On March 25, 2022, Muxxa dared Adekunle Gold to make something of Tayc’s “Dodo” on Mouv’, and Adekunle Gold improvised over the beat on air. The clip spread fast enough that Tayc put out an Adekunle Gold version of the song on April 12. “Without your challenge, it wouldn’t have gone that viral and we wouldn’t have made the remix,” Tayc wrote when he announced it, thanking the station.
The two are now billed together again. Lagos feat. Paris, a new festival of French and Nigerian music, has named Adekunle Gold and Tayc its headliners for Friday, December 11, at the J. Randle Centre for Yoruba Culture and History in Onikan, and its poster writes the pairing the way a song credit would: “Adekunle Gold feat. Tayc.”
Most Lagos listeners know Tayc through that one record. At home in France, his own records top the charts. Born in Marseille to Cameroonian parents, he calls his mix of R&B and Afrobeats “Afrolov,” and he has had a No. 1 single there with “Le temps,” a No. 1 album with Dadju on Héritage, and a No. 2 album this year with Joÿa, going by his French chart history. The festival promises three French stars and three Nigerian ones on the night, and the other four have not been named.
The week around the show is built to make more meetings like “Dodo” happen on purpose. Before December 11, a music camp puts Nigerian and French writers and producers in shared Lagos studios to make material for the concert, and Audio Girl Africa is running production workshops for twenty young women. The French rapper Fefé, born Samuël Adebiyi to Nigerian parents, will be handed his new Nigerian passport at a ceremony in the city. The festival’s founder, the Nigerian-French entrepreneur Wale Gbadamosi-Oyekanmi, said the idea came from watching the two scenes trade features: “What I realised is that the pace of collaboration between those two countries is accelerating.” He already has Abidjan, Salvador de Bahia and Seoul in mind as later partners for Lagos. Sacem, the French songwriters’ society that is among the festival’s partners, ran a camp at Mavin Records with the French embassy earlier this year that produced 60 tracks.
For Adekunle Gold, it means two Lagos nights fifteen days apart, with this one coming before he goes back to the National Theatre for The Greatest Showman on December 26. Early-bird tickets for December 11 are ₦35,000 until tomorrow.