Retro casseta, or the hauntology of retro algerian music.
IMAGINARIUM : An Alternate History of Art
Welcome to Imaginarium: an alternate history of art. A podcast where we delve in to the most obscure parts of art history.
Hello dear listeners, I’m your host Nadjah, and in this podcast, we try to shed light on less studied parts of the history of art and visual culture. In today’s episode, we are going to explore the exciting world of 1980s Algerian music, the beautiful graphic design that graced the covers of the vinyls and cassettes, as well as the extremely cheesy ones ! We will discuss the revival of that aesthetic and music in the current musical Algerian landscape, and how the role of what is after all a very recent history, has shaped the way Algerian culture understands itself. These saccharine cassette tapes and the stories that come with them are stories that have been creating the present that we currently have.
Before we begin, I want to give yu all a bit of context, I am Algerian, and despite currently living abroad, I have lived in Canada since I was very small, however I try to go back to Algiers every other and my culture is one that is incredibly important to me. And Algerian history often is almost exclusively seen through its lowest moments, and while these moments are important, traumatic and have shaped algerian history, such as the extremely long french colonization or the black decade, all of these only in the past 200 years, however I also want to show how despite of those events, algerian art, culture and heritage encompasses so much more than that. There is no way of avoiding taling about the french colonization because it has impacted the modern history so deeply, however I do not want to reduce history to only that. I am tired of looking for books and content on algerian history and having them only be concentrated on the french colonization, as if those hundred and so years are the ones that define and characterize the entire history of algeria, when there is an extremely rich history that happened before that and after those periods that are barely explored. I am. Sorry for the rant. haha So this episode, hopefully will seek to paint a portrait of a very specific period of algerian history through the lense of the music and the graphic design that grace the covers of those vinyls and tapes.
So let’s turn the clock back all the way back to the 1980s.
It is in that vibrant and colorful decade that the movement and musical style called Rai music would be born in the west of Algeria, in the beautiful city of Wahran, most commonly known as Oran in the west. However I am Algerian and thus i will continue to call it Wahran for the rest of this episode, because that is her name and to be honest, I simply want to.
On a street corner, in the western city of Wahran, stands a small building that houses the music label disco Maghreb, created by Boualem Benhaoua, the site where numerous of the main names of raï have recorded and produced songs that are now classics of algerian music, such names as cheb mami, cheb hasni and all of the greats of the era. A music label that not only housed a good part of algerian raï music, but is also a representation of the desire to preserve the musical culture of the golden age of raï music in algeria, it has also given its title to a new song by the artist DJ snake, a song that swept Algeria and the arab world. It is a song that is a modern hymn to the past. Maybe that we still need to tell our own story again and again in a goal to reappropriate it, to revisit it and make it our own even more, after more than a century of colonialism, violence and generational trauma.
This musical movement was built on social change in the years following the independence, but also on a historical foundation of the different genres of music that existed in Algeria previously, such as the Andalus style and chaa3bi to just name a few of them. It did not destroy nor replace anything, it built upon what already existed and constructed something new with the very sounds that were already present in algerian music, all the while using the very new technology and tools that were shaking up the music world of the 1970s and the 1980s, and introducing new methods of creating music.
This genre was built upon a strong musical foundation of Algerian music, and the way the traditional and the modern constantly meld, It is a mixing of the past and of a particular musical tradition that values not only the past, but algerian cultural identity. I think what is important to understand here, is that Algeria is an immense country, it is one of, if not the biggest country in the african continent, and it means, just by virtue of its size, that it has an astoundingly varied culture. The culture you find in Algiers, the northern urban capital, will be very different from the one you will find in the saharan south. From dress, customs, food to music and mannerism, each region is unique, complex and absolutely beautiful. I know that I am incredibly biased, however I think valorizing and uplifting traditional customs and craftsmanship and highlighting cultural specifics of each region in terms of culture is incredibly important to combat the idea of a normalized and standardized globalized world, because that normalization often only implies a new version of modern imperialism and disguised white supremacy, instead of a world where culture is shared and heightened. Instead it is flattened to a bland version of what should be modern culture, which ends up just being a repackaged version of white supremacy.
When it comes to algerian music, there is a terminology of artists calling themselves cheb or cheba. When I’m talking about Cheb Hasni, Cheb Mami, Cheba Nadia, it is a prefix that ended up being used by lot of Algerian rai singers will adopt and put in front of their first names, and it’s basically a stage name for these artists, so I thought I’d explain this denomination so people who are not familiar with these terms so people do not get too confused with the names I will be mentioning as we move on in our episode !
The key figures of Algerian music in the 1980s and 1990s who brought this new genre, a genre that embodied the fervent energy of the youth, as well as the changing wind of progress, were young musicians, artists and producers that were ready to risk something new. Raï music was officialized, in a way, with the 1985 raï music festival in Wahran, where it went from an underground trend and genre to a full-fledged sensation and national movement that swept the whole country. And we absolutely cannot talk about the musical and cultural change that was brought in the 1980s without mentioning Cheb Hasni and his magnificent music. Cheb Hasni, born in 1968 , rose to quick and phenomenal fame in a matter of a few years to become the figurehead of the raï genre, and for good reason. In a genre that was already doing new and innovative things with music and culture, he was doing something that was genuinely out of the ordinary, and he knew true success and obviously had a mastery of his art. Cheb Hasni was one of those flames that burned bright and quickly, his discography is full of hits after hits, that most Algerians have heard as part of the general culture around them, as the sound of his voice was becoming part of algerian culture and identity.
Unfortunately, he was murdered in 1994 at only 26 years of age, in the midst of the black decade, and of the tumultuous time of terrorism and civil war in Algeria, and the dark uncertainty that came with it. This civil war lasted from 1991 to 2002, and was a conflict that had several groups such as the algerian government, the army and various islamist groups. This decade of terrorism is much more complex than I would be able to describe shortly, but suffice it to say that this is the context in which a lot of the music was produced. And so, he was murdered by the Armed Islamic Group in 1994. This is so young for a life to end, and I always wonder just how much more music and art and he would have given us if his life was not so tragically cut short. Imagine being a huge part of a movement that majorly disrupted and innovated Algerian music in a way that was never seen before, and all of this before you even turn 27 years old. I always am of the opinion that most careers and lives are built slowly but surely, and there is no need to put any pressure on oneself to succeed before a given time frame because we truly have to go at our own pace, but if there is an example of someone who had genius and talent and skyrocketed to the top, it’s very much Cheb Hasni.
In Raï music, there is a loosening of the lyrics, lyrics that will be used to consolidate an identity for the youth, in a way that was happening for the first time in the 20th century. It is difficult to create a youth culture and identity when your country is under the rule of the french colonial power for so long. There needs to be a certain safety and space for this sort of cultural change to happen within a society, and a colonized society does not have neither that space nor that safety. And so, it makes sense that it is only through the late 1970s and the 1980s that these changes occurred, and that it was during this era that for a lot, were some of the best years in Algeria, that the youth had a culture of its own. It was a new youth identity that was entirely Algerian, with the influences of funk and the new technologies of the time, mixed with traditional sounds as well to create something entirely new and different. This music was the soundtrack to an era of prosperity, and of innovation and modernity. When I talk to my parents, to my uncles and aunts who lived through the 1980s and remember it, they all have only positive things to say, and some of it might be based in nostalgia, sure, however I do think there is some truth to it, that life was somehow a bit brighter then. It was not perfect, and I do think that everyone’s eyes are covered in rose colored glasses that make that era seem lovelier than it was , however compared to what was to come, and compared to what was before, the years between the independence and the 1990s were years of ease and happiness for a lot of people.
The vocabulary in raï music is one that is decidedly popular and one that is closer to street slang, words and phrases that were not usually welcomed in the environment of the home, near your mothers and fathers. It was a language register that veered more toward a quote unquote vulgar one that wasn’t one usually used in songs and media, even though, it was something that was eventually going to be making it to the whole of Algeria and beyond. Compared to the songs of genres such as cha3bi where the vocabulary was more poetic and wordy, the lyrics of rai songs were more grounded, popular, the vocabular that the youth and the people on the streets were using instead of the poetical and more refined register of the earlier songs. The vernacular of acceptable art in itself was changing.
If you go to Algeria, or simply on instagram if you don’t have the time nor the money for a plane ticket right now, you can find several younger people, in their 30s, in their 20s, who were not born or barely born in the hey days of raï music, with accounts dedicated to sharing and showcasing vinyls and cassettes of the era. This collecting and curating — and ultimately this virtual exhibit of these covers and of that music becomes a very real act of preservation and historical archiving, albeit done on an individual and personal level. The act of sharing of vinyls and cassettes, it is a hobby for many, however it very much helps to bring interest toward the subject from people who would not otherwise have had an interest for recent history. I also have to mention that most of the best donations and contributions to cultural institutions and the collective memory often came from someone who was just really really passionate about a thing in particular, especially when it concerns something that is not usually considered worthwhile by official cultural institutions, but still have a huge historical value to make us understand the way our history is shaped and shapes us. I worked at a museum for a certain time, and my current career is in the field of archiving and document managing, and I can safely say that external donations can be a very important and significant part of the development and expansion of historical archives.
The way that people create collections and personal catalogs and records of the things they love, in this particular case, it is about music and the physical objects that bear witness to the memories of that era, but it is also about that love of the culture and the act of sharing within a community. These collected objects could be anything really, the value they get when they are grouped together goes up, not only the monetary value, but the cultural and historical significance. It is as a collection that those items bear witness to a very particular subsection of history. The way people group and order and classify the items they own and manage their own personal archives and documents, of what they love and deem personally valuable is something that is extremely important to me, it is this way that history, not just the big history of the wars and kings and the dates of treatises and huge world changing events, but the smaller things, the music someone loves and decides to keep and the care people will give to those items. It is the way people lived, the dresses someone kept in an attic that talks of a life well lived and well dressed. All of these are important evidence of history, of people and of their lives and routines, and are as important to us for our understanding of history, of who we were, and of where we are coming from. The story of the small things that happen, of the daily life of people is also incredibly important and shapes, in even stronger ways sometimes, the course of the rest of history.
In the book Retromania by Simon Reynolds, which by the way, is a really relevant and interesting read on the way the musical world, specifically, does a lot of retrospectives and throwbacks, but mostly it touches on this global fascination that we all have for the past, and the ways art continually recycles. When you look at today’s culture, there is a feeling that the future does not really exist anymore in culture, and there is a culture stagnation , are we in a period where we constantly revisit the past and the lost promises that were given to us, when the future seems to be bright. I think during the 1990s and 1980s, and even up to the early 00s, there was this general sense fo things WERE getting better, however I do feel like a sense of doom has submerged us in the years since. With climate anxiety, cost of life crisis, a global pandemic and housing crisis, I think that even if hope hasn’t been lost, I really do not think that the world is hopeless, I am not at that stage yet, however, I find it hard to be able to imagine a future. I feel like just a few decades ago, there was a sense of hope, that better things were going to be coming, and now, I think it’s a bit more bleak than it used to be before.
And maybe, we just need to look back at those times where things were looking up, where the colors of the cassette tapes were bright, when you could just listen to Cheb Djalal’s « l’étoile du disco rai » translated to « the star of the rai disco » and look at the beautiful album cover of turquoises, oranges and bright yellows and feel something akin to hope. The music, also, is absolutely excellent, and I totally recommend this album, even though my favorite of Cheb Djalal is A Labes, a beautiful song with rai and cha3bi influences about a long lost love, and the pain of separation, and how love might torment you, but it’s going to be okay. Oh how we do love our dramatic lyrics !
After all, sometimes you simply need to dance.
Personally, when it comes to looking toward the past, i don't think it is necessarily a bad thing. As a historian, I have always had been more interested by the things that happened before, I think the knowledge that we have of our past, is something absolutely essential for the building of our present and of our future. However, I am aware that I am incredibly biased, as a historian, but I will hope that, as you are listening to an art history podcast, you are equally as biased as I am on the topic. However the loss of our collective future, of the idea of what the future could be, and the creativity and imagination that accompanies this idea of the future, is something that is a bit worrying. I do love the concept of looking at the past and bringing it into our present, I think it’s a good way of having a constant dialogue with our own history and our understanding of the past, as it is something that constantly shifts and morphs as our experience and knowledge grows. For Algeria and Algerian music, the era of the 80s and the early years of the 1990s were years that are remembered with fondness and a sense of nostalgia, with a yearning for a long lost time of happiness and progress, before the black decade changed things irrevocably. But a question does remain, why do we look to the past ?
This is an attempt at a very short social history and visual history of Algeria and the golden age of rai music, but also about our current era’s need of constantly looking to the past and the loss of the idea of the future that somehow occurred during the past 20 years. Of course, this subject, as most subject I touch upon during this podcast could be the subject of a whole entire book, however I will do my best to make it understandable within a short podcast episode ! I was born in the mid 1990s, and so I vividly remember an era when the world at large was collectively looking toward the future, however without myself even noticing, I lifted my head to discover myself in a world that thought only of the past, and never about the future, not really in a way that feels very hopeful I have to say. People who are way smarter than i am have spoken about this subject, and if I could only recommend one book on the topic, it would be the book Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures by Mark Fisher which really kickstarted my reflection on this topic because the idea of the futures that we had imagined for ourselves collectively has been lost is one that really touched something within me. After all, who among us has not thought about how they used to think they’d become a writer or a fashion designer. There is a lot of dreams and goals we have for ourselves, and futures for ourselves that never came to be, after all, there is only the present. But those alternate futures, where maybe you are a successful architect, or where you live as a recluse beekeeper, are forever haunting us.
I genuinely recommend all of Fisher’s writing, he has a very inquisitive mind and his writing goes deep into subjects of the modern world and the changes that it brings in terms of history, media and culture. He unfortunately passed away in 2017, but the archives of his blog is still available as well as a couple of books, all of which are on my list of books I want to read next. His writing always features such magnificent deconstructions and critiques of our current culture. I cannot help but wonder what his thoughts would be on the culture of 2023, in a world that went through a global pandemic, and yet .. And yet. In this book,Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, I think he touches on something that is quite important. The word Hauntology is a porte-manteau word composed of hauntings and ontology, which is a part of philosophy that deals with the nature itself of being. The idea of hauntology was developed by Jacques Derrida, in 1993, in his book Specters of Marx, a book about the legacy of Marx in western civilization.
We are haunted by a future past, by the dreams and hopes that we used to have for the future, because in the imaginary at least, there is no longer any future. I think about retro-futurism, and the idea of the future that the late 19th century imagined and pictured, I think about what our current culture think of our future and its. bleak. A colorless chrome future in the midst of a climate crisis of unprecedented scope, no wonder the world is constantly looking to the past. A good chunk of what is created nowadays and in the mainstream culture is just recycled and prefabricated images of the past. I am fully aware of how many people are out there creating beautiful and original new stories, however, I am very much talking about the culture surrounding the mainstream, and how the only way to get a project made is often with a revamping of an original intellectual property. People are not giving chances to new ideas, and there are not giving the time to the few new ideas that are being produced to make their way into the world. If the success is not immediate and striking, the project is often cancelled and ended almost immediately. There is a feeling, to me that culture is both stagnant and yet faster than ever, however we cannot deny that a lot of the way we have been relating to culture and the future and creativity has been to look back to the past.
Most of the music in algeria was on Vinyls and Cassettes, but mostly on cassettes which were affordable and easy to carry. There is something to be said about the physicality of the object, that you had to physically carry and make space for, especially now that everything is streamable and on youtube or my kind of website you might wanna visit. While it is easier to simply click play on your phone, on your music app or Spotify, there is a charm to the ritual of taking the time to set up a turning table and playing a vinyl, where you have to experience the album in the order it has been chosen and you can’t really skip over a song if you don’t like it all that much. I think these sort of analog processes ground you to reality and the physicality of the world around you in ways that streaming will never be able to truly replicate. And please, I love the convenience of being able to stream anything and everything I want at the drop of a button, please do not misunderstand me, I have my phone in my vicinity at any given moment, however I think there is still something charming and beautiful to taking the time to truly be in that moment.
The quote of Brian eno from a year with swollen appendices is one that I often come back to and I think is continually relevant, but especially so on this topic of looking back to the era of vinyls and cassettes, so quote « “Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. » Unquote. And this is why, in an age where the use of vinyls and cassette affords a tangible connection to the past and to a world that might have been. I think it is easy to see the revival of 1980s sounds and influences in music. Those sounds and idiosyncrasies that used to be reviled, becomes now an aesthetic point that is voluntarily added on, to create a sound similar to the one heard on vinyl or tape.
I think it is easy to imagine how things might have been if the 1990s in Algeria had not happened. After all, those were violent and dangerous years, where a lot of people disappeared and died, and where tensions were running extremely high. And so, the 1970s and the 1980s shine as a beacon in the darkness, an era of prosperity and relative peace contrastingly. The album covers of those 1980s and early 1990s albums are always very colorful, bright and often bear strong colors, yellow, oranges, turquoises, greens and reds. The way that the layout of these album covers are simple, and yet they have a very specific visual identity to them. These layouts very much have the feel of a collage, those designs are not carefully crafted and produced photoshoots. They have that very DIY and handmade dimension to them, it feels grainy and real and something that was quickly thrown out together, which it very might have well been. It is very much in keeping with the times, where they had to put out music extremely fast, and just have a quick cover to put on the cover. It felt amateur-ish on a certain level, but it does feel like it was made with a lot of enthusiasm. Personally i see them and there is an instant feeling of nostalgia to me, the music is absolutely iconic to any Algerian, but mostly they represent an era that is past and long gone, that was colorful and in constant movement, where things seemed like they were truly looking up after years and years of an oppressive colonial regime, the culture was in effervescence and the years seemed incredibly happy.
The vintage and retro aesthetic that is currently front and center in the cover art of Dj Snake’s Disco Maghreb is a direct reference not only to the music that came out of this era, but to that production house in that street corner in Wahran. But this is a tendency hat does not apply exclusively to music and album covers in Algeria. When you look at the ongoing trends globally for everything, whether fashion, music, movies, design, and more generally the world of culture in general, there is a definite tendency and leaning to nostalgia and perpetual revivals and revisiting older art and trends to create a constant circle of inspiration and references that just keep coming back and again and again. Everything is new again and everything is old again, and we just keep circling through history without truly innovating anymore. Of course, this is not quite true either. There are artists, authors, and creatives of all sorts creating beautiful new art, stories and sounds, but you do have to make the effort to seek them out.
And I cannot say that this look toward the past is necessarily always a bad thing either, after all, as an art historian and a historian in general, I am constantly looking back to the past and I do appreciate when creatives are using the well of history as a basis for creativity, there is so much fun stuff to uncover and so much inspiration to be gained from it.
Those album covers of vinyls and cassettes are ephemeral witnesses to a time that is now lost forever. The graphic design that graced those covers is still here, 30 and some odd years later, but there is something to be said about the anonymity of those graphic designers, of those artists that created iconic images and visuals, but who are now forgotten. It is incredibly important for me in my art history practice to try to fish these people out of the obscurity and into the limelight, which is very difficult to do if their names are not anywhere in the process, and especially considering as commercial artists are often not being considered as artists, the same way ~artists~ with a capital A are. And while, I have not managed to find the names of those graphic designers, those cover albums still live on as the evidence of a time that was once happy. However I think it needs to be said, that for a country whose history has been cruelly and viciously erased and bastardized by imperialism, civil conflicts, corruption and war, this look upon the past is an important and joyful one. To reconcile yourself with your own history and culture, to try and feel the weight of that past, but not only the fragments that hurt, but the ways in which creativity, happiness and innovation has been also flourishing. After all, we are a country that love a beautiful song and any opportunity to dance. These songs are a link between the past and the present, bridging the old and the new, in a circle that is never ending.
The past is haunting us, and it will never stop haunting us. After all, we can never go back, we can only move forward.
On this, my darling listeners, thank you for listening to this episode of Imaginarium, I hope it was fun and we’ll meet again next month for a new episode and a new deep dive into another lesser known subject of art history and visual culture. If you want to support this podcast, you can do so on patreon @ patreon.com/nadjah. Otherwise, talk about it to anyone you’ll think will like it. And as the youtubers say, like and subscribe, and give us a good rating if you enjoyed. As always, all the relevant images will also be on all of our social platforms @ imaginarium_pod on instagram as well as on twitter. This podcast was written, narrated and produced, by yours truly, Nadjah. On this, I wish you all a very lovely day, evening or night, and I hope to see you again very soon.