Remitti: rai's hard-drinking diva - Music rebels: dissident music then and now

New Internationalist, August, 2003

In Algeria during the 1920s, working-class Muslim women in the town of Oran rejected the prevailing values of men in power and combined street gang, French language, and populist poetry known as chir al-milhun, to form a musical movement which came to be known as rai. It wasn't long before disapproving sheikhs took note, as did fundamentalist mujahedin independence fighters and the so called 'liberal' French authorities.

A rai artist by the name of Remitti drew most scorn for her outlandish behaviour, lewd lyrics about sex--and her legendary drinking abilities. Despite the rumblings from above, peasants and workers came in droves to see Remitti and her friends perform.

In the mid 1950s when the country was steeped in anti-colonial insurrection, Remitti and the rai revolutionaries added to their repertoire songs of armed struggle. 'Cheikha Kheira Guendil [a rai singer] was the first ... to brave the colonial police and sing about a free Algeria in public,' she later said. But even the post-independence socialist government reacted to rai by rounding up its musicians. Alcohol was banned, as were large rai concerts.

A decade later, new musicians like Cheb Khaled took up the mantle again. With lyrics that speak of injustice, poverty and corruption, modern rai is as relevant as it was in the 1920s and presents the single strongest cultural challenge to the fundamentalist Front Islamique du Salut.