Cyril Mokaiesh

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” Seated in the Ménilmontant café where he writes every day, Cyril Mokaiesh swiftly quotes Oscar Wilde’s famous aphorism to describe his fifteen (years) on the main stage and in the parallel corridors of French chanson. Initiated by the sensation of Communiste in 2011, after a rock warm-up with the quartet that bore his name, this trajectory of a former high-level tennis player turned concert hall orator is indeed unlike any other. Passionate, ardent as fire, a committed citizen, sometimes enraged, yet a voice of wisdom, Cyril has, since his beginnings, mapped out an unquiet world like the origami of desperate causes, tirelessly seeking glimmers of hope and reasons to believe. He opens this eighth and new album with the explosion of Regarder passer les trains, using a quote from a contemporary figure who is so raw, Vincent Lindon: “I’m getting better and better at a job I like less and less.”

Is it a passing bout of the blues? A lucid observation, spoken/sung in the style of Léo Ferré, facing the headwinds of our time, that of influencers, hucksters, and algorithms? This mood song, not devoid of humour and self-deprecation, ends with a shout of “Bonne chance pour la suite” (Good luck for what’s next), the title of an album where what’s next, precisely, beautifully disproves this sense of powerlessness. It had been nearly a decade, since Clôture (2017), that Mokaiesh hadn’t found himself alone. He successively released a vibrant and collective album, linked to his Lebanese roots, blending electro and traditional music (Paris-Beyrouth, 2020), another of duets with the best of his peers (Dyade, 2021), then delivered a grand tribute to the prince of the nonchalant, Georges Moustaki (Le temps de vivre, 2023). This man who writes “so as not to end up dry, bitter, and pedantic” has never lost faith, in humanity or in himself. He