I went to see Rachid Taha in concert last night.
http://rachidtaha.artistes.universalmusic.fr/
Rachid's site by his music publisher
This guy is clearly something special and his band was
top-notch. The audience, which must surely have included
every Franco-Algerian in Los Angeles, couldn't have loved
this guy any more devotedly. Gifted, impish, charismatic,
swaggering in black leather pants, sunglasses and a beret,
Rachid has got rai bad-boy poete maudit rockstardom
visa-stamped all over him.
Rachid was moaning in fragmentary English about his
"jet lag" early in the show. About an hour later,
oh dear, the underground pharmaceuticals were gaining the
upper hand. In the midst of his thunderous,
polyrhythmic noise Rachid was collapsing like a beer can
under a French cop's boot; the bass beat was the
only thing holding him up. A number of comely
girls booty-rushed the stage to party down with him
in fine Maghrebi belly-dancing fashion, but Rachid was
knee-buckling, stumbling, dropping his mike....
For all his charisma and impressive pipes, Rachid's a cavernous,
sunken-chested, pasty little guy... After slogging through
the last numbers of his set, he more or less swooned
into the capacious lap of a suntanned Californian beach
babe. It was something to see this tenderhearted multiculti pop fan
gamely trying to pry the artiste up off the stage of the
Knitting Factory as if he were fresh highway roadkill...
She should have ditched her sequins and put on nurse's whites.
I do hope Rachid merely stumbled over a patch of bad powder
when he's far from his usual sources, but to judge by
the dour looks on his bandmate's faces, that was no uncommon
occurrence. What a shame. In a world as troubled as this one, a
hot crossover rock-Moslem act could be bigger than Kurt Cobain.
