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Zouk, popular dance music associated mainly with the Caribbean

islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique, as well as Saint
Lucia, Dominica, and Haiti, all in the French Antilles (French West
Indies). The music blends a variety of Caribbean, African, and North
American music styles. It is characterized by frequent use of French
Antillean Creole language, the prominence of electronically
synthesized sounds, and sophisticated recording technology.

The French Antillean Creole term zouk was first used on the islands

of Guadeloupe and Martinique to refer to nightlong dance parties.
The collective label for the various types of Caribbean music played at
such parties was mizik zouk. Included in the mizik zouk rubric were
the Haitian popular music styles known
as compas and cadence, beguine from Martinique and Guadeloupe,
and cadence-lypso, a hybrid of Haitian cadence and
Trinidadian calypso popularized in Dominica in the 1970s.

In 1979 Guadeloupean sound technician and bass player Pierre-

Edouard Décimus and guitarist Jacob Desvarieux formed Kassav’, the
group that integrated the diverse styles of mizik zouk, injected the
mixture with a contemporary urban, studio-produced sound, and
marketed the new music as zouk. With the overwhelming commercial
success in 1984 of the group’s song “Zouk-la sé sèl médikaman nou ni”
(“Zouk Is the Only Medicine We Have”), zouk was firmly established
as a new and viable Caribbean dance music genre.

Kassav’ found its principal audience among the French Antillean

Creole-speaking population of Guadeloupe, Martinique, Dominica,
and Saint Lucia. Within this community zouk emerged as an emblem
of cultural pride, owing first and foremost to the music’s use of Creole
lyrics. By projecting the unofficial common tongue of the region in a
modern and cosmopolitan musical setting, zouk appealed to
the ideology of créolité (“creole-ness”), a concurrent literary and
cultural movement that strove to recognize the language and culture of
the French Antilles as legitimate hybrids, both related to and distinct
from their predominantly African and European (particularly French)
parent cultures.

Aside from its use of the French Antillean Creole language,

early zouk was distinguished from its Antillean relatives by its studio
sound, including the extensive use of synthesizers, as well as by its
female lead and backup singers, a precedent for which existed in
calypso music. Moreover, zouk used instruments and rhythms that
drew from local traditions, further elevating the status of French
Antillean cultural practices. For example, Kassav’ used the
distinctively Guadeloupean gwoka (or gwo ka) drums and drum
patterns on its early recordings. This helped to bring attention and
respect to an Afro-Caribbean drum dance tradition that had previously
been disparaged as crude and uncultured. The more broadly
Caribbean heritage of zouk was evident in the music’s guiding rhythm,
a repeated pattern of two long beats followed by a short beat (a 3-3-2
rhythm, written, for example, as two dotted eighth notes followed by
an eighth note in Western music notation). The rhythm was also heard
in most of the musics that were played in the mizik zouk context.
In zouk music the rhythm was usually carried by the hi-hat cymbals.

For French Antilleans zouk spoke back not only to cultural and

political domination by France but also to musical domination
by genres from other regions of the Caribbean.
Although zouk possessed an undeniably local French Antillean
character, it also had an international orientation that enabled it to
compete commercially with foreign genres such as reggae, soca, and
especially salsa, which enjoyed a strong appeal in the French Antilles
in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Indeed, the founding musicians of
Kassav’, although from Guadeloupe, were well connected
internationally. Décimus had toured extensively in France and in the
Caribbean beyond Guadeloupe, while Desvarieux had lived and
performed in France and Senegal. The band’s later membership even
more clearly reflected its international orientation. Martinican singer
Jocelyne Béroard, for example, had previously performed with
Cameroonian bandleader Manu Dibango. Martinican keyboardist
Jean-Claude Naimro had performed with both Dibango and South
African singer Miriam Makeba. The group’s horn section
(including saxophones, trumpets, and trombones), moreover,
consisted of Paris-based musicians with international recording and
performing credentials. Such connections to African musicians and
styles has remained an especially rich resource for zouk and for French
Antillean music in general.

The success of Kassav’ opened a space in the international music

market for zouk artists of diverse origins. Typically marketed as
individual singers rather than as bands, these artists included Soumia,
from France; Kairos, from the French overseas department of
Réunion, off the east coast of Madagascar; as well as French Antillean
singers Medhy Custos, Orlane, and Jean-Marie Ragald, among others.
Along with this diversity of participation, substyles of zouk developed,
including zouk love, with romantic themes and slow tempi, and the
faster-paced zouk béton (hard, or “concrete,” zouk).

In the 1990s singer Edith Lefel performed with a group that combined
the danceability and popular touch of zouk with the sophistication and
instrumental virtuosity of the Martinican band Malavoi, a group of
classically trained musicians who had successfully blended French
Antillean styles with jazz and Latin music.

Although the popularity of zouk brought new attention to Malavoi and

other established French Antillean bands, such exposure also sparked
debates about the cultural impact of commercialism and
modernization on French Antillean identity. Indeed, zouk’s popularity
and increasingly international sound have been seen by some as a
threat to other styles of dance music, such as beguine, that embodied a
more distinctly French Antillean flavour. Moreover, as zouk became
more cosmopolitan, lyrics came to be sung in French rather than
Creole. In other words, while zouk succeeded in putting the French
Antilles on the world music map, it sacrificed some elements of its
“creole-ness” for the sake of such global accessibility. Younger people
in Martinique and Guadeloupe at the turn of the 21st century were less
likely to know the varieties of social dances or music that their parents
enjoyed, preferring zouk, for example, over beguine.
Nevertheless, zouk continued to be strongly identified with the French
Antilles in the early 21st century—despite its cosmopolitan character.