Humsafar, Ya M'safer

I really love North African music.

There’s the master of it all - Umm Kalthoum, from Egypt, whose Enta Omri I referenced before when talking about Shakira.

There’re the Algerian pop (rai) sensations like Cheb Khaled, whose hit song Didi was big in India, possibly because didi is a very common word for sister and also this song just fucking slaps. Try not to move your body while listening to it! Try! You can’t! You’ll just build up energy and spontaneously combust! Khaled’s other hits are also damn groovy and dramatic with arguably Indian titles.

Cheb Mami was once featured on a Sting song/horse advertisement - Desert Rose - and Mami was the only enjoyable part of the whole thing. I have tried in vain to find studio versions of Desert Rose without Sting. Mami’s other songs are quite phenomenal as well - even if he doesn’t have the on-screen presence of certain other Arabic language performers.

Ghalia Ben Ali’s Ya M’Safer is fantastic, and you can see where Spanish guitar gets so much of its influence. The name of the song itself is a cognate of humsafar a borrowing into Hindustani from Arabic via Farsi. It’s actually quite a common word, as in Qurat-ul-Ain Baloch’s rendering of the tearful Woh Humsafar Tha, which is both the theme for a TV show named Humsafar and a ghazal about the break-up of Pakistan into Pakistan and Bangladesh in 1971. “He was my companion”, indeed.

A Vava Inouva by Idir is a Kabyle (Berber) song. The voices and guitar melody are haunting and the lyrics don’t tone it down any. Some of the most subtle and terrifying exchanges between a father and daughter.

Tinariwen are Tuareg musicians. The Tuareg themselves have a fascinating place in the history of the world, acting as a silent pivot in the fates and profits of empires as evidenced in this slightly exoticizing segment from National Geographic:

Regardless of skin color, a surprising number have topaz blue eyes. This genetic grab bag suggests one of the riddles of the Tuareg, who have always considered themselves a people apart yet for centuries took slaves from other desert tribes and intermarried with them. The result is an ethnic group distinguished primarily by its common language, Tamashek, which is related to Berber tongues spoken in Algeria and Morocco.

Rachid Taha is known a bit for his cover of The Clash’s Rock the Casbah, which might actually have been inspired by him. His original songs in both Arabic and French are also phenomenal.

Altogether, I have spent hundreds of hours of my life listening to North African and Sahel music, without too much thought into why exactly I love this particular brand of funk, rock and Arab/Berber folk. Probably because it fucking slaps.