Paris, October 23, 11:40 p.m. On Moulin Rouge Machine, bodies warm up with intoxicating bass and impetuous percussion. The party may have started at 8 pm, but the more the hours passed, the more the excitement grew. The evening’s dancers have only one name in mind: Maureen.
And suddenly, his arrival is announced. The phones are activated immediately. The queen of shatta – crown, golden dress, very fitted – arrives to the sound of Welcome to Shatta Land, the introductory title of your album Queen released this October 24. And he takes an audience, already very heated, in his wake.
QueenThere are a total of twelve songs that are danceable, they allow you to let yourself go and sometimes they can be heard as confidences. Maureen talks about her tender loves (Together), their disappointed stories (My C does not belong to you)his vengeful confidences (war queen)… Creole and French words are stimulating. The jokes are crude – and already viral – as in fishing emoji : “Clap, clap, clap, there’s only peach emoji, clap, clap, clap, clap your butt.” The compilation is not limited to shatta, but also captures zouk sounds (Thing for you, Vanity) and surprises in Inside…taken from Beethoven and his Letter to Elise. A very rich first album, long-awaited and already praised by critics.
Do you realize what is happening? “It’s just a great relief for me,” he breathes over the phone this Friday, October 24. “Yesterday I really enjoyed the atmosphere and the audience, which was really adorable, who gave me a lot of love and luck. It motivated me even more to defend this album.”
Maureen knows: expectations were high. With thirty titles under his belt and the publication of the EP bad queen (2024), Maureen was already seen as the ambassador of shatta: “I’m happy but it’s a weight to carry, it’s a lot of pressure and stress,” she admits. It’s not easy every day, but for now it’s okay. (laughs)“.
Queen is precisely “a term that defines her.” “Not just me, because all women are queens. It is a very strong word that shows that I have found the key within myself, I am proud of myself, of what I have achieved. I know what I think, what I am, what I want. And no one can tell me that certain things are not accessible to me.”
“I’m the bad queen and the queen, that’s me in my own right. The bad queen is wild, tougher when the queen is softer.”
In this joyful speech, in this enveloping pride, we also detect some wounds. Maureen will remain vague during the interview, letting it slip that “the music industry is a very sexist environment, an environment where if you’re not well surrounded, you can have a very bad experience.” She, in fact, “checked (her) surroundings.” “The most important thing is to inform yourself, ask questions, don’t hesitate to assert yourself. Don’t let yourself be crushed,” he says. “Because this industry can eat you up.”
Irresistible Ascension
Maureen is not from the inner circle. In the early 2000s, the little girl grew up in the town of Dillon, a neighborhood in Fort-de-France, Martinique. She is curious and her family loves music: it is not unusual to find her at her mother’s rehearsals in the gospel choir. If you already admire Rihanna, “the quintessential queen”, Jamaican dancehall will be your favorite when you are a teenager, particularly artists Vybz Kartel, J Capri and Sean Paul. “It was through dancing that I heard this music,” he points out. “I rehearsed the choreographies I saw on television; I always loved dancing.”
Maureen happily saw herself as a choreographer. Working at city hall or the Family Allowance Fund during the day, she dances at night for the shatta artists of her island. Earlier, a group of friends asked him to join them on stage and record his first sounds. “At first I hesitated, I really wasn’t up for that. And then I told myself it was for fun, I had fun, without asking questions, without thinking about what happened next.”
The sequel, in fact, is marked by its dazzling. In 2019, Maureen is already enjoying success with Fold – This is only his second title published on the platforms. A year later, his career really exploded with Tic – taken up on TikTok and at the Mugler show during Fashion Week. From then on, the streams went crazy: his collaborations with Martinican stars Kalash in Laptop and Blaiz Fayah in raise money each has over 50 million streams.
Along with Shanon or Elji, Maureen thus becomes an essential figure of shatta and her explosive and raw percussions, her powerful bass lines and her deep voices. This musical genre, derived from dancehall, appeared in Martinique in the 2010s thanks to the experiments of Martinican DJs Gil and Dan. The latter made remixes of Vybz Kartel and Mr. Vegas, isolating the vocal tracks and adding powerful bass and percussion as a tambour bèlè. Before writing your own texts.
Taken from Martinican slang, shatta also evokes pure pleasure, when in Jamaican it means gangster. But behind the dance rhythms, shatta aims to echo the inhabitants of the working-class neighborhoods from which it comes, rawly evoking both the romantic relationships and the social, monetary and postcolonial problems they face.
“It is an art that allows us to express ourselves. When we write, whatever the topic, we do it without moderation and we say things really, even crudely. Shatta is like a trap for rap.”
Recognition of shatta becomes international. Maureen’s too. His title alongside Kalash, awarded at the Les Flammes ceremony in 2023, was also nominated for the American BET Awards, which primarily reward African-American artists.
Maureen also became the first Martinican artist to perform at Colors Studios where she performed. bend your back. He sees it as a responsibility: “This visibility allows local artists to shine, it opens the way for them. The best is yet to come.”
The next logical step is a tour. Maureen has to leave for Brussels, for another launch party, before returning to Paris for a concert at the Center Pompidou the next day. “I’m not going to lie, there is still a lot of fatigue and you have to have a lot of organization. Fortunately, vitamins exist! The young mother laughs. Afterwards I can’t complain, because I chose it and it goes with it.” Crown on the head and head on the shoulders.
Source: BFM TV
