 Souad Massi
text John Lewis
photography Tony French
Millions of people around the world have found themselves spellbound by the music of Souad Massi. Unfortunately, her two-year-old daughter Inji isn’t one of them.
“If I try to sing one of my songs to her as a lullaby, she starts wailing,” laughs Massi. “She starts crying ‘No mummy, sing me Michael Jackson! I want Michael Jackson!’ And so I have to sing ‘Bad’ or ‘Billie Jean’, and then she calms down. And then she’ll ask me if she can meet Michael Jackson! And I have to tell her that isn’t going to happen.”
Increasingly, her daughter is going to find herself in a minority as more and more converts find themselves beguiled by Souad Massi’s music. The British rock legend Paul Weller has recorded a version of one of her songs and is keen to record with her; she was the star of African Express, a project assembled by Blur’s Damon Albarn for last year’s Glastonbury Festival; while even Icelandic singer Bjork has described her music as “beautiful, calming and life-affirming”.
Stylistically, it’s difficult to describe Massi’s music. Sung in a mixture of French, Algerian Arabic and the Berber language Kabyle, it owes little to the raï and chaabi music that dominates the streets of North Africa and more to Anglo-American folk-rock and country music, albeit in a form that has been gloriously mutated by contact with the Mediterranean world.
 “I don’t know what I call my music,” she ponders. “It’s Souad Massi music. I mean, I love Brazilian bossa nova, for instance. To me it is the music of sunshine, and bossa nova guitarists have had a deep impression on me. But I cannot call myself a bossa nova guitarist. In the same way, I love flamenco music. I have many gypsy friends and I even spend holidays with them. But I can never be a flamenco singer because I am not a gypsy. All I can do is to take elements of these to create Souad Massi music.”
If that makes Massi unique in a “world music” market obsessed with authenticity, it made her even more of an oddity growing up in Algeria during the 1980s and 1990s. She was born in 1972, raised in a ramshackle, working-class suburb of Algiers near the Mediterranean coast, one of six children, and her first love was Western pop music.
“The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, U2, AC/DC, Tracy Chapman…” she rolls off the names gleefully. “And my mum would play soul music around the house, stuff like Aretha Franklin, James Brown and Tom Jones. I wanted to be contrary, so, when my friends were getting into rap and reggae and raï, I got into country music like Kenny Rogers and Emmylou Harris.”
After a short spell in a flamenco band called Trianas d’Alger, she joined a rock band called Atakor, named after a mountain range in the Sahara. “They played heavy, headbanging rock, but they brought in elements of lots of other music – Arabic music, jazz, flamenco.”
In 1997, Massi released a cassette of her own songs, backed by Atakor. It sold well and was massively pirated, leading to a degree of nationwide fame. Radio and TV appearances followed, but in a country riven by civil war, such prominence started to become problematic as radical extremists became more dominant in Algeria.
“The extremists were always difficult,” she says, with polite understatement. “I would be carrying my guitar to my music lessons, wearing jeans and no head covering, and I would often be abused or even assaulted. Then later, when I was singing with Atakor, I started getting anonymous phone calls. Death threats. Stuff like that. Everything became too much of a risk.
The problem with” fundamentalists is that they refuse all art. They see artists as the enemy. They dislike all that is different. If I try to explain that music brings sense to my life, they wouldn’t understand. So I can only feel pity for them. If I hated them, I “.become like them It was this environment – coupled with a tempestuous love affair that inspired many of the songs on her first album Rouai – that forced Massi to leave Algeria. In 1999, she was contacted by the French-based Algerian exile Aziz Smati, a broadcaster who had been shot and paralysed by fundamentalist gunmen in 1994 before fleeing to Paris. Smati had seen Massi perform on Algerian TV and invited her to play at the Femmes d’Algerie (Women Of Algeria) concert in Paris. Her stunning performance caught the attention of many and led to her signing a recording contract with Island Records, extending her stay in France and beginning a long spell of exile. In Paris, she found a home among immigrants from the Maghreb, but also came into contact with other .types of music I love that you can go out” every night in Paris – or any other big Western city – and see a Pakistani singer or a Malian kora player. It’s like the whole world is coming to play for you.” It’s clearly rubbed off on her own music. The song “Yawlidi,” for instance, takes a joyous detour into Congolese dance rhythms, the energetic “Ech Edani” revisits her flamenco fascination while “Deb” features tabla and Indian-style vocal percussion.
Her most recent studio album, Honeysuckle, features six guest guitarists, who variously bring elements of Malian kora playing, Ghanaian hi- life, Brazilian bossa nova and .Egyptian classical oud playing Paris, however, is also home to a huge industry based on a melancholic nostalgia for Algeria, an industry fed by books, films, songs and TV documentaries that appeal to the white French pied noir colonialists and the subsequent waves of Algerian immigrants. Ironically, it’s meant Massi has had ample opportunity to re-engage with the traditional music of the .Maghreb A lot of the culture of” Algerians in France is one of longing and nostalgia, but it is a nostalgia for a place that has never really existed. So that idealised Algeria becomes even more enticing. Although it is a myth, maybe it’s a myth worth celebrating, especially when your country is suffering and “.in pain She didn’t return to Algeria for four years, but recently took her daughter back for an extended stay with her mother. “Now parts of the country are safe. It is changing. The civil war sometimes breaks out in the suburbs, but you can avoid it.” She was keen for her daughter to reconnect with her North African ancestry, although the current political climate can make any kind of .travel very difficult You know, it’s the same” with so many immigrants and exiles. I never realised how Algerian I was until I left the place. Now it infects everything in my music!”
Acoustic: The Best Of Souad Massi is out now on Wrasse Records. |
