In the very calm and very bourgeois town of Neuilly-sur-Seine, the team did not expect to cause so much excitement. But this October day, in a small street in the town of Hauts-de-Seine, the photo session has barely started when small crowds form. Garbage collectors stop their truck and take out their cell phones to film the scene. From the sidewalk opposite, a group of teenagers post the images on social networks. A postman driving a yellow car brakes, rolls down the window and shouts: ” Eagle ! » The man thus nicknamed smiles before resuming his pose.
Fally Ipupa is used to attracting attention. At 45, the Congolese singer and composer is a must in African music. Parisian metro users see his face on advertising posters for a money transfer company to Africa, but above all on November 25, he will be on the stage of Paris La Défense Arena, the largest French performance hall, with forty thousand people expected.
A concert already considered historic, since the first fifteen thousand places on sale were sold in one day, filling the first gauge in record time. Such enthusiasm that ten thousand additional tickets were immediately made available. “ Only international artists with big audiences are capable of selling so many », assures Raphaëlle Plasse, the programming director.
Young listeners of all origins
In seventeen years of career, “Fally” – as his fans call him – has become a monument of African music. His admirers were first his compatriots and members of the Congolese diaspora in France and Belgium (the former colonial power from 1885 to independence in 1960). The fame of the man who then devoted himself to rumba then spread to the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, from Nigeria to the Ivory Coast, before winning over young listeners of all origins. A varied audience who will applaud him in Paris, but also at the OVO Arena Wembley (twelve thousand five hundred seats), in London, on December 8, and at the ING Arena (fifteen thousand seats), in Brussels, on the 16th. A tour worthy of an artist who has some fifteen million subscribers on all social networks and one and a half billion views on YouTube.
For the general Western public, Congolese music has long been summed up by Papa Wemba, emblem of world music, collaborating with the American icon Aretha Franklin or the British songwriter Peter Gabriel and known for his outfits, copied throughout the African continent… A myth. A status that Fally Ipupa can claim today, up to date with the new codes, particularly marketing, of the music industry and which embodies the upheavals in popular music.
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