Clash cover- Algeria

[gregm]

clampdown

 

[gregm]

very cool video

 

[gregm]

rogue check this out. He is from algeria , I like the fact he isnt some dogmatic, boring, and predictable anti american leftist. Very interesting world music. I like the way he rolls those rrrrr's in the song.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B02E6D81F3DF930A25750C0A9639C8B63&pagewanted=all

"An old-school rock star headlined SummerStage in Central Park on Saturday afternoon. Grinning and unshaven, he strutted around the stage, sang in a knowing growl and cued his band for extended, hard-grooving versions of songs using fuzz-toned guitar riffs over a dance beat.

Rachid Taha, the Algerian rock star, with his band at Central Park SummerStage on Saturday.

He wore a leather fedora, then switched to a red cowboy hat. He dumped a bottle of water onto audience members — redundant, since it was raining — and onto his own head. He twirled his microphone on its cord, joked about Ecstasy and cocaine and was less than reverent when handed a flag. For his encore the band vamped and chanted, “Get up, get up,” and the star declaimed, “My name is James Brown! My name is Marvin Gaye!” But his other songs were serious: reflections on exile and cultural strife.

The star was Rachid Taha, an Algerian now based in France. Mr. Taha is the most rock-influenced of Algerian rai singers, who mix Arabic and North African elements with Western ones; he has collaborated with British musicians including Brian Eno, Steve Hillage and Robert Plant. At SummerStage his songs dipped into hard rock, reggae, rumba-pop and Bo Diddley, but often they used Arabic-style beats defined by the hand drum called a darbuka, and Mr. Taha’s voice was answered by oud solos.

THE Algerian singer-songwriter Rachid Taha, 46, likes to tell the story about the night he met the Clash. In 1981, when he was the leader of Carte de S?ur (''Residence Permit''), a pioneering band from Lyon, France, that combined Algerian rai with funk and punk rock, the Clash played a concert at the Th?re Mogador in Paris. Mr. Taha, a huge fan, bumped into the band on the street outside the theater and handed them a copy of his group's demo. He never heard back, but a year later the Clash released ''Rock the Casbah,'' a raucous sendup of Middle Eastern politics with a suspiciously Carte de S?ur-like sound: slashing electric guitar, a dance beat and a lead vocal by Joe Strummer filled with undulating Orientalisms. To this day, Mr. Taha says he believes that his recordings inspired the song. ''How else could they have come up with it?'' he asks with a grin.

On ''T?toi,'' his sixth solo album, he reclaims the song. As a tribute to Mr. Strummer, who died in 2002, Mr. Taha recorded ''Rock El Casbah,'' an Arabic-language version that tricks out the song's familiar melody with swooping, Egyptian-style strings, Moroccan flute, qanun and other traditional instruments. The result -- ''Rock the Casbah'' sung as though inside the Casbah -- deepens the song's ambiguities. Is ''Rock El Casbah,'' with its images of sheiks gusting through the desert in Cadillacs and cracking down on ''degenerate'' disco dancers, an indictment of the oil-choked, religiously fanatical Arab world, or a wry comment on the West's cartoonish vision of the region? No listener to the recording can doubt that it is both, or that in Mr. Taha, a rumpled North African with a buzz saw voice, the Clash has an unlikely heir.

Throughout the night, he regales his companions with jokes and strong opinions. He rhapsodizes about his musical heroes: Marvin Gaye, the New York Dolls, the legendary Egyptian singer Oum Kalthoum, the disco producer Giorgio Moroder, Alan Vega, Kraftwerk, Johnny Cash, Public Enemy. Stopping at a lesbian bar -- Mr. Taha is one of the owners -- he holds forth loudly, and profanely, on his latest passion, John Ford westerns, and his disdain for contemporary French cinema. ''I'd much rather watch some dumb Hollywood movie than another haute bourgeois auteurist piece of crap,'' he says. ''Anyway, I don't see any French Coen brothers, any French Scorsese.''

When talk turns to politics, Mr. Taha, who has no love for the Bush administration, shocks everyone by announcing that an American bombing raid on Iranian nuclear sites wouldn't be such a bad thing. ''Believe me, Arabs don't care at all about Iran,'' he says. ''Besides, Iran shouldn't be allowed to have nukes.''

 

[gregm]

His best line

"When I hear George Bush, and when I hear Osama bin Laden, I hear two bedouin nomads. The only difference he says, is that one of them is from the desert of Texas and drives an SUV, and the other is from the desert of Saudi Arabia and rides a dromedary." Taha says Bush and bin Laden come from similar well-heeled backgrounds. And both, he says, use a similar fundamentalist rhetoric."

In "Tkitoi," he remains an equal-opportunity offender. The album veers from plaints and laments to enraged polemics, in songs that tackle questions of identity, democracy, the root causes of violence, the persistence of idealism in a broken world and the gulf of understanding between Arab nations and the West. That's the subject of the propulsive title track, a duet with Christian Olivier of the Paris band Les Ttes Raides, which pits an Arab against a Westerner in a furious existential dialogue. ("Tkitoi" is a slang contraction of the French phrase "T'es qui, toi?," or "Who are you?") It's a song that puts Mr. Taha in mind of those archetypal combatants, Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush.

"The irony is, they're ( bush and bin laden) so similar - they're twin brothers," he says. "They're both wealthy religious fundamentalists from oil-producing desert states. It's like watching an argument between two Bedouins. The only difference between them is one drives an S.U.V., the other rides a dromedary."

[video=vimeo;29389953]http://vimeo.com/29389953[/video]

 

[roguejuror]

rogue check this out. He is from algeria , I like the fact he isnt some dogmatic, boring, and predictable anti american leftist. Very interesting world music. I like the way he rolls those rrrrr's in the song.

good tune, it looks like he filmed the video on the south of spain

 

[gregm]