Rachid Taha

Joan Baez sang “where have all the flowers gone?” back in 1964.  Forty years later, it’s more a case of “never mind the flowers, where have all the protest singers gone?”   In a time of unprecedented global chaos, conflict and anger it seems that rock’n’roll has abandoned its rebel stance, taken the king’s shilling and contented itself with dancing the corporate two-step.    No doubt there are voices of dissent out there, but you have to be either very hip or very persistent to know anything about them.   Come to think of it, who was protesting in ’91, except the Rolling Stones?  And who was there in ’82, except Robert Wyatt?   Maybe that whole rock rebel stance has been nothing more than a hollow gesture, ever since ‘Street Fighting Man’ slipped down the charts and John and Yoko got out of bed.  There was Crass I suppose and the Clash of course.  Yes, there will always be the Clash.  But before we all decide to slit our wrists or go down to Wall Mart to shop and forget, it might encourage us all to know that musical protest, not diatribe, but sincere self-questioning protest with soul, still lives and thrives in the strangest of places.

“I dreamed of singing about my own nightmares,” was Taha’s succinct answer to my question about the creative genesis of his new album ‘Tékitoi’.   For most of us, there are two types of nightmare, the introspective type, in which our inner loneliness and doubt suddenly become monstrously scary, and the external type, in which the potential dangers of the world haunt us to the marrow of our bones.  ‘Tékitoi’ deals with both types of nightmare.  Its lyrics dovetail the personal and the universal, with the gouging power of a hawk’s beak.   In the track ‘H’asbu-hum’, a title taken from a slogan meaning ‘Get rid of them’ which Taha spotted on a banner at a protest march in Algeria which he saw on TV, the people responsible for Taha’s outward nightmares are neatly listed, in Arabic of course.  Translated, the list goes something like ”Liars, thieves, people who humiliate others, murderers, oppressors, traitors, the envious, the corrupt, diggers, propagandists, destroyers, slave drivers, the lazy, the racists, the undecided, the ignorant, the preachers, the profiteers, the boasters, the dirty.”  He follows the list with the words ‘Get rid of them!   Bring them to account!”

If ‘Tékitoi’ comprised solely of such lists, mixed in with big boombastic words of vitriol and anger, then it wouldn’t really amount to much more than a kind of emotional enema, in the style of 1980s skinhead ‘Oi’ bands.  Thankfully, it’s so much more than that, because Taha has the courage, and even the humility, to confront the other type of nightmare, that’s to say, the dark quick sands of his inner self.  Even ‘Tékitoi’, the title of the album, a deft piece of French street lingo which translates as something like “Who the hell are you?”, has a troubled existentialist ring to it.  “The song is an attempt to explore the identity of the person in front of me,” explains Rachid. “In order for tolerance to have any hope of existing, you have know who you are, and you have to know who the person you’re dealing with is.   That’s what the song is about.”   It’s worth noting that these slices of angst are fried on a backing track that makes you think Cramps, Clash and North Africa simultaneously, without any visible joins in between.  The album then dances and moshes onwards, throwing up more questions than answers, coming back again and again to the bleak and dirty victory of experience over innocence, the wilful corruption of the world versus the desperate attempt of the individual to find some kind of goodness in their lives, the anger and frustration which Taha himself shares with the ‘ordinary’ man in the street all over the world.

Taha has long been recognised as a perceptive thinker and a courageous mental guerrillero, but what is really astounding is that he has always been fighting a war on two fronts.   His stand against the racism and bigotry of his adoptive France, so neatly expressed in anthems like ‘Voilà Voilà’, or the corruption of western governments and war-mongerers, has already been widely hailed and documented.  What it less appreciated, is Taha’s struggles with his own Arabic roots, with his inherited North African culture and especially with the age-old tendency to metaphorise musical or poetic discourse in the Arabic world.  Taha considers this metaphorical muzzling to be a product of a generalised puritanism and lack of democracy, which has always been the scourge of free thinkers form North African or the Middle East, like himself.   For any Arabic poet or musician, to abandon metaphor automatically means to shock.  “Metaphors are so dangerous,” Taha asserts.  “The problem with a metaphor is that it can usually only be understood by a minority, an educated elite.  But I want to communicate directly with the man on the street, even if that means talking in a brutal way sometimes.  Too many metaphors lead to war.”

It’s no surprise therefore that Taha has always been a master of the provocative gesture, the act that pulls no punches.  Famous early examples were his decision to call his first band ‘Carte de Séjour’, which means ‘Resident’s Permit’.   As a moniker for a bunch of young North African immigrants, singing in Arabic and French, this was as neat and succinct a piece of provocation as any. Then there was Carte de Séjour’s cover of ‘Douce France’, a wistful and nostalgic classic of the French chanson canon by Charles Trenet.  Think of Asian Dub Foundation doing a cover of ‘White Cliffs Of Dover’, back in the early ‘80s, and you might get a measure of its provocative value.  At the time, Taha also persuaded the renowned French minister of culture, Jack Laing, to distribute copies of ‘Douce France’ to every member of the French parliament.   A few years later, on the cover of ‘Olé Olé’, an album whose electronic approach revolutionised North African music, Taha died his hair beach blonde and sported Aryan blue contact lenses.  It was a visual v-sign to all the TV producers, Radio programmers and chicken-shit journalists who didn’t dare touch Taha because he was Algerian.  But it was also an attempt to rib the macho prejudices of North African manhood, to whom the very idea of homosexuality and gender bending, are a complete anathema.  Taha himself feels certain affinities with the gay underground “because minorities need to stick together” and has been seen serving drinks behind the bar of his favoured Parisian club ‘Pulp’, also popular with the city’s gay and lesbian community, on a regular basis.

The real joy of Taha is the unpredictability of his thoughts and opinions, and his refusal to conform to any rigid and reductive dogma.  In an interview, his answers surprise you constantly.  Talking about Epargnes sur Vologne, the idyllic little village in the eastern French province of Alsace, where his parents moved to in 1968 when they left their home near Oran in Algeria, Taha says “I felt like a rat in a cage, looking for an escape route.  But racism wasn’t really a problem because in a village like that, everyone hates each other anyway.  Real racism starts in the cities, when you’re older, and you can’t get a job or a flat or anything.”

Leaving and home and community for Lyons, and a crap job in a heating appliances factory, was a decisive journey for Taha, and a prerequisite for the kind of intellectual development he yearned for.  “Communitarianism is the worse possible thing,” he says with emphatic zeal.  “It’s the way wars start.  When I go out, I see the youth of the same neighbourhood and same origins sticking together.  I never wanted that to happen to me.  You have to be an adventurer.  Staying stuck in your own community comes down to laziness.  It’s conformism.  It’s great to spend time with your family but the best way to find freedom is to get the hell away from the family.  The alienation and racism of the Socialist Party in the 1980s caused young North Africans to retreat back into their community.  This breach was then exploited by the National Front and Le Pen.  Le Pen isn’t in power but his ideas are.  The self-proclaimed fundamentalist Imams and preachers also exploit the situation for their own ends.  This reinforces conservatism, laziness and nostalgia rather than curiosity, and a desire to look outwards and understand others.  Nostalgia is a kind of pathology.  I always want to move forward, and never retreat into nostalgia.”

This forward, outward and upward philosophy is at the core of Taha’s musical approach.  Even though he was born in Oran, and raised in the nearby town of Sig, Taha has always felt either bored or alienated by the excessive nostalgia and barely disguised tendency to ape Julio Iglesias in the pop-rai music of Khaled, Mami et al.  In Lyons he started a club for all the people who weren’t allowed into the city’s more established nightspots, called ‘Les Refoulés’, which means ‘The Rejects’ or ‘The Frustrated’.  There he would spin everything from Oum Kalthoum to Kraftwerk, and spend many absorbing hours creating little samples of Arabic or rock music to run over beats stolen from some other sources.  During the day I spent with him recently, Taha made allusion to an impressive list of musical heroes and influences, thereby hinting at a deep musical curiosity and open-mindedness.  These included Led Zeppelin, The Clash, The New York Dolls and Johnny Thunders, The Who, Bo Diddley, Neil Young, Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, Giorgio Moroder, The Meters, Dr John, Suicide, Laurie Anderson, Farid El Atrache, M’hamed Hadj El Anka, Nass El Ghiwane and Leo Ferré.  “My music is like a Pakistani corner shop,” Taha is fond of saying.  “You can find everything in there.”

The Clash were an especially big influence, mirroring as they did Taha’s taste for revolt and spectacle.  Taha went to see the band at The Mogador in Paris in 1982.  He met up with them for a brief couple of minutes before the gig and handed over a tape of Carte de Séjour.  Although he never heard from them again, Taha maintains that it’s possible that Joe Strummer had Carte de Séjour and Taha in mind when he wrote ‘Rock The Casbah’.  Taha’s cover of the song on the new album, which he sings in Arabic and has cheekily renamed ‘Rock El Casbah’, is a tribute to Strummer.  “I liked his sincerity and maladroit humour,” he says.  “He wasn’t part of that cynical punk thing.  The song is very ironic, maybe even racist.  It’s seems to be a parody of the west’s view of the Arabic world as an oil pump and nothing more, completely devoid of culture.  It was that attitude that lead to the Baghdad museum being sacked whilst troops guarded the oil ministry last year.”

Unlike many other musicians of Algerian origin, who get all excited by the idea of working with a long string of “trophy” producers at the behest of their record companies, Taha has sustained a remarkable 22-year long bond of creativity and friendship with the English producer Steve Hillage, a man whose love of North African and Arabic music was already well advanced by the end of the 1970s.   Hillage heard Carte de Séjour by chance when he was visiting the offices of Virgin France in Paris sometime in the early eighties.  He ended up producing the first Carte de Sejour album.  Since then, on albums like ‘Olé Olé’, ‘Diwan’ and ‘Made in Medina’, Hillage and Taha have effectively rewritten the instruction manuals for North African music, by approaching it with an unabashed spirit of modernity and excellence.  On ‘Tékitoi’ their collaboration scales new peaks, forging a totally original sound with Arabic melodies sparring against rock riffs and north African percussion skirmishing with deftly programmed rhythms and sequences, all crowned with Taha’s ruff neck and percussive Arabic vocal, which are close in style and texture to the voices of the cheikhs, or male singers of rural roots rai.  “Rachid has always had a very consistent vision of where he wants to go musically,” says Hillage.  “I remember visiting him in his dressing room after a Carte de Séjour gig in Lyons in 1982.  He put on a tape of the famous Algerian chaabi singer M’hamed Hadj El Anka and said, “Hey, listen to this.  C’est le blues!”  The rock element in the last album, ‘Made in Medina’ was a little bit retro.  We’ve evolved and our technique is more advanced on ‘Tékitoi’”

The fusion on ‘Tékitoi’ is sometimes so perfect that it makes a mockery of the word ‘fusion’.   On final analysis, it’s just a superb rock album, spiced with a world of flavours, with lyrics in Arabic.  If that’s just too hard for blinkered editors and radio programmers to accept, then they need to get out more.  It’s also a very dark angry album, a raw and gutsy reflection of a world that’s “going head-on into a brick wall” to use Taha’s own words.  Sometimes the gloom of the lyrics is so pervasive that it’s hard to imagine how Taha gets out of bed in the morning. “When I have black moments, I try to say to myself that black is a colour, despite everything, and that the colour black is made up of all the other colours.  Black is almost like the curtain which hides the window.  But life is seductive.  You have to seduce and be seduced.  It’s all about loving life, and all that’s around you.  You must never be blasé or bitter.  That’s the worse possible thing.  After that comes death.”  “And is there anything you’re still yearning to do before you depart this life, “ I ask, “like jump out of a plane with a parachute or something like that.  “No, that’s not it,” Taha retorts.  “It’s jumping from a plane WITHOUT a parachute.”

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2009
First published in Songlines – Dec 2009

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Rachid with Damon Albarn and friends, Africa Express 2009. Photograph by Simon Phipps.

My gaze glues itself to one of today’s most eccentric rock’n’roll rebels as he stalks the stage in front of the flirtatiously grand Mairie de Paris like a demented scarecrow, a defrocked undertaker, a panto miscreant of the kind that haunts young children’s dreams.  Rachid Taha is probably the most recognizable person on that bursting stage in the collective eye of the 18,000 strong French crowd, who are both tired and ecstatic after a six hour orgy of African and western musical coupling under the hot Parisian sun.

“Weeee don’t laaahhk it!!!! ROCK DA CASBAH!  ROCK DA CASBAH!!!”   Taha’s voice whines atop the rousing racket like the white spume on a towering wave, which teeters and totters but somehow manages not to crash.  Pork pie hatted Damon Albarn leads the charge together with Rachid.  Behind them storm a mob-happy crowd of musicians, all rat-arsed on the 90 per cent proof joyousness of the moment.  I can see Jamie T, Romeo and Michele from the Magic Numbers, the Kooks, Patrick Wolf, The Kick Horns, too many to register in those incalculable seconds of unity.  Africa Express, Rachid et Damon, you, me, white, black, Africa, Europe, roots, pop, rock’n’roll, altogether now…”ROCK THE CASBAH!!”

A few sobering months later, I’m on the blower to Rachid as he sits in the offices of his record label in Paris early on a cold blue-eyed September afternoon, a head tightening hour for a nocturnal incubus like Taha, who grudgingly goes through the motions of yet another promotional stint for his new album ‘Bonjour’.   So hey, let’s warm the conversation up over the flame of those sweet memories of the Africa Express gig in Paris.

“I don’t think Africa Express had much impact you know,” comes the cold shower. “It was a sort of Rotary Club gathering, but it didn’t go far. In fact, to begin with, what is Africa Express?  What’s it for?”

Erm…to promote African music to a wider audience. Come on, Rachid, mate, you can go along with that can’t you?

“Well it isn’t the case at all pal!”  My skin turns a chicken texture.  “Nothing’s really changed.  I don’t see many African artists making it in France right now, or Arabic ones.  We’re still in the era of the West and America holding on to their role as the arbiters of pop music, of Africa and everything else, even the economy and life itself.  Africa is just left to die, just as African culture is just left to die too.”

I should have known better.   Rachid Taha has never gone in for cosy certainties or hippy-hugging harmony.   He lives, he fights, he stumbles and burns bridges for breakfast, all according to Dylan’s famous dictum: To live outside the law you must be honest.  And Rachid is the embodiment, a strange growling Franco-Algerian Stetson-wearing rock’n’roll animal embodiment, of the outlaw archetype.

Journalists with only a shallow knowledge of Franco-Algerian complexities are prone to misunderstand Taha.  They call him a rai artist, alluding to the grinning Algerian pop music style that has dominated the North African Diaspora for three decades.  It’s a bit like calling Iggy Pop a New Romantic.   The misclassification used to irk Taha but not any more apparently.  “I couldn’t give a toss, I’m beyond that now,” he says.

They miscast Rachid as a defender and proselytiser of Algerian and North African culture.  In fact, a bit like John Wayne in the desperate low-point of a John Ford western, Taha is an intellectual loner firing his Winchester at smug hypocrisy and half-baked platitudes on all sides.  He despairs of most of his fellow North African artists, regarding them as little more than the lazy pilferers of a great musical tradition.   He insists that the likes of Khaled, Mami, Faudel and other pin-ups of the Maghreb make him feel sad rather than angry.

“There’s no infrastructure in North Africa equivalent to the one in the west,” he explains. “Over there, you don’t record a cassette, you just fill it up.   Singers are still considered buffoons.  There’s no real intellectual or cultural interest in what they do, so they’re content to just sing for important personages and nothing more.  And when they become stars, they bourgeoisify themselves very quickly.”

Taha went back to Algeria, a country which he left with this parents at the age of ten to go and live in a hick village in eastern France, for a series of concerts back in 2006.  It was a dispiriting experience.  “We did about six dates,” he remembers reluctantly.  “They were in French cultural centres yet again.  It’s always frustrating to play in places like Algeria.  I always come back dissatisfied with a suitcase full of pain.  Either it’s all very intellectual and bourgeois, or you go popular and play in stadiums.  Or it’s nothing at all, except weddings perhaps.  But can you see me playing at barmitzvahs and weddings?”

You might have expected all these brain-burning struggles and disillusionments to turn Taha into a moody cynical man.  But the opposite is true.  He protects himself by staying on the eternal offensive, shooting from the hip with little regard for the consequences and remaining determinedly in lust with life.

Back in the late 1970s, when Taha was in his early twenties and working in a heating appliance factory in a suburb of Lyon, he started a club called ‘Les Refoulés’ (‘The Rejects’) where he would splice bits of Oum Khalthoum and other Aarbic pop classics onto Led Zeppelin, Bo Diddley and Kraftwerk backbeats.  His first serious group, ‘Carte de Sejour’ (‘Resident’s Permit’) was a kind of Maghreb-punk shock machine who stuck it to the French Man with a remake of Charles Trenet’s classic ‘Douce France’.  Imagine Asian Dub Foundation gobbing out ‘White Cliffs of Dover’ in the early 1980s and you should get the feel of Taha’s talent for upsetting cosy collective sanctities.

Then came hits like ‘Voilà Voilà’, a flame-fisted techno-rant against the rise of the extreme right in France, and Taha’s rocking cover of ‘Ya Rayah’, a classic elegy on emigration written by the great Dahmane El Harrachi.  Taha’s version remains one of the most popular hits of modern North African music.   Both these songs, and a clutch of revolutionary albums, were the product of Taha’s twenty-two year association with the British producer Steve Hillage, a marriage that recently broke up when Taha decided to work with Gaetan Roussell, a close friend and lead singer of the massive French rock band Louise Attaque.

“You have to leave home at some point, you have to kill your daddy,” Rachid says about the breakup.  “I can thank that relationship for where I am today, but to be honest, I was totally fed up.  I think of Steve from time to time, and maybe I’ll go back to him one day, but I don’t look back.  Nostalgia is not for me.”

But where exactly is Rachid Taha today?   With the success of ‘Voilà Voilà’, ‘Ya Rayah’, and his participation alongside fellow Khaled and Faudel in the epic ‘1-2-3 Soleil’ concert at the Bercy stadium in Paris, which yielded a million-selling live album, Rachid was definitely a big star in France in the 1990s.  But he never bothered to capitalise on that status.  Commercial strategies and speculations are just bore him frigid.  When I ask Taha about the collapsing recorded music industry in France he just quips, “hang on, I’ll pass you my Financial Director and you can talk to him.”  Ok, ‘nuff said.

The truth is, Rachid Taha is on the same solitary road that he’s always walked. ‘Bonjour’ is an optimistic album, with songs of love, respect, hope and yes, a little anger too, riding astride his signature pounding rockabilly beats and Bo Diddley stomps, all meshed together with swirling Arabic riffs and motifs.  One remarkable song called ‘Selu’, exhorts all of us, and no doubt Taha himself, to “consult the angels”, who he then proceeds to list:  Khalil Gibrain, Mohammed Darwish, Naib Mahfouz, Cheikh Hamada, Youssef Chahine, Blond Blond, Kateb Yacine, Frantz Fanon and Camaron de la Isla.

I ask Rachid about Camarón, the doomed poet-hero of Spanish Flamenco.  “He was the greatest singer of all time, alongside Elvis Presley,” answers Rachid.  “He was also the last punk.”   I almost say, “except you Rachid, except you,” but my skin is still feeling like cold chicken so I just keep schtumm.  We can’t all be honest outlaws.

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2009
First published in The Independent – Nov 2009

The post RACHID TAHA – The Last Punk? appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.