Taha later joined Africa Express, a collaborative project between African and Western musicians, set up by Damon Albarn, which led to a famous long set at the 2007 Glastonbury festival in the UK. The album contained a wonderful cover of The Clash's hit Rock The Casbah, which perfectly mixes Arabic rhythms and instrumentation with the punk rock of the original. Made In Medina (2001) was very good (and is highly recommended) but it was Tekitoi in 2004 that really cemented his reputation as a creative musician and singer with real political bite. And as he got further into his recording career, he seemed to get better and better.
Taha's creative partnership with producer Hillage led to the first North African tracks to be mixed with dub and reggae (to great effect). In this sense, Taha's musical approach was more akin to that of the eclectic Manu Chao, who also sings about the experiences of immigrants and minorities in France. As Taha explained later, his music was rooted not so much in rai rhythms but those of chaabi, a street music more influenced by blues, rock'n'roll and rock music. The concert, named "1, 2, 3 Soleils", brought media attention to rai music but it was readily apparent that Taha's take on North African music was different to the approach of Khaled and his rai contemporaries. Rai singers like Cheb Khaled and Cheba Fadela were already international stars when Taha joined Khaled and Faudel Belloua for a mega-concert at Bercy Stadium in Paris in 1998. One song, Ya Rayah, became wildly popular with European DJs.įrom the late 1970s, Algerian rai music had been bubbling away in North Africa and by the mid-1980s had become part of the "world music" boom that swept the globe (Taha himself would have no truck with the term "world music", arguing that Mexicans don't view their music "world music" in Mexico when they play it. He released further albums, Ole Ole in 1995 and Diwan in 1999, the latter of which featured covers of North African and Egyptian songs and tunes. It is an interesting, though embryonic, first solo effort and it produced the first of his hits, the anthemic anti-racism gem Voila Voila. The duo's first collaboration was Rachid Taha (1993). The musical alchemy that the two created would propel Taha to international stardom and Hillage would produce most of Taha's albums. He met rock guitarist and producer Steve Hillage (formerly of the psychedelic band Gong). His first album, Barbes (1991), did not sell well, despite being produced by US veteran Don Was. Paris called in the late 1980s, so Taha moved to the big city to launch a solo career. In many ways, his focus and approach to music, mirrored that of his contemporary Manu Chao, whose first band, Mano Negra was also inspired by The Clash and the band's lead singer Joe Strummer. He was, he later noted, inspired by punk bands like The Clash ad roots poets like Linton Kwesi Johnson. Like many immigrants, he also worked many jobs, from selling encyclopaedias to washing dishes. By the mid-1980s rai music had taken off in North Africa and Taha would play rai music, along with salsa and funk, when he found work as a DJ in his late teens. Oran as many readers know is the home of rai music, a potent popular genre based on local Mahgrebi music and Western rock. But Khaled ended up prostituting himself on trivial disco-oriented collections such as Sahra (1997), Hafla (1998), Kenza (1999), 1,2,3 Soleils (1999), with Samra Faudel and Rachid Taha, etc.Taha was born in 1958 in a small village just outside the port city of Oran on Algeria's sea coast. His style changed dramatically, for better and for worse, with the slick synthesized production of Kutche (1989), a milestone in Anglo-Algerian fusion that announced a musician no longer limited to his acrobatic melisma but also to a hodgepodge of western dance music, a concept that was refined on Khaled (1992) and N'ssi n'ssi (1993). Rai became the voice of the poor and the oppressed, and, in the years of the Civil War, the voice of the anti-fundamentalist westernized youth, as documented by Fuir Mais Ou? (1988).
( Copyright © 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini d'uso )Ī typical French-style maudit and bohemien artist, Cheb Khaled took the sound of the Algerian revolution and transposed it into the punk era. Cheb Khaled: biography, discography, reviews, links
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