A display of bravado during a youth festival in Algiers, home to some 100 rap groups.
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The Impossible attracts me,
because everything possible has been done and the world didn’t change.
Sun
Ra, U.S. free jazz musician (1914-1993)
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“Manipulation, aggression,
disappointment /
That’s what my lot is today / My only crime is to hope and to dream.” |
Taking aim at the war,
corruption and economic crisis, Algerian rappers have turned the kingdom of rai into
the Arab world’s most vibrant hip-hop scene
 “They’re
down there on Loubet / They’ve all got big houses / They’ve got the cheek to tell
us / ‘We live in a ghetto’ / He smokes foot-long joints / He’s pretty addicted /
He looks like a gangster / But he’s just scared / Of getting thrown in the slammer.”
The four members of the group Perfect G’s hammer the lines with “attitude”. Bordering
on involuntary self-parody, this send-up takes aim at the strew of other rappers
who hang out in the same neighbourhood of Oran as they do. None would look out of
place in the tough suburb of a French city or a lower-class district of New York,
with their pricey track-suits emblazoned with the logos of big sportswear firms,
the name of their group (Ol’ Dirty Shame, Killa Dox, Lord Squad, Black Eyes, The
Commission) and their stage names (Oddman, N.Fect, MC Ghosto, Flyman, Machine Gun,
Vex, Jigy, Baby, and so on).
The rappers of Oran, Algeria’s second largest city, are to be found in a downtown
area that has been the haunt of “cool” people for several decades. They sit on the
benches along the Avenue Larbi-Tébessi (formerly Avenue Loubet) or on the
steps of shuttered shops in Mohamed-Khémisti (once Alsace-Lorraine) Street,
because they can’t gather in the local cafés and tea-houses. It is in this
200-metre radius area that they gather to shoot the breeze in the late afternoon,
or whenever they take time off from their studies, their casual jobs or just from
doing nothing.
This western Algerian city is the birthplace of rai, and of one of its leading stars,
Khaled. But Oran’s rappers and disc-jockeys aren’t too keen about each other. “There’s
just copycats left in rai these days,” says H Rime, of the group MCLP. “Rai’s just
for having a laugh,” says Vex of the group Da Tox (Theory of Existence). Jealousy,
almost hatred, is in the air.
The rappers see the many rai singers as the main obstacle to their hitting the big
time with their provocative rants delivered at the speed of light to music that doesn’t
lose face to foreign rap:
“In the battle, Algeria’s there / With Oran guys rapping / They’ll get revenge /
They’ll settle their scores / Their heads are hot / As boiling water.”
Electronic rai has been going for 20 years now and its pioneers, all from very poor
families, are pushing on 40. Hip-hop became the rage about a decade ago, led by middle-class
performers. Today, it has spread around the country (neighbouring Morocco has only
a small hip-hop scene), turning Algeria into the rap leader of Arab nations and probably
of the entire Muslim world despite a meagre musical output (each album only sells
about 10,000 copies) considering the dizzying number of groups.
Oran had about 40 hip-hop groups in 1990. Today there are more than 60. Algiers had
60 last year and now has about 100. The capital has given birth to a wave that has
spared no city in the country. Groups recite their rhyming verses in a weird frenzied
language, switching from one tongue to another, then to a third and a fourth. In
a single sentence, French, English and the two forms of Arabic, literary and spoken,
are jumbled together. They invent a flexible, ironic, language with bold descriptive
power: “Tight-fitting hijeb [the Islamic headscarf]/See-through hijeb/Swimsuit hijeb/Flashy
hijeb/Multicoloured hijeb/Crumpled hijeb/Frisky hijeb bought on the Champs-Elysées/OK
hijeb/Malaysian hijeb/Removable hijeb/Air-conditioned hijeb.”
Every TV image finds its way into their lyrics: wars, the ozone layer, famine, fashion
models, films, contraceptives, soap operas, ads, hooligans. Everything is evoked
, compared and twisted to fit the rhyme. Then comes the real problem of finding a
proper recording studio.
Two famous groups in Algiers, MBS (Microphone Breaks the Silence) and Intik (“cool”
in Algerian slang) have already brought out their first CD in France, Algerap on
one of the big labels. Wahrap (an abbreviation of Wahran, which is Oran in Arabic,
plus the word rap), a compilation by several Oran groups, came out in June 2000.
The theme of the album is summed up by MCLP’s refrain: “We’re microphone fiends /
We’re telling you what we see / Whatever’s going on / Some people steal / Others
suffer.”
From a musical standpoint, the compilation is well above the first Algerian rap albums
that hit France. Nonetheless, from the outset, Algerian rap was well received in
France. Rappers met with sympathy for evoking the massacres and social ills afflicting
their country. But the genre is still struggling to establish itself: audiences in
France are more drawn to immigrant Algerian rappers such as Freeman and Imhotep,
of the Marseilles group IAM, Rimka of Collectif 113, and non-Algerians like Joey
Starr, of the duo NTM, who worked on the albums of MBS and Intik.
Last year, Algerian rappers only produced a dozen recordings on mediocre cassettes,
but today hip-hop products are springing up all over, reflecting young people’s formidable
need to speak out. Algiers is home to a constellation of rap groups including the
Hamma Boys, Cause Toujours, K-Libre, Les Messagères, City 16, De-Men and Tout
Passe. The flourishing resembles the explosive growth of the written press during
the democratisation that followed the riots of October 1988.
Since those days however, disillusionment has taken hold, as the Algiers group Intik
raps: “Manipulation, aggression, disappointment / That’s what my lot is today / My
only crime is to hope and to dream.”
In Annaba, a town in eastern Algeria, Lotfi and Waheb, of Double Kanon, who are considered
the best rappers of the day, openly denounce the country’s ills: “They come and they
come armed / Devils or people / They come down from the Jewish cemetery / Today it’s
a crackdown / There ain’t no football match / They come from the parade ground /
Carrying the flag like in the Lebanon war / Up there people are fleeing / The land’s
become black.”
The war between the security forces and Islamic fundamentalists (“terros” or terrorists
in rap language) is the focus of such hip-hop, along with attacks on corruption,
opportunists, the “trabendo” (black market), hatred, injustice and the blues.
“Zero morale”, the name of a song by the long-standing Oran group Vixit, sums it
all up: “The Escobars / The Al Capones we have right here / We have the mafia / What
is left? / Engineers, doctors, diplomats / Think about begging cigarettes / Jobless
people just hang around / The market economy / We are condemned / Like animals in
a zoo.”
SOS
But a new trend
is emerging. In its early days, rap was the privy of well-off middle class youths
who wrote their rhymes and worked out their tempos in the comfort of fancy villas.
Now it is becoming more democratic and inspiring young people from underprivileged
backgrounds. In short, Algerian rap has taken off across the social spectrum.
The rappers of MIA (Made in Algeria) rehearse inside an empty container in their
high-rise suburb of Ain-el-Turk, while those belonging to the group Cottages, from
the small town of Boufarik, sell vegetables and cigarettes on the street. It’s common
knowledge that Réda, of the group Intik, had to sell his shoes in the Algiers
flea market to pay for the last recording hour of his group’s first cassette. But
everyone believes in just trying to get by, as products of local education without
a future, of satellite dishes spewing unreality and of inescapable poverty.
In early May 2000, about 30 groups gathered in the city of Mostaganem for a hotly-contested
rap competition. The first prize went to a group from Algiers. Its name was SOS.
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