It exists in Arab music… and if there, would like.
Because what matters is not the music, but the people. And the rest, is pure ornament.
Youtube is now availablevideo of the conference I gave at the auditorium of Arab House in Madrid to mark the Music Day (2011).
(c) mimundo.org
Everywhere there are cultural misunderstandings, everywhere grow prejudices and stereotypes Despuntan. In Catalonia rock means anyone who is in Catalan, in Castilian or English. If you get rock Arabic label world music and you begin to listen to rock and traditional music is heard coming from a distant, mythical. You run into a kind of no man's land: too much guitar for folk music scene, too Arabic for the world of rock.
Last 15 May died in Paris the great Cheikha Rimitti, the last representative of the first rai, the last of its creators. Had 83 years old, a new album and two nights before had been giving a concert.
The first time I saw live was the Cheikha Rimitti outdoors, in a free concert in the Plaza Real de Barcelona, microcosm that combines the bottle, free camping and stylish bars, that night was filled with fascination Maghreb, young beautiful palm trees perched, the streetlights, and Catalan hallucinated with so much anticipation. And she appeared: black dress, with a crown of black hair gold collected, like a goddess emerging from artificial smoke, absolutely sublime. "May God bless you!”, shouted, And may God bless your parents!; she danced and answered with a proud smile and seductive, triumphant: then passed, and long, the 70 years old.
Saida was born Rimitti calling, being a woman, completely poor, in colonized Algeria; soon became an orphan and became a "street child". In was, as they say, prostitute, although prostituyese, nor was singer, but sing: Saida was a survivor, and discovered that survive Oran cabarets at a key moment, when people, men who had fled the villages to seek a better life in the city, had run out of music to sing about pain they were new and that the existing music could not express: the pains of the migrant, the pain of uprooting, the sad sad city. Thus was born the rai and thus became in Cheikha Rimitti Saida. "Cheikha" as a nod, makes the same call Marquise to the owner of a brothel, and that new generations of singers have dared to use, en quedándose a discreet "Chebba" (young); "Rimitti" with "remettez": rellenad, volvedme to fill the wine glass. He sang of sex, Alcohol, to snuff, handsome men and women promiscuous, openly, without hypocrisy and without metaphors.
His whole life is full of riots: fought with the French colonists and later the National Liberation Front; fought with the fundamentalists, fought with “heirs' musical, whom he accused of stealing songs, fought with Robert Fripp King Crimson and Flea, Red Hot Chili Peppers when, to 71 years old, recorded with them the album "Sidi Mansour", a million-selling album that became an international star but which completely repudiated: say what he should tell, sell what you sell, she did not like.
As a human being toast his music, by sympathy, for strength, charisma; but as a woman I drink it: to thank the ferocity, implacable gaze, consistency, the sincerity of the gesture, loyalty to itself, his past and his speech: a benchmark, a myth, for women who were not born to be princesses, or to be good girls. Once again living Rimitti!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qiu2mgIMkNQ]
This work of Brigitte Vasallotiene licenseCreative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Spain License.
Published in the journal Batonga! in June 2006.
