Rai

Algerian rai, born in the bars and shrines of Oran, frank, defiant and hugely influential.

Rai began in Oran in the 1920s and 1930s as the music of the cheikhas, women singers who performed for mixed crowds and sang plainly about drink, desire and hardship in a way the respectable repertoire would not. Cheikha Rimitti is the name that carried furthest out of that generation.

It went electric in the 1970s with synthesizers and drum machines and a young wave of cheb and cheba singers, and through the 1980s and 1990s pop-rai became one of very few Arabic-language musics with a real global chart presence, largely by way of France.

It has always been argued about, and it has always been more popular than its critics.