Today, the most familiar Arab pop style in the West is rai (the word means "opinion," "point of view" or "way of seeing"), which by the late 1980’s had grabbed young Maghrebian club-goers in much the same way rock-and-roll hooked teenagers in the 1950’s. Although Algerian in its origins, rai spread quickly across the Arab world to North African immigrants in Europe and on to non-Arab audiences beyond. Its combination of up-tempo exuberance and gritty verité touched young audiences at their core. Says Khaled, an Algerian singer who has given the music its most electrifying shot, "In rai, you sing your true feelings. The lyrics come straight from your life, from your heart. It’s about real life, not life as it’s supposed to be." But it wasn’t that that pulled the non-Arabic-speaking West to rai—it was the explosive dance beats that feel at home in clubs anywhere in the world.
The roots of rai actually predate its international popularity by nearly 50 years: It developed largely in sailor hangouts in the Algerian port of Oran. There, lyric singers like Chaikha Rimitti and Chaikh Hamada earned their honorifics (shaykh and shaykha mean, approximately, "leader") and melded Spanish, Egyptian, and Oran’s own urban sounds with rural Algerian elements to create a genre with both commercial and artistic appeal. In the early 1970’s, rai became more youth-oriented, and the singers began to be known as cheba and cheb ("kid"), which helped them cultivate a rebellious, generation-specific image.
Instrumentally, it was in the 1950’s that electric guitars, trumpets, and organs joined the band, raising the tradi-tional Algerian string orchestra’s volume through the nightclub roof. Then western rock-and-roll arrived, and the Tlemcen-born brothers Rachid and Fethi Baba Ahmed, early veterans of western rock bands, galvanized rai with synthesizers, drum machines, and fresh lyrics that by the late 1970’s had put the form on the road to global popularity.
"Pop-rai," as the electric style is called, has since spawned its own stars. Oran-born Khaled, known as the "King of Rai," continues to rule rai’s roost. Since his first hit at age 16, Khaled has both charm-ed and challenged Arab audiences and trendy club-goers worldwide. In 1991 he teamed up with Los Angeles producer Don Was to bring out Khaled, an album full of the headlong happiness that is his signature style. On subsequent record-ings, such as 1997’s Sahra and this year’s Kenza, named for his daughter, Khaled has delivered a lively mix of new songs and fresh treatments of traditional rai standards.
Saida-born Cheb Mami—known early in his career as the "Prince of Rai"—has taken the genre farthest from its North African roots. He has mixed rai and rap, made extensive use of special effects and vocal sampling, and recently came to the atten-tion of mainstream pop in his duet with Sting, "Desert Rose."
Rai continues to find favor with a new genera-tion of artists and audience members. Faudel, a rising young star born in France but whose family hails from Tlemcen, exemplifies rai’s cross-cultural resiliency, and his winning personality and success on the European charts lead many observers to tap him as the future of rai on the continent. Still, the husky-voiced Cheba Zahouania and local Oran favorite Houari Ben-chenat, both of whom first came to prominence in the early 1980’s, prove that veterans of the rai scene have considerable staying power, and that you need not be in your teens or 20’s to sing up-to-the-minute lyrics.
Although not strictly a rai artist, Rachid Taha is another Algerian singer with a strong presence in the world music record bins. The 1999 live recording 1,2,3 Soleils, which grouped Taha with Khaled and Faudel, racked up tremendous sales in the Arab world and beyond, while his remake of "Ya Rayah," first recorded nearly a half-century ago by legendary Algiers artist Dahmane El Harrachi— who has exerted a considerable influence on Rachid Taha’s vocal style—is heard regularly on radio and TV stations from Rabat to Riyadh.
A different pop style with an equally strong, easy appeal to westerners comes from Sudan and that Nubian heartland that reaches north into Egypt. Sudanese pop incorporates a myriad of styles from the Horn of Africa, from the lilting vocals of Swahili wedding music to the urgent work songs of Afar salt diggers, and it relies more on simple tribal dance rhythms than on the elaborate orchestrations of rai. Multiple handclap and drumbeats underpin solo melodies that are often part of an earthy call and response in the chorus.
The result is a felicitous middle ground between the traditional and the contemporary. Band leaders Abdel Aziz Mubarek, Abdel Gadir Salim, and Ali Hassan Kuban (an Egyptian Nubian) nimbly mix Arab-scaled western instruments like violin, guitar and accordion with dominant lines on the traditional Arab 'ud and densely layered percussion.
Unlike much of the sugary, teeny-bop pop of the post-Umm Kalthum era in Egypt, Sudanese music is neither overly electrified nor tricked-up with studio gimmicks. Singers enunciate their words in unhurried cadences. Lyrics are celebratory, nostalgic, and humorous. Bandleader Salim’s breakthrough hit "Umri Ma Bansa" ("I’ll Never Forget [Her]," released in the West in 1990) recounts an event of great local import: the first visit of a Bedford lorry to Kordofan Province. This Salim made into a metaphor for his beloved, ending with the double-entendre, "You drove me insane!"
One Egyptian to break at least partly out of the teenybopper mold is ‘Amr Diab, torch-bearer of al-jeel ("the generation") music, an electrified, up-tempo style dating from the late 1970’s and aimed at the country’s new class of young, well-educated urbanites. Diab also works outside his tradition, having recorded with Khaled, a Spanish flamenco group, and Greek singer Angela Dimitriu. Says Stanley Rashid, "Jeel has very sophisticated tempos, and Diab knows how to show them off. My hunch is he will be the first Arab singer to make it big here."

-From Aramco World, March/April 2000

Louis Werner is a film maker who lives in New York. His favorite Arab pop style is almost extinct: the nightclub orchestras that once enlivened Cairo's Tawfiqiyya district. A taste of that sound was preserved in 1991 on "The Music of Mohamed Abdel Wahab" by Simon Shaheen on the Axiom Label.

Click here to visit our music pages.

Back to Current Culture