It's somewhat ironic that the title of Rachid Taha's fourth solo studio album is a question. It's a phonetic transliteration of the French "Te qui toi?"-- "Who Are You?"-- and though Taha spends a couple of songs on the record asking questions, he spends a lot more of it in the imperative. There are more exclamation points in the trilingual transcriptions of the lyrics than a 15-year-old girl's yearbook, and you couldn't call the music anything but urgent. Even when he is asking questions, as on the opening title track, he's spitting them out in a gritty, pungent attack, though it's worth noting that part of his guttural approach comes from the fact that he's a native Arabic speaker, as it's a very guttural language with lots of action in the back of the throat.
Taha's politics and his music are the same thing, reflecting his multinational/nationless background, a story that began in Oran, Algeria and moved on to France when he was 10 years old. Taha has spoken in interviews of being a "permanent immigrant," French and yet Algerian, a part of both cultures and yet not quite integrated with either. His music reflects both identities in its embrace of Western styles like punk, house, and electro, viewed through the prism of Algerian rai. The union makes perfect sense-- rai is both Algeria's punk music and its signature dance music. It's the kind of stuff that proves the limitations and biases of a term like World music; this is where Taha's records are inevitably filed, owing to...what? The Egyptian strings that wind their way through most of the songs, perhaps? Because he sings in French and Arabic and occasionally in Berber? Honestly, it's sad that our marketplace can't just accept it on its own terms and recognize the global pop music world for the continuum that it is.
For Tékitoi, Taha and longtime producer Steve Hillage have captured a massive sound stuffed with crunching guitars, swirling strings and colossal beats that's guaranteed to go over well with anyone who liked his past work North African percussion and a guitar-like instrument called a mandolute also feature prominently in the mix amongst the programming and distortion, giving the music a layered, expansive texture that freely mixes the organic with the artificial. The mandolute has an awesome timbre, dry like the desert that bore it, with a loose-stringed edge similar to an oud.
When the world is your sonic playground, you're bound to come up with some interesting stuff, and Taha doesn't disappoint. "H'Asbu-Hum (Ask Them for an Explanation)" finds hints of French musette rising up through the bumping Algerian beats, the Brian Eno collaboration "Dima (Always)" is full of skitterign drum programing and aslow, darkly luxurious string arrangement, and "Meftuh (Open)" splits open a conservative rai arrangement with slamming drums and blasting electric guitar. "My heart and yours are wounded/ the doors to prosperity are still open!" he shouts in Arabic on "Meftuh," mixing hope for the future with a curt acknowledgment that the past is full of pain and wrong.
As great as most of the songs are, though, there's an elephant in the tracklist that's impossible to ignore. It's called "Rock el Casbah," and it's a very faithful cover of the Clash's "Rock the Casbah," with the verses translated into Arabic and Egyptian strings fluttering in the wings. If that were the whole story, it'd be an interesting cover and little else, but Taha's history adds another layer, namely that his original band, a France-based punk group called Carte de Sejour that incorporated elements of rai into its sound was concurrent with the Clash and may have actually been the inspiration for the original "Rock the Casbah". Taha himself passed the Clash a tape of Carte de Sejour while they were touring France, and less than a year later found himself listening to a very familiar sound coming from the radio in the form of "Rock the Casbah". It's possible to view "Rock el Casbah" as a reclamation as much as a cover, and listening back, it's quite striking how well-suited Joe Strummer's odd, throaty voice actually would have been to rai.
Early pressings of Tékitoi include a DVD featuring a 43-minute documentary called Kienes (it does the same for Spanish that the album title does for French) that rather loosely chronicles Taha's tour of Mexico, where he and his band play everywhere from what looks like a small-town fair to a posh theater where the audience looks ridiculous sitting down for such intensely kinetic music. It's actually better for the interview clips than the live clips, though, as Taha plays with journalists, asking them to define their lazy terminology (the scene where he asks a reporter to define the Third World is especially telling) and explaining that he's really a contemporary of the Clash and not a follower. For its part, the album scarcely needs any extras to make it worthwhile, and it's a perfect exemplar of pop's progressive globalism, bashing down barriers that governments have barely begun to tackle.
