cover(ed): rachid taha and outlandish

All this youtube blogging: apologies. We'll get back to texts of the more usual sort soon, I promise. But I was talking to a friend this past weekend about cover versions, and this pairing came to mind. I like covers for much the same reason I like to read poetry in both the original and in (good) translation--the space for re-encountering and re-imagining the familiar. Nazim in Turkish and Nazim in English are different facets of the same poetic sensibility, each revealing. And Nazim in Urdu (he got there via Faiz, who translated him from something else--and then Agha Shahid Ali put the Urdu back into English) is yet another refraction, if one I can only grasp through the graceful syllables of a friend's recitation.

So, two songs, similarly translated and hence transformed. The first, "Rock the Casbah", is surely familiar already: here's video of the original version by the Clash, complete with armadillo. They apparently wrote the song in vague reference to Ayatollah Khomeini's ban on pop music--although the lyrics suggest a Arab/North African context--telling of a ruler who hates the rock'n'roll played down in the casbah, and sends his fighter jets to destroy the music-makers, in vain. The song was a hit in 1982, but it experienced a rather ugly resurgence in 1990, when it became--perhaps because of the line about dropping "bombs between the minarets"--an anthem for US forces in the first Gulf War. I'm told it was the first song played on Armed Forces Radio when the bombing of Iraq began (to the distaste of the Clash, I should add, who intended no such thing). So the original tune had, in a sense, been subverted once already when the French-Algerian punk/raï singer Rachid Taha came along. He took "Rock the Casbah" and translated it into Arabic, (re)claiming it as an rebellious snarl at both American military aggression and political Islamism--spat back in Taha's wonderful growly voice, as "Rock el Casbah":



Like Taha, the raï superstar (Cheb) Khaled is Algerian by birth, but has lived and performed in France, where he has a massive following, and sings in both French and Arabic. His 1996 hit Aïcha will probably ring a bell even if you don't listen to raï; the lyrics are primarily in French (although the version I've linked to has some Arabic). I've loved this song for years--it still makes me think of an Italian restaurant in Edgware Road and a particular pair of eyebrows--but these days, the version I hear most often is by the Denmark-based group Outlandish. A couple of years ago, Outlandish rendered Aicha into a rather unusual (when was the last time you saw a positive image--or any image--of hijabi women in a music video?) tribute to the women in their lives. The lyrics, now in English (save for a single line of French, a nod-and-wink to the original) are not actually a translation of Khaled's version, but instead something at once familiar and entirely new:



A word about Outlandish. Isam Bachiri Azouaoui, Waqas Ali Qadri, and Lenny Martinez grew up in the same Copenhagen neighborhood, children of immigrants from Morocco, Pakistan, and Honduras, respectively. Two are Muslim, one Catholic, but all devout--and faith is a key theme in their music, R&B/hiphop/pop sung in a blend of English, Danish, Arabic, and Urdu. They refer to each other as 'el moro'--as in, "I got all my moros in here." Outlandish songs are frequently political, taking on issues like migration, war, and social justice, as present in the lives and imaginations of young European Muslims in particular. ("Look Into My Eyes", for example, sounds like something you'd hear all over MTV--until you listen a little more closely to the lyrics, based on a poem by a Palestinian teenage girl, and realize they're admonishing American taxpayers for supporting the Israeli occupation. I doubt the video is going to be on Total Request Live anytime soon.)

A couple months ago, Teju sent an email from Brussels about overhearing a shopkeeper's greeting, in which "Comment ça va?" was met with the reply "Alhamdulillah." "I don't know what to call this argot yet," he wrote, "but I think "European" might be a good name for it." (And just recently, thariel writes to me, full of delight at the mishmash of Arabic and French he hears in Morocco). I'm not quite what sure to call this music, these Moorish transmutations of punk and African-American sound--but I think "European" might be a good place to start.