Largely open to hip-hop this year, the Printemps de Bourges has bet on heavyweights, Dinos or Gazo, but also on the new generation, like Favé, all in ego trip, or Eesah Yasuke, pen committed.
Favé, 18, is a meteorite from the Paris region. Spotted at 16 thanks to songs posted on social networks, he entered at that age “for the first time in the studio, with a guy who made sounds that were not too expensive”, he recalls for AFP. Since then, Gazo has contacted him for a featuring, one of those collaborations that rap is fond of, on No Lèche. And one of Favé’s titles, Urus, is approaching 40 million listens on Spotify, the world’s leading music platform.
Favé is the embodiment of this “frenetic rap scene”, as Boris Vedel, director of Printemps de Bourges, told AFP. “The rap public, it is no longer even in love, it is passionate, overnight, artists unknown until a few months ago fill rooms just through their own social networks”, unrolls the manager.
“It’s going so fast, I haven’t had time to realize that it’s a chance of everything I’m going through,” slips the rapper. “I have never been to see a concert or a festival in my life, my first experience of all this is now,” he confesses. Unimpressed, Favé therefore sang for the first time in a festival at the Printemps de Bourges, for only his fourth appearance on stage in his budding career. He is programmed to go far, as we hear in his song Mercedes: “I’m prepared / Suburban ready to move all of Paris”.
On stage, Favé is supported by a DJ perched on a sort of giant Space Invader. When he tumbles, a forest of smartphones lights up to film him and the spectators, the overwhelming majority of teenagers, already know the refrains and punchlines by heart. It will pass this summer by the Solidays festival, among others.
Eesah Yasuke succeeded him on stage, with a different rap, more calm, more thoughtful, which managed to capture the attention of an audience who had come there to party. The young woman – who does not say her age – began to write poems at 14 to put down on paper a bumpy life. Originally from Roubaix (she now lives in Lille), she was then placed in a home that took her away from her sport-study project to become a sprinter. “When your project is not done, you have the impression that everything stops, but it was a milestone”, she dissects for AFP. His next mini-album scheduled for May 30, Prophecy, is inspired by his journey.
The desire to write, which became the desire to rap, resurfaced when the young adult was to become a “specialist educator to work in day care, with people in situations of exclusion”. “I want to sing about what touches me»: His songs denounce racism (NGR) or the rise of far-right ideas (X-Trem). His first mini-album Cadavre exquis released in 2021 touched the ears that matter. In addition to her own show, she was one of the voices of an evening at the Printemps de Bourges concocted by Oxmo Puccino, a figure in French rap.
Oxmo Puccino was seduced by the sensitive rap of this rapper whose stage name comes from Yasuké, the first black samurai in the 16th century. Captured by slave traders in Mozambique, he arrived in Japan, where he entered the service of a lord. Eesah Yasuke has practiced ju-jitsu, as much for this martial art as for its philosophy: “we don’t use it to attack, we know how to defend ourselves whatever happens”.
