Taha delivers a vivid manifesto with a groove
Rachid Taha, the Algerian-born singer whose music melds North African rai pop and its older brother, chaabi, with funk, rock, and the pulse of techno, is -- to put it mildly -- a character. Thursday night at the Paradise, Taha was an apparition of seedy charisma: a crooked, irresistible figure in a garish silk shirt, leather trousers, and orange-tinted sunglasses, grooving incessantly, leering from beneath greased curls, and seducing the crowd with his half-cocked polyglot banter. ''I love you Boston tonight, you know? Viva Zapata! Faire l'amour! Discotheque for you!"
Taha is famously outspoken in his politics. ''Twenty Arab governments . . . 20 fascist states!" he spat at one point, but -- the language of choice for his longer harangues being French -- the non-Francophones in the audience (this writer included) missed the finer points of his critique. No matter: The gist of it is in his music, which is a vivid, visceral manifesto for multiculturalism and the free traffic of ideas.
Taha and his band -- featuring traditional North African lute and percussion, a sampler, an electric guitar, and two more pairs of leather trousers -- have found a way to lock the sinuous, repetitive rhythms of rai into a more recognizably Western funk-rock, without sacrificing any of the older music's fire. Tasteful blips of techno rebounded through the mix as Taha harnessed centuries-old energies in the service of his pan-global pop celebration.
The band members were all smiles, the guitarist even essaying some Hendrixian gimmickry by playing with his teeth, and Taha seemed to appreciate every one of them. He kissed his drummer several times.
Taha's voice is a somewhat ragged and abused instrument -- he smoked and drank copiously onstage -- but his croaking delivery had a power all its own, roughening his band's slicker workouts with the rasp of experience. The audience ate him up. ''You want to love with me? Eh! There you are!" he said.
By the end of the long set, the lateness of the hour had tightened the crowd to a fervent knot of supporters; women climbed onstage and belly danced, and young men arose to trade vocals with him. Taha himself suddenly looked exhausted, almost ill, and was helped offstage -- only to return, hair slicked back (''I am Valentino!") for a jaw-dropping version of the Clash's ''Rock the Casbah," with verses in Arabic. Somewhere the spirit of Joe Strummer was soaring.
