Special Edition

......A PORTRAIT:
Khaled Hadj Brahim (born 29 February 1960), better known as Khaled, is a raï singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist born in Sidi-El-Houri in Oran Province of Algeria. He began recording in his early teens under the name Cheb Khaled (Arabic for "Young man Khaled") and has become probably the most internationally famous Algerian singer. His popularity has earned him the unofficial title "King of Raï".

Though he's not too well known in Germany, rai musician Khaled is a phenomenon in the Arabic world, with a popularity that has reached almost surreal proportions. In 1992 his monster hit single 'Didi' sold over a million copies in European, Arabic and Asian countries, and made him more popular than Michael Jackson in India. This year he was also elevated to the status of nationwide celebrity and ambassador for the Arab minority in France, when his first French-language single, 'Aicha', put his brand of rai, a blend of traditional Algerian music and more Western styles such as soul, reggae and rock, at the top of the French charts for months, and sold 700,000 copies in France alone.

I'm very reluctant using superlatives, but Khaled's album, "Sahra" (1996), is really a work of 'celestial brilliance', and it was bewildered that most Britons have never heard of the man, let alone his music. And the various people I interviewed for this article were all palpably thrilled to be given a chance to talk about their work with Khaled, clearly considering it one of the most unusual experiences of their lives. Don Was, the legendary American producer who produced 'Didi', described on the cover of Khaled's 1993 album "N'ssi N'ssi" how he appeared live with Khaled on the American late-night TV show Tonight in 1992. At least five of his friends called him the next morning, because they "found this quarter-tone funk so unlike anything they had ever heard before, that they were uncertain as to whether the entire show had occurred in their dreams."

ECSTATIC RESPONSE
I had a chance to speak with Khaled, in the basement of his record company's offices in London. Khaled Hadj Brahim was born on February 29th, 1960, in Oran, an Algerian port, and made his first recording as a child prodigy atthe tender age of 14. Despite strong disapproval from his parents he had started to sing at weddings and cabaret evenings, and had begun to appropriate the rai, originally traditional Algerian music sung by women, and mix it with Western music and Western music technology. He continued to develop this new, electric rai under the name Cheb Khaled (Cheb means 'young'), and helped to start a whole new musical movement.

During the late '70s and early '80s rai music became the voice for Algerian youth rebellion, just as rock 'n roll was the voice of youth rebellion '60s and '70s. Rai is Arabic for 'opinion', and in it the singer presents his opinions on life, the universe and everything, though in the case of rai and Khaled, the universe rarely stretches much beyond love, women and alcohol. Despite this, Khaled created a song that became an anthem for womens' liberation, and continuously spearheaded calls for religious and cultural tolerance. It's easy to see why the religious fundamentalists took offence, and during the '80s and '90s rai singers have been assassinated with chilling regularity, most recently, and most famously, Cheb Hasni, who was killed in Oran in 1994.

Khaled, meanwhile, had been crowned the King of rai during the '80s, releasing his music in a fashion that was typical for African and Mediterranean countries during that time: on compact cassettes. Because Algeria used to be a French colony, strong ties remain between the two countries, and when Khaled made his European live debut in France in 1986 he got an ecstatic response. Becoming more and more nervous about political developments in Algeria -- he feared for his life -- and seeing new creative and commercial opportunities looming in France, he decided to relocate to Paris.

His cassettes had been odd, hi-tech, low-fi affairs, full of idiosyncratically applied synthesizers and drum machines. It was therefore not surprising that his major label debut, Kutche (1987, with Safy Boutella, released on Stern's African in the UK) was a hi-tech, hi-fi affair, and a wholly original and exhilarating mixture of traditional Arabic music and instruments with state-of-the-art Western technology, including the Linn 9000 and the Fairlight CMI sampler.

Khaled: "My cassettes were very much home-made, DIY affairs, produced by Algerian producers. My work with Boutella was the first time I worked with a foreign producer. It was my first venture into true professionalism." Boutella was trained as a jazz musician at a music college in Boston, and this oddest of culture clashes created something so unique that, according to Khaled's A&R man, Barclay's Pierre Paparemborde, Kutche has become one of the most popular CDs to lift samples off for many Western dance and rap music acts. However, Kutche gained little recognition with a larger audience, and Khaled decided to sign with the French label Barclay. Indicating that he felt he'd grown up, he dropped the 'Cheb' from his name, and set his sights as high as he could. Having acquired a taste for working with Western producers, nothing short of the world's top producers would now do.

CHEMISTRY
The first step was the album Khaled (1992), half of which was produced by Michael Brook, a producer with an excellent reputation for top world music albums with artists such as Youssou N'Dour and Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn. With the exception of the scorching flamenco-influenced track 'Wahrane Wahrane', and the lascivious 'Liah Liah', which gave musical form to Khaled's reputation as "a man constantly on heat", Brook's production was little more than competent. The real breakthrough happened with the five tracks produced by Don Was, the American producer extraordinaire famous for his work with Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, Bonnie Raitt, Stevie Nicks, and his own bands Was (Not Was), and most recently Orquestra Was. Amongst these five tracks is the stunning and bizarre 'Didi', which was a hit in 49 countries and sold over a million copies worldwide. Khaled takes the story from the beginning: "I said to Barclay that I wanted to work with a top American producer, so they gave me a list. When I saw Don Was's name I wanted him, because I remembered the music of Was (Not Was), and he'd worked with Bob Dylan, who I also like a lot. Dylan is a romantic and poet who sings about love. So I went to see Don in Los Angeles, brought him the demos that I'd done with my keyboard player Mustapha Kada in my home studio, and played them for him. The demos were very good, better than Kutche, and Don said to me: 'What do you want me to do? These demos are excellent, I have nothing to add.' I said: 'No, no, no, I want you to create a different, more American sound, and I want you to play bass on it, because you're a great bass player.' So he said: 'Alright then, but it's going to cost you.'" [laughs uproariously].

Via transatlantic telephone from his home in LA, Was gives his version of their first meeting, and some other reflections: "First of all, I'd like to say that I've been a fan of Khaled for a long time. I'd bought some of his cassettes when Was (Not Was) was touring Europe in '86-87, and it immediately struck me that he was a very soulful singer, who could really penetrate your emotional skin. I also thought that he'd come up with a really bizarre way of working with drum machines and synthesizers, and combining them with traditional percussion and all this quarter-tone stuff. It was something I'd never heard before, and it was radical and extreme. He'd managed to use all this technology without losing any of the original identity of the music. So when I was approached to produce him, I was thrilled to even meet the guy. But what I liked about his stuff was that it was different, and when he asked me to incorporate American R&B -- to Americanise the music -- I must say that that was the least appealing thing about it for me [laughs]. But in the end I thought: 'OK, let's do it, and at least try to create some music that no-one has ever heard before.' I felt that there were a couple of really important political points that we could make, by attempting to make an irresistible record that everybody in Europe was going to want to play and dance to, and that was sung in Arabic. At the time, playing a record sung in Arabic on French radio was still almost a criminal offence. And secondly, I'm an American Jew, and I work a lot with American black musicians. The nature of world history is that Jews, blacks and Arabs have been pitted against each other as a decoy, so that the powers that be can make money, and I thought that it was a really strong statement to show that when you put these three groups together, they can conquer anything."

Despite the fact that Don Was, like Khaled, was also aiming to conquer the world with the music the partnership would make, the success of 'Didi' still caught him by surprise. One of the keys to its success was the way in which Was put together the disparate ingredients that went into the record. One such ingredient was music technology, and one of the big decisions Don Was had to make was how to work with it, since it had formed an essential part of Khaled's Algerian DIY cassettes, Kutche, and also of the demos he'd made for the music Was was working on. Khaled: "There were many machines playing on Kutche, and although it was a very good album, when I went to the USA Don told me that I should have more live musicians, and that one shouldn't become the slave of the machines. We nevertheless used drum loops made on a computer as the foundation for the tracks Don and I made. Lesen Sie weiter... ›