refrains of rai
Derek Walmsley
It's hard to resist an album called 1970's Algerian
Proto-Rai Underground. You've got the promise of some strange
prototype of unheard urban music; the North African connection,
only a decade and a bit after Algeria emerged from French rule;
plus, the idea of pop operating through underground channels, which
sounds a contradiction in terms for Westerners, but is less
improbable in the Middle East and North Africa (I'm reminded of the
electronica underground in Iran, for instance).
The music is almost as exciting as the title. One refrain on the
album is particularly familiar to fans of 90s rave, with one track
using a version of the "We are IE" vocal, which found
its way, twisted via rave speak, onto Lenny De Ice's proto-jungle
classic "We Are E". I'm not sure what the vocal is – it's
found across a lot of Rai music, with what sounds like the same
lyrics and the same melody. Whatever, the refrain is certainly
spine-chilling, and so memorable that the dancehall/urban/mixadelic
website weareie, who curate the
excellent Blogariddims series, grabbed it for their name (which
puns on the Irish connection of the people who do the site).
The audio meme of this vocal secretly linking rai and rave sent me
on a frenzy of googling and downloading, trying to figure out other
versions of the refrain. I eventually remembered Cheb Mami had done
a particularly good track which had it in; a pop song which is like
an excerpt from My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts, with
the kind of eerie vocal that graced "Boat Woman Song" from Holger
Czukay's Canaxis.
Maybe it's the one Lenny De Ice sampled, but in any case, the track
is mindboggling in its own right. The time signatures are so fluid
I can't follow them at all, and yet it's entirely second nature to
Cheb Mami himself. Some amazing fusions happened when francophone
African musicians had to figure out what they were doing on the fly
in Parisian recording studios; Cheb Mami's stuff is some of the
best I've heard. It's instantly resonant, but complex and elusive
too... much like that vocal refrain itself.
It's well worth checking out - and stands its own next to almost
any other tune from anywhere on the planet. Cheb
Mami- "Douni El Bladi" [RE-UPPED 24/10/08)
Tags: Uncategorized