ORIENTALISM

"The popular music of North Africa exists precariously in the fissure of post-colonial, postmodern in-betweenness. Popular musicians sing against the institutions of the politically powerful, yet depend upon the connections of such institutions to the former colonizing nations, especially the recording industries of Paris and London. (...) No other North African popular music has secured a place as palpably in the postmodern imagination as has raï, which means something like 'a way of seeing' or 'an opinion'. Raï is the music of the urban disenfranchised in North Africa, especially in Algeria and eastern Morocco.


The Fifth Element - real. Luc Besson, 1997

We might also interpret the attraction of raï as stereotipically orientalist. (...) As world music, raï evokes the marketplace of the Muslim city, the harem, the court, and the social gathering where forbidden substances are used. When the producers of the 1997 science-fiction movie The Fifth Element needed a soundtrack to accompany Bruce Willis as he raced through the confused fantasy of the futuristic metropolis, a song by perhaps the most famous raï star, Khaled, fitted the bill. The jumble that raï has absorbed becomes the East writ large. In the mediated world imagined through world beat, the producers of raï have succumbed to the allure of full-blown orientalism" (A Very Short Introdution to World Music de Philip V. Bohlman)

(2008)