Cyril Mokaiesh

Be yourself, everyone else is already taken. Seated at a café in Ménilmontant where he writes every day, Cyril Mokaiesh picks up Oscar Wilde's famous aphorism to describe his fifteen years on the main stage as in the parallel corridors of French song.

Launched by the brilliant success of Communiste in 2011, after a rock warm-up with the quartet bearing his name, this trajectory of a former high-level tennis player turned tribune of concert halls resembles no other.

Passionate, burning like fire, engaged citizen, sometimes enraged, and yet voice of wisdom, Cyril has deployed since his beginnings the cartography of an uneasy world like the origami of desperate causes, of which he seeks by all means the clearings and reasons to believe in.

" Temporary blues? Lucid observation in spoken/sung on the Leo Ferré way facing the headwinds of the era, that of influencers, tricksters and algorithms?

This mood song not without humor and self-derision ends in screaming "Good luck for what's next", title of an album where the next, precisely, comes to belie in beauty this observation of powerlessness.

It had been nearly a decade, since Closure (2017), that Mokaiesh had not found himself alone with himself.

He successively released a vibrant and collective album, linked to his Lebanese roots, mixing electro and traditional music (Paris-Beyrouth, 2020), another of duets with the best of his peers (Dyade, 2021), then delivered a large-scale tribute to the prince of nonchalance, Georges Moustaki (Le temps de vivre, 2023).

This boy who writes "so as not to end up dry, bitter and pedantic" never lost faith, in humanity as in himself. This