Rachid Taha

1958-2018

by Amaya García

In 2004, with the release of his sixth solo album, Rachid Taha asked himself the question that had been following him his whole life and musical career: “Tékitoi?” It’s an Algerian-French street slang term which, in the context of the album, roughly translates to “Who do you think you are?”

Throughout more than two decades in the spotlight, the groundbreaking Algerian-French singer had tried to address this question in a myriad of ways; from his mischievous answers to international interviewers, to his activism and advocacy for the North African community and other oppressed minorities in France. Taha also tried to answer it through the instrumentation choices he made in his music, and the Algerian standards he chose to reinterpret in his own chaabi-meets-punk rock style. He made Tékitoi the title of both his album and its opening track, and in his signature whiskey-soaked growl he threw the question back at his audience: “Who are you, you? Who are you, me?” he sang. “But you, who are you? What are you?”

In some of his most eloquent interviews during the Tékitoi era, he described his music as a “Pakistani corner shop,” where you can find absolutely everything. When he was asked to directly explain who he was, he wittily referred to himself as mandolute – a hybrid of a traditional oud and a European fretted instrument, such as a guitar. "It reminds me where I come from and where I’m going,” he explained to The Telegraph at the time. “I always say that I read French from right to left and Arabic from left to right." It was his way of saying that his music, his style, his lyrics and possibly his sense of self were the product of a centuries-old culture that’s built on fusion and migration. It is also the product of French colonization, war and exile; the direct consequence of a nostalgia for his homeland of Algeria and the urgent need to look critically at said nostalgia, and run away from it, as far as he could, so that he could launch himself into the future.

The son of Algerian immigrants who moved to a small village in the region of Alsace in France when he was a teenager, Taha came of age in a country with an increasingly hostile attitude towards the presence of North African immigrants. That was thanks in part to politicians like Jean-Marie Le Pen and his Front National party, who were proselytizing xenophobic ideas. His experience of the perpetual in-betweenness that shapes children of migrants had its drawbacks, but it became the primary tool of his trade, and the fuel for his fighting stance. A factory worker by day, he found his refuge and his raison d’etre in music – an arena where he had the power to create and recreate himself as he pleased; to explore what the intersection between an Algerian and a French identity might look like, and to laugh in the face of those who dared reduce him to a passport or a tiny box on the Census. During the night, he revelled in the melange, creating a club night for those in the North African community who felt like him, who refused to conform to a parochial life, and who were also stuck in the in-between. He called the club night Les Refoulés (“The Rejects”), and as the DJ, he played everything from Kraftwerk to blues and rock, and spliced it with samples of Oum Kalthoum and other music from the Maghreb and the Arab world.

His time running Les Refoulés fueled Taha’s perpetual hunger to challenge definitions based on racial and national lines, and to question the structures that perpetuated racism, inequality and poverty, specifically for North African immigrants. The first time he pondered this question publicly was in 1986, with his first band Carte de Sejour (which translates to “Residency Permit”). The band, formed by five North African men, turned the classic French chanson “Douce France” (a symbol of nationalist nostalgia, sung by Charles Trenet) into a new-wave-meets-surf-rock jam. At the time, it was seen as a clever, confrontational and obnoxious statement about the hypocrisy of French society. For the country’s nationalists, it landed like a brick through a window. After the song reached the French parliament via the hands of the then Culture minister Jack Lang (who, it is said, had been persuaded by Taha to distribute it), it put the band dead center in the debate about French identity. Enraging the intolerant and the xenophobic became one of Taha’s crowning achievements with Carte de Sejour.

In his search for what it meant to be a French-Algerian musician, Taha made it a point to loudly and provocatively challenge the powerful status quo present in both of his cultures. His critiques came in somewhat calculated spurts; they were multidimensional, and full of very human contradictions. On his second album, 1995’s Olé Olé, he mocked both extreme ideals of masculinity and the fetishization of whiteness, appearing as a blonde, blue-eyed pop star on the cover. Olé Olé also blurred genre lines, veering towards an introspective pop that mixed everything from rock and raï (an Algerian pop music that combines traditional instrumentation and melodies with electronic instruments), to balladeering and even jungle. He revered and covered raï and chaabi masters in his critically acclaimed albums Diwan and Diwan 2, and in the same breath distanced himself from raï contemporaries like Khaled and Cheb Mami. He considered them too complacent, too smiley, and not challenging enough of the anti-democratic governments that he believed were hindering the Arab world’s progress and the freedom of its citizens.

He tried to rid himself of the raï label (he claimed his true influence was the street-style chaabi), but begrudgingly became one of its most recognized figures. He was a populist who liked to speak to his audience in a direct manner, considering metaphors the dangerous language of the elite. He was also a welcoming, Parisian bohemian who went out every night, sometimes served drinks at the famous gay and lesbian club Le Pulp, and counted as friends celebrities and philosophers alike. He participated in Damon Albarn’s effort to shine a light on African talent, Africa Express, and later denounced it as useless. A shit-stirrer, a rebel with a cause, a true punk; he was all things to all people. Yet, addressing who he was head on became imperative to his fight against the rot in the world.

“[‘Tékitoi?’] is an attempt to explore the identity of the person in front of me,” explained Taha in a 2009 interview with Songlines. “In order for tolerance to have any hope of existing, you have to know who you are, and you have to know who the person you’re dealing with is.” Tékitoi was released during the Iraq war, and at the height of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiment around the world. For Taha, it became even more imperative to listen intently to the ill-intentions of the politicians that were proponents of the war – George W. Bush, Tony Blair and Silvio Berlusconi – and to try to dismantle their reasoning and to expose them as an opportunist, power-hungry pack hell bent on destroying any semblance of peace the world had left. He shared the same disdain for the leaders of the Middle Eastern world, and he used his music and his access to the press to take them to task and call the masses to arms, to demand accountability from their leaders. The most famous example of this is “H'asbu-Hum!” (“Ask Them For An Explanation!”); a song that features Taha at his angriest, shouting over combative, Arabic percussion and heavy, punk guitars. The track contains – per a translation – a list of enemies that needed to be fought: “Liars, thieves, humiliators, killers, oppressors, traitors, the envious, the rotters, the diggers, propagandists, destroyers, humiliators, slavers, the lazy / Get rid of them! Ask them for an explanation!”

It’s no secret that, throughout his career, and specifically during the making of Tékitoi, Taha modeled his combative style after Joe Strummer and The Clash’s philosophical take on music and life. One of his favorite stories to tell the press about the Carte de Sejour era was the fateful night in 1981 when he put the band’s cassette into the hands of The Clash, who were in Paris to play a residency at the Theatre Mogador. As history tells it, everybody who became important in the Parisian music scene witnessed the show. But, while unsubstantiated, only Taha could claim to have had as much influence on the band as they had on him. A year after the meeting, The Clash released “Rock the Casbah,” and it immediately became a hit. The song itself is problematic, with its stereotypical visions of the Arab world – the minarets, oil-crazy sheiks rolling around the desert in luxury cars, ruthless dictators – and, eventually, even The Clash stopped playing it. But it’s undeniable that “Rock the Casbah” sounded a little bit like Carte de Sejour, and could’ve even been on one of their albums. After Strummer’s death in 2002, Taha decided to cover the track and place it on Tékitoi, in honor of Strummer and The Clash’s spirit.

What happened next was extraordinary. Not content with releasing a mere cover, Taha had the song translated into Algerian Arabic, word for word, by a professor of Oriental Languages. He effectively recontextualized the song forever, absorbing it into his own critique, not only of the state of the Arab world, but of his place in French society, his otherness and his personal war against oppression. Prominently featuring a mixture of Arabesque strings, the jangly sounds of the mandolute, and Taha’s visceral growl, “Rock El Casbah” became the most recognized track in Taha’s career. He effectively snatched it away from The Clash (with their blessing) and, in true punk fashion, subverted its power. Unwittingly, it became a declaration of everything Taha was: an Algerian, a European, a French man, an immigrant, an activist, a flamboyant provocateur. He was a rock star who shunned purism and created music that was as borderless and as hybrid as he was. For that, Rachid Taha will remain a timeless icon.


Illustration: André Gottschalk

One Last Note...

A celebration of important music figures we lost in 2018

“I read French from right to left and Arabic from left to right.”

Rachid Taha