For a good part of their audience, listening again to Raggasonic in 2012 is like finding old friends you had lost sight of, or older cousins who had gone abroad. Fifteen years after their last album, Big Red and Daddy Mory are back. Making a clean sweep of the past, they pick up their good habits: Frenchie on production (for the most part) and sharp lyrics, anchored in reality. In 1995, their first album was the ideal synthesis of hip-hop straight talk and Jamaican rhythms. 15 years later, current affairs still provide their ammunition. And there is no shortage of it: identity, exclusion, police checks, the Front National… Ca va clasher, discovered as a single, or Dans la rue, on the Skateland Killer riddim (with Mory's hypersonic fast-style), illustrate the R-Sonic-branded recipe well. In a word: raggamuffin.
The idea was to "get back to the hard core of Raggasonic", they told us in an interview. 15 more years show, and while the two have not really changed (same flows, same themes, same attitudes), you can feel the experience and the maturity. The lyrics, thoughtful and of course written in French, still hit home. Mon identité or Ma couleur are thus the occasion for many well-aimed punch-lines.
But it would be a mistake to see "Raggasonic 3" as a nostalgic album. In continuity with the previous ones, certainly. To broaden the musical horizon, the duo summoned other producers, such as Marc of Animal Sons for La vie, or Sheldon Pennicott on Real Friends, two scorching dancehall tracks. But it is above all with Grime Style, a grime incursion naturally signed Big Red with his sidekick Youthman, or Monkey Star, which closes the album on an electro note, that things jolt a little. It is intentional: they absolutely did not want "an album for old men" or for "conservatives." Indeed, Big Red and Daddy Mory did not content themselves with making a "Raggasonic 2-bis", but a real "Raggasonic 3". The album thus introduces a modern Raggasonic, very much of its time, while awaiting the many announced remixes (as back then with Ainsi va la vie and Bleu blanc rouge in ragga jungle). One ear on the past, the other towards the future, and the head in the present: Raggasonic is well and truly back.
Pull up :
Dans la rue
Ma couleur
Identité
Changer l'histoire
