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Taha brings Clash-inspired sounds to Logan Square
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Chicago Tribune, Taha brings Clash-inspired sounds to Logan Square >>
On his latest album, "Tekitoi" (Wrass), the French-Algerian dance-punk maestro Rachid Taha doesn't just cover the Clash's "Rock the Casbah," he plays it with such dash and daring he might as well have written it. It's only fitting, Taha says. After all, the Clash wrote the song a year after briefly meeting the singer in 1981.
"It was a very quick encounter, I ran into them backstage after a concert," he says through a translator. "I wanted them to produce my first album and handed them a demo tape. I never heard back from them, but I know they were influenced by what I gave them, just as I was influenced by them. Good spirits met that night."
At the time, Taha was in the band Carte de Sejour ("green card" or "residence permit"--signifying Taha's status as an Algerian who had immigrated to France with his family when he was 10 years old, seeking a better life). To him it's no coincidence that the Clash song sounds very much like his old band, with its ululating vocals, strident guitars and snaky Eastern rhythms. In his remake, "Rock El Casbah," Taha punctuates each line with lusty Eastern strings. It's even more audacious and danceable than the Clash original, and Taha rolls consonants, shouts and growls with relish; he not only understands the song's wicked sarcasm, but also unearths its underlying anger.
Influence of Strummer's death
He was inspired to revisit it because of Clash singer Joe Strummer's death, and it anchors his sixth and best solo album, a furious fusion of electronic dance music, punk brio and Algerian groove. It's the culmination of a sound Taha has been refining all his life, ever since he was a deejay in Paris who specialized in mixing genres with impunity, as if the cultural barriers erected around rock, funk, Algerian rai music, Bollywood movie soundtracks and reggae didn't exist.
"The rhythm is the same, whether it's from an Elvis Presley song or African music," says Taha, who arrives Friday at the Logan Square Auditorium as part of a rare U.S. tour. "To me, it was easy to see the similarities rather than worry about the differences."
But it wasn't until he heard punk rock for the first time that he decided to form a band.
"It was a brutal, powerful sound," he says. "I saw it as a way to make some noise and shout everything that was inside me. There was an anarchist aspect that really appealed to me--anarchy in the sense that it is a way to promote change."
As a drummer and later a vocalist, Taha found an outlet not just for his vision of crosscultural music, but for the frustrations he encountered as an eternal outsider in his adopted country. "As an Algerian living in France, you are integrated into society, but still separate," he says. "I feel French every day, but I will be Algerian forever."
In rai music, there was a protest aspect that he wanted to incorporate into his songwriting. "Rai expresses the protest within Algerian society, but it has nothing to do with Bob Dylan or Woody Guthrie," he says. "It's opposition music, especially when it's sung by women. It's the desire to speak up and be heard by the people who are trying to ignore you or suppress you."
Collaborates with Gong
Though Taha was unable to persuade the Clash to produce him, he did meet another Western musician, Steve Hillage of the progressive band Gong, who became his career-long collaborator, beginning in 1983.
"Steve did not play in punk bands, but he is a punk in his approach to music and the way he sees things," Taha says. "He was very open-minded. He saw music the way I did."
On his solo albums, Taha and Hillage have blended electronic rhythms with traditional folk instruments and punkish guitars to create one of the world's most distinctive sounds. The unifying thread is Taha's rebel attitude, and "Tekitoi" is his angriest and bluntest album yet. In the song "H'asbu-Hum!" he rails at unnamed "liars, thieves, humiliators, killers . . . "
"H'asbu-hum! Nah'h'u-hum!" (Ask them for an explanation! Get rid of them!), Taha rasps.
"It's a song about the corrupt people that are sitting in big chairs in government," Taha says. He doesn't think his songs can change the world, "but at least we can change something through a night. It is a way of expressing ourselves. It's worth doing, if only for that reason."
-Greg Kot 07/01/05
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