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"Rock el Casbah" from Tékitoi
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"Winta" from Tékitoi
Sample Track 3:
"Dima (Always)" from Tékitoi
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Tékitoi
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Khaled and Friends

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Time Out New York, Khaled and Friends >>

Algerian superstars Rachid Taha and Khaled have about as much in common these days as Nick Lowe and Elvis Costello do , but their names persistently pop up together, whether it’s as Paris transplants who’ve transformed the music style rai into a globalist lingua franca, or simply because they bother recorded albums last year for Wrasse/Universal. It’s pretty easy to tell them apart. Khaled, the longtime king of rai, is much more beholden to the music of his homeland than is Taha, who emigrated to France as a preteen and has always fancied himself a rocker. The king prefers buttery, Don Was-engineered funk to Taha’s guttural kick-out-the-jams crunch-ups, but the latter’s embrace of techno increasingly sounds like the wave of the future.

That may or may not be why Khaled is getting outside help for his Summer Stage even this week, while Taha is going it alone downtown. Both artists have run afoul of fundamentalist elements in Algeria (Khaled endured death threats throughout the ‘80s), but it is Taha’s recent songs that continue to address repression: “Our culture is not democratic,” he sings in “Safi (Pure).” “The child cannot talk to his father.” Tellingly, Khaled and Was are staging a one-world-style peace concert featuring North African mixologist DJ Chebi Sabbah, as well as Cuban arranger Luis Conte and former Santana member Walfredo Reyes. Taha is bringing his band to the Bowery, to say nothing of his Arabic reclamation of the Clash’s “Rock the Casbah.”

-K. Leander Williams

 06/30/05
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