RACHID TAHA

Some strange mutation in the Taha gene over forty-six years ago created a phenomenon as rare as an albino tiger; a musician of Arabic origin with the courage, intelligence and insight to speak the truth as he sees it, loud and direct, without the softening comforts of metaphor, parable or nostalgia. Or perhaps this uniqueness can be put down to the simple fact that music hit Taha, and vice versa, in the first few years of the 1980s, a period when rock’n’roll still meant rebellion rather than dollars, and when young North African immigrants and sons of immigrants living in France were beginning to shake off decades of timidity with their very own equivalent of America’s Black Pride movement.

Tékitoi

• Rachid Taha
• WRASS 126
• Harmonia Mundi

“I dreamed of singing my nightmares,” says Taha. The apocalyptic vision of a society careering into a wall was the impetus for a marathon of questioning; his motives, other people’s motives, the dirty victory of experience over innocence, the root causes of the virulent anger and chaos that grips our world. "Tékitoi" is Taha’s most thought provoking and yet fascinating album to date. And in the midst of it all there’s "Rock El Casbah", an homage to the late great Joe Strummer, a man whose unvarnished honesty and lack of text-book punk cynicism made him hero, to Taha and to many others.