"In fifty years, we'll still be listening to it": the secret of youth of Magic System's "Premier Gaou"

" They say premier gaou is not gaou, oh... " It only takes a few words and a recognizable melody for the song to get stuck in your head and never leave. For twenty-five years, Magic System's Premier Gaou has been a staple on dance floors well beyond the borders of his native Ivory Coast. "It's our classic ," says Abidjan DJ Yo Gio , "the one we have to play at every party, local or international, and which will get everyone dancing."

It's arguably one of the most covered and sampled African tracks, not far from Soul Makossa by Cameroonian saxophonist Manu Dibango. The latest example: a mashup with the hip-hop track Which One by Canadian and British rappers Drake and Central Cee, mixed by Dutch DJ Noon, went viral in early August and has been posted more than 70,000 times on TikTok.

Back in 2002, French DJ Bob Sinclar made a dub version for clubs, and Magic System recorded another Afrohouse remix with Haitian composer Francis Mercier. The latter was modernized nearly twenty years later by Zimbabwean DJ Nitefreak, and this new remix became one of the genre's biggest hits in 2021, with around 76 million streams on Spotify.

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