary bourgeois". Voluntarily unwinding the cliché, including oneself in it. Translation: "I've always lacked a cultural identity / Not a stinky cheese, a natural wine / Displayed by the region where I grew up for no reason / With 'Chevignon' written in large letters on my jacket". Further on: "And yes, we live the life of Oui-Oui(=Noddy) / The price of a square metre in Paris is skyrocketing / And developers often give us the eye / 500, 000 euros for a two-roomed flat in Montreuil (=close suburb)".
Twenty-five years of career, without Bercy-Accor Arena or air gaps, companionship with Renan Luce and Benoît Dorémus, a bluffing reverence to Brassens, forays into the young public repertoire. A faithful and precious friend in the landscape of song, and not only of the season. He is also a referee of elegance, associated with detonating one-man-show skills that provoke hilarity not without depth in the audience. Wit, we repeat. Textual precision, undeniably. Alexis HK pursues his balancing act without resorting to expedients. In Olympian stride, this return of the dandy balladeer. In the legs already, a nice warm-up of twenty or so dates in affectionate and intimate venues (a timing he has become accustomed to since the Brassens breakthrough). A solo with two guitars. The dashing multi-instrumentalist and co-producer Sébastien Collinet (a drummer and a bassist will join the tour for the official tour).
Change in continuity. Because the mood of this record is at the antipodes of Comme un ours, released in 2018 (with a live recording two years later) and crossed by a societal darkness, an undergone or chosen loneliness, an acidic disarray as well as an acoustic decorum under cover of traditional instruments. This path of shadows to pierce the light finds its perfect counterpoint on Bobo Playground. To get out of a certain torpor and to move away from the grey areas. If the French language is once again so well courted, the handsome freedman allows himself to break a few locks here. A hipster record, moving, alive, with a hospitable groove. It is adorned with a hip-hop influenced production and a strong vocal elasticity. Sometimes ragga, sometimes synthetic (Elle tekiffe, a track with a diffuse tenderness). Of course, the eloquence of the storyteller is always present, with the finesse of a man's voice and the haughty elocution. Verbose flow and syncopated rhythms irrigate the repentance of an anarchist torn between his position as a wild animal and a domesticated one (“Qui l’eutcru ? = Who would have thought it) while the crooner's voice, moistened by the secretion of his nonchalant gland, lights up the melancholic verses of PartenaireParticulier, a happy cover. There are songs of Jacquouille la fripouille (=Jacquasse La Crasse) :((no) knight) and of unexciting dreams (Rêve de nul), of political fiction in which he imagines Trump in charge of a sustainable development strategy and housing migrants in luxury hotels (Le tweet). There are still the beautiful escapes promised at a pivotal age (J’ai 18 ans), the comforting aura of Carima's house isolated in the middle of a pile of skyscrapers and threatened with destruction. Or the jubilant projection of an urban artist in a nursing home (Comme unrappeur).
Beyond a variation on the bobo sphere, Alexis HK above all links the division of privileges to the fragility of human consciousness. In declivities. This is also the art of this boy, to take us on board within defined beacons, to make an echo that is never exclusive, to impose himself in the sociology of taste, of sensibilities and of winks. At the end of the journey, Fille de l'air, conceived in the same dynamic as Le dernier présent, is a blunt statement of happiness. Then the black sky over the pavements of the capital. Ville lumière, a song that is as essential as it is necessary to bring reason back to life. |
