Berlin’s PAN label has been sidling up to Parisian gallery Bourse de Commerce since the latter opened its doors in 2021. The two collaborated on Baiser Mortel, an LP and performance of the same name that took place in the gallery the year it opened. In it, Paris-based producer Low Jack paired up with French rapper Lala &ce and a host of other musicians—one of whom was Le Diouck (real name Magueye Diouck.) The Senegalese French artist designs graphic novels and has performed on several releases with Boukan Records boss Bamao Yendé. His latest project, Grace Joke, is both his debut solo album for PAN and the prologue to a trilogy of comics he plans to release with Yasmeen El Hamdani in the coming years.
The album’s title might sound like a dig at Grace Jones, but in fact it’s a portmanteau of two characters from Le Diouck and El Hamdani’s forthcoming novel: Grace is a young woman reanimated as a cyborg searching for her memories, and Joke is a down-and-out circus clown broken by melancholy. This split personality recalls the record’s near namesake, who declared in a 1985 interview, “I’m schizophrenic, I have many moods.” Rendering his character sporting lipstick, an angular haircut, and a hundred-yard stare, Le Diouck evokes Jones’ iconic figure on the cover of Grace Joke, a bubbling alt-R&B album that flaunts every iota of its maker’s mercurial identity.
Until now Le Diouck’s androgynous Auto-Tuned verses have sauntered across Afrobeats, batida, and dancehall tunes. But, as he told French television show Basique, he really loves Brazilian funk and rock, so a bunch of talented musicians from France’s underground electronic scene and PAN’s roster conjure up this refreshing blend for him on Grace Joke. Yann Rose’s guitar and Yves Tumor’s vocals breathe an emo edge into the alt rock of “Onigashima,” while the strings on “OVNIesque”—produced by Modulaw, Eliot Rdv, and Bamao Yendé—abruptly leap from their floating intro into short, skipping bursts over a funk beat.
Frequent sudden changes like those spice up the album’s verse/chorus structure with sharp and unexpected turns in mood and intensity. After screaming over creeping grunge guitars at the start of “Émeraude,” Le Diouck retreats to a whisper beside light percussive taps. Such shifts in tone aren’t always so blatant; occasionally Le Diouck lets them coexist like a devil and angel on each shoulder. The electric guitar whining beneath the jaunty reggae of “Cumbia del Diamante” mirrors the stark contrast in the track’s video between Le Diouck’s fabulous yellow tunic and the forlorn figure he cuts. Grace Joke and its many producers find boundless ways to make the record pop.
The sheer number of niche pop-cultural references Le Diouck weaves into his swooning verses make it denser than your usual R&B album. When he raps, “T’es ma Kajol, j’te rassure, pas de débarras” (“You’re my Kajol, I assure you, no good riddance”) he invokes a popular Bollywood TV character to express a forbidden love. His rap braggadocio is hardly run of the mill, either. “Akira en Zinedine, fort” (“Akira on Zinedine, strong”) he raps on “La Païva,” reimagining Zinedine Zidane headbutting Marco Materazzi with a Tetsuo-sized head. It’s an anecdote that many will only half get, much the way not all listeners will be able to keep up with his swerves between languages. But even for those of us who aren’t polyglots, each linguistic shift replenishes his verses with fresh fight. “I’m tired of that shit/Ma nkoy watt,” he barks on “Thelma & Louise,” and the three abrupt Wolof syllables snap back at the English phrase like a kung-fu combo. It wouldn’t be outrageous to compare Le Diouck’s rapid-fire vocals to someone like MF DOOM, whose rhyming couplets pasted a rough collage of his universe rather than a clear picture. It was cryptic, but undeniably him.
On Grace Joke, Le Diouck reveals as many facets of himself as can be crammed into a single work of art. Like many releases on PAN, this omnivorous record is a feat of world-building; draped in a Technicolor dreamcoat of moods, ideas, and inspirations, it’s a passionate defense of multiplicity in a world that often prefers a stifling consistency from its creators. Surely Grace Jones would approve.
