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Global Hit (click for full audio)
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The World (Public Radio Intl), Global Hit (click for full audio) >>
The Algerian rai singer Rachid Taha has always teased with the artificial lines that separate his native music with rock and roll. The World's Marco Werman tells us that his latest CD goes further in elaborating the links between rock and rai than ever before.
Before you listen to Rachid Taha's new album, you have to go to the roots of his rock and rai.
That geneaology isn't hard to trace.
It's like connecting Mick Jagger to blues screamer Big Mama Thornton.
With rai, you must start in Oran, the once-exotic colonial seaport on Algeria's Mediterranean coast.
Oran had a reputation as a city of loose morals.
The Spanish invaded it several centuries ago.
And they kept women there to...entertain their troops.
Fast forward to Oran of the 1920s.
It was a city divided into four quarters: French, Jewish, Spanish and Arab.
It remained a party town.
But if you were a woman, especially a Muslim woman, life was no party.
There's an old tradition of itinerant women in Oran who sing in the street.
Other women, mostly the daughters and wives of Algerian peasants and labourers, saw these singers almost as role models.
These peasant women realized that they could use song as a way to express their frustrations with the world around them.
The word, rai, essentially means to opine, or to speak out.
And that's what women singers, or cheikhas, like Zohra Rilizania did.
Just as Big Mama Thornton could never have foreseen Mick Jagger, it would have been equally impossible for Cheikha Rilizania to predict her musical progeny Rachid Taha.
This tune, "Lli Fat Mat" is a track from Rachid Taha's just released album.
It means "what is past is dead and gone."
Sure, Rachid Taha has enormous respect for his musical forebears.
But he's moving rai on.
The new recording "Tekitoi" is produced by Taha's long-time collaborator Steve Hillage.
Hillage himself is a veteran rock star and producer.
He performed with his own band Gong, and with musicians like Todd Rundgren.
Hillage is in large part responsible for the evolution of the sound of rai from the cheikhas to the rebel rock of Rachid Taha.
There's no better indication of that evolution than Rachid Taha's tongue-in-cheek cover of "Rock the Casbah" by the Clash.
Taha and Hillage put a simple twist on the Clash classic.
The title says it all: Rock el Casbah. 02/16/05 >> go there
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