From The Curator at BlackFM
There is a particular pleasure, not unlike watching two accomplished dancers find the same rhythm without rehearsal, in hearing artists from different musical traditions discover that they were, all along, speaking the same language with a different accent. That is precisely the effect achieved on Best, the collaboration between French-Congolese rapper Tiakola and Nigerian superstar Rema that has emerged as one of the more quietly assured highlights on Tiakola’s second studio album, WpointM, as first reported by notjustok.com. The pairing works because it does not strain for effect; it simply allows two distinct vocal temperaments to occupy the same space with the unforced confidence of old acquaintances.
A Meeting of Two Fluent Traditions
Tiakola has built his reputation on a kind of French rap that owes as much to melody as to metre, a style in which the line between singing and rapping dissolves into something more fluid and altogether more contemporary. Rema, for his part, arrives with the Afrobeats cadence that has carried him from Lagos to international stages with a directness that never feels rushed. On Best, produced with a contribution from London, who handled the track specifically while AOD and Washy shaped the wider album, the two idioms are not merely stitched together but genuinely woven, each artist given sufficient room to work within his own vernacular while still, somehow, arriving at the same destination. The Tiakola Rema Best pairing feels less like a guest verse bolted onto a chorus and more like a conversation between two people who happen to have grown up on different continents.
Heritage Woven Into the Wider Record
The collaboration did not arrive entirely without warning. Tiakola had teased it in the music video for his earlier single, Upa Solide, a gesture that had the desired effect of stoking anticipation among his following. That song, along with Winter Melo Music featuring Leto, appeared on WpointM – 93120, a six-track preface released the day before the full album, on 24 September, a structure that gave listeners a taste of what was to come before the main course was served. WpointM itself, comprising seventeen tracks in total, is billed as the next phase of Tiakola’s solo career, one in which French rap, Afrobeats and the sounds of his Congolese heritage are allowed to sit comfortably alongside one another rather than being treated as separate compartments. This is, in its way, a very Parisian gesture: the city has long been a crossroads for Francophone African diasporas, and Tiakola’s music reads as a document of that particular inheritance, worn lightly but unmistakably.
The album’s guest list further underlines this cosmopolitan instinct, featuring British singer Jorja Smith, alongside Theodora, Bné, and the Congolese group Zaïko Langa Langa, a name that carries considerable historical weight in Congolese rumba circles. To place a legacy act of that stature alongside contemporary Afrobeats and French rap sensibilities is a statement in itself, suggesting that Tiakola sees his own project as part of a longer continuum rather than a clean break from what came before.
Rema’s Ever-Widening Orbit
For Rema, the feature lands during what can only be described as a particularly active international stretch. He has recently been announced as a headliner for Afro Nation Portugal 2027, sharing billing with Davido and Congolese star Fally Ipupa, with the festival scheduled for 9–11 June 2027 in Portimão. It is the sort of announcement that confirms what close observers of Afrobeats’ global spread have long suspected: that Rema’s ambitions, like those of the genre itself, are no longer confined to any single market. His catalogue already ranges across genres and continents, a breadth of ambition that was given formal recognition when his 2024 album Heis earned him a Grammy nomination, placing him among a select group of Afrobeats artists to receive that particular honour.
A Small but Telling Addition
Best, then, is best understood not as an isolated novelty but as another entry in a growing ledger of cross-border collaborations that Rema has been quietly accumulating, each one adding to a picture of an artist who treats genre boundaries as suggestions rather than instructions. For Tiakola, it represents a similarly outward-looking gesture, proof that French rap’s current generation is as comfortable reaching towards Lagos as it is towards its own Congolese roots. Neither artist compromises his identity in the process, which is precisely what makes the track work; there is no sense of either man performing a version of himself tailored for the other’s audience. The chemistry, as has been noted elsewhere, is genuinely amazing, and it is the kind of chemistry that tends to matter more in the long run than any single chart placement, precisely because it points towards where both careers, and indeed both genres, might be heading next. Anyone tracing the current dialogue between French rap and Afrobeats would do well to start with Best, a track that manages to feel both effortless and quietly significant, and which suggests that the most interesting collaborations are often the ones that arrive without any great fanfare at all.
Source: notjustok.com. Keep listening on BlackFM Afrobeats radio.
