Khaled, Sahra (Island) 9+
Cheb Khaled Hadj Brahim is the ballsiest mother funker in music today. He has risked assasination for the past seven years since fundamentalist rebels extended their war against the state to the assassination of secular music artists. Rai, Algeria's own casbah pop, is simply too sexy for psychotic fundamentalists. Since rai had been banned, singer Cheb Hasni was assassinated in 1994, and the big rai producer Rachid Baba-Ahm was killed in 1995. Now here's someone who puts everything on the line for their principles. Crowned the king of rai in Algeria in the 80s for taking a traditional music that had been popular for decades and updating it with electronics and Algerian street idioms, Khaled was forced to flee to Paris to avoid certain death in his homeland. In Paris he gets harrassed for it, yet he continues to make the music he chooses to make. In this case it's pan-Meditteranean pop. Sahra is an excellent crossover of many styles (blues, Flamenco, rap, ska, bhangra, soca, rave) in addition to his standard, mesmerizing Arabic vocals rooted in feisty rai rhythms. The genre-hopping may not be groundbreaking, but it's an excellent introduction to people who will likely end up digging into his earlier, more traditional efforts, much the same way people have discovered the diverse, if varyingly traditional Quawali offerings of Pakistan's Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (RIP).
