Zouk

Zouk is the dance music created in the late 1970s by the Guadeloupean band *Kassav'*, fusing Antillean cadence and Haitian compas with funk, synth-pop and studio electronics into a fast, bright, rhythmically precise style sung mostly in French Antillean Creole. Built on locking guitar patterns, synthesizer brass, drum machines and live percussion, zouk became the dominant popular music of the French Caribbean and a major force across francophone Africa, before slowing in the 1990s into the romantic zouk-love variant that dominated the following decade.