Roseline Layo has taken Ivory Coast by storm this year.
In June, her first album, Elu de Dieu, was certified gold and yet she only dropped her first single, Donnez Nous un Peu, in December 2021.
It looks like a meteoric rise, but Layo has been harbouring this dream for a while. She was learning to be a dressmaker to help support her family, but decided to enter a local TV talent contest.
She didn’t win, but it lit a flame inside her and she continued to look for opportunities and make connections. Now, everywhere, Ivorians are dancing to her tunes. Her fans feel she comes across as down to earth – someone the ordinary person on the street can identify with.
Layo’s most recent hit, Mogo Fariman, is reminiscent of a traditional praise song, at least in its lyrical content:
She told the “Mogo Fariman is Malinke [a West African language]. It means ‘the great man’.
“We wanted to value our fathers, the people who help us, the people who support us, that’s why we sing: ‘The baobab arrives, the head of the family arrives, the big man arrives, the president arrives, the king makes his entrance’.”
Layo is keen to emphasise her versatility – she said she doesn’t only perform zouglou, a popular Ivorian genre.
“People would like to label me as a zouglou girl but it is not the case at all. I do a big variety. I do everything. You can give me reggae, I’ll do it. You can give me rap, I’ll do it,” she said.
After the TV talent contest in 2014, Layo joined Bella Mondo, Ivory Coast’s first all-female band: “That’s where I learnt how to perform on stage, how to speak to an audience, how to hold a microphone.
“I would say that’s where my training really started. Then I continued working as a piano bar artist and I learned all about live music, I learned a lot, and that’s when I said to myself: ‘Roseline, go for it, you are ready.'”
She released Donnez Nous un Peu (which means ‘Give Us a Little Bit’) and it has now racked up 26 million views on YouTube. It seems the preparation paid off. But what does Layo put her success down to?
“It’s thanks to God and work, because we work all the time. And you have to love the job you do, put your heart into it, and when you do it, it can only bear this kind of fruit. We don’t sleep much!”