Since the namesake for this blog is French/North African, let’s start with a little North African vibe. We’ll start with the Orchestre National de Barbes.

Here is the Orchestre National de Barbes singing one of their favorite songs, Zawiya (or, Sufi corner): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5CJXQXKM-U

Orchestre National de Barbes. http://www.orchestrenationaldebarbes.com/

The Orchestre National de Barbes (ONB) is a group of French musicians founded in 1995 by bassist and composer Youcef Boukella. Inspired by North African Rai music, the group is open to mixing a great number of musical genres, including : Arabic shaabi (popular), salsa, reggae, North African Gnaoua, jazz and even rock in order to achieve a new sound.

Of multi-cultural origins, the members of the group come from a wide range of nationalities including : Algerian, Moroccan, Tunisian and Portuguese. The group consistently performs both inside and outside of France and is known both within Europe and outside of it.

Before there was Orchestre National de Barbes, however, there had to be others.

See this article:
http://www.rfimusique.com/musiquefr/articles/065/article_15483.asp

Lili Labassi sang in the 1930s:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6p0thqhhw5o

Labassi’s son, Robert Castel, became a popular French (Algerian) comedian and musician in France in the late 1950s: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-2yZFW_c68

Bob Azzam’s rendition of “Ya Mustapha” was heard all over Europe in 1960.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNbrEPWnYCg

In the 1960s, Middle Eastern-influenced music became popular in America, thanks, in part, to Rosemary Clooney’s “Come ona My House,” written by two Armenian-Americans, Ross Bagdasarian and William Saroyan. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlG19En0PS8. Just as it did in France, with the success of singers like Jacqueline Taieb. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZjExxr2S_c


Shortly thereafter, major stars in France like Nana Mouskuri and Charles Aznavour began singing non-traditionally French-type songs to a French audience.

Nana Mouskuri, Danny Kaye and Harry Belafonte sing the Greek classic Nina Nai in 1966:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CL9VcdZjig

Charles Aznavour sings Deux Guitares (a French version of a Russian gypsy song) in 1972:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqpUiR56sWE

The 1990s, however, really paved the way for the Orchestre National de Barbes.

MC Solaar, an immigrant from Senegal, rose to the top of the charts with his African-influenced hip-hop hit bouge de la. After that, all doors were open. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4iZ_eQiSTY

Rachid Taha, a French-Algerian musician, his music is influenced by many different styles such as rock, techno and rai. While living in Lyon, Taha met Mohammed and Mokhtar Amini. The three of them, Rachid, Djamel Dif and Eric Vaquer would later form the band "Carte De séjour" (Green Card) and record their first maxi Album Carte De Séjour in 1983. Their first LP Rhoromanie, came out in 1984. Their second and last LP entitled Ramsa (Five) was released in 1986 and included their famous and ironic cover of Douce France, originally sung by Charles Trenet.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U12Wp5LAGXA

Cheb Khaled -- Khaled Hadj Brahim -- is a singer-songwriter and musician born in Sidi-El-Houari in Algeria. He began recording in his early teens under the name Cheb Khaled and has become the most internationally famous Algerian singer. His popularity has earned him the unofficial title "King of Raï". His most famous songs are "Aicha" and "Didi".

In 1992, after dropping "Cheb" from his name, he released his self titled album Khaled, which established his reputation as a superstar in France and among maghrebian emigrants around the world and sold over a million copies in European alone, an estimated 7 million worldwide, and he scored an even bigger hit with his love song Aicha in 1996.

Didi by Khaled:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEGDMP0BP8g

1,2,3 Soleils: Abdel Kader (performed in Paris in 1999)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCpEzRTHpBY

Back to ONB

First, let’s break down the name. The Orchestre National de France is a symphony orchestra that is linked to Radio France and has been in existence since 1933. Radio France is a French public service radio broadcaster that has been in existence since 1922

What is Barbes?
Barbes is an area of Paris named after Armand Barbès, a 19th-century French politician, surnamed the Bayard of Democracy; imprisoned in 1848, liberated in 1854; he expatriated himself voluntarily and died at the the Hague.

The Bouleveard de Rochechouard and the Boulevard the Barbes meet at the foot of Montmartre. This area has a distinct atmosphere, where the different nationalities of Paris, Algerian, Moroccan,Senegalese, Beninois, Antillian are evident.

Why are there Algerians and Moroccans living in France?
In 1830, the French invaded Algeria and expanded over North Africa. During the following 132 years, Algeria was a French colony. In 1962 Algeria obtained independence from France.

Morocco became a Franco-Spanish protectorate in 1912, but with an Alaouite sultan, chosen by the French. The French controlled the central and southern areas while the Spanish controlled north. Tangiers was an international zone and Rabat the capital. The second world war weakened the position of the French and there were as strong movement for independence. To control this, the French exiled the sultan Mohamad V to Corsica but only succeeded in strengthening the independence movement. Eventually the French had to bring Mohamed V back and he became king in 1956 when independence was declared. King Mohamed V died suddenly in 1961 and was succeeded by his son, Hassan II, who introduced a Social, Democratic and Constitutional monarchy, with elections for the parliament every 6 years but power remaining with the king. The present king, Mohamad VI, succeeded king Hassan II on his death in 1999, has continued his fathers progressive reforms of health, education, and economics.

From a paper by Karima Laachir:
Migrants from Africa to France after the Second World War were predominantly from North Africa. Immigration from Sub-Saharan Africa has always remained relatively small in comparison with that from North Africa. African immigration to France is strongly linked to the history of French colonialism; the French depended heavily on African troops from the colonies in the two World Wars; most of the soldiers were repatriated after the war and only a small number stayed.

However, it was in the post-war period that North African immigration to France was activated because of the shortages of labour within France and the enduring effects of French colonial policies in the colonies, which had pushed the peasants to proletarianisation and poverty. France, however, has refused to consider the phenomenon of North and West African immigration as being historically bound to colonialism. When France ordered the stopping of labour immigration in 1973 (following racist attacks on the workers in Marseilles), family reunion started and thus a new phase in the history of immigration began.

The immigrants and their families were located in very poor housing conditions in the form of bidonvilles and then transferred to cités de transit ending finally in HLM banlieues on the periphery of French society with more or less the same poor housing conditions. If the immigrants were considered for a long time as a temporary foreign labour force and thus had to be kept outside political and social affairs, the most recent realisation of their settlement in the host countries has given rise to a ‘sociological approach’ that still grants them a marginal place in society.

The immigrants and their descendants are used to ‘strengthen’ the coherence of the main community and thus reinforce the dialectic of proximity and distance, which situates the immigrants and their descendants (who are French citizens) in a position of social foreignness and territorial exteriority. A more thorough scholarship that focuses on the cultural and social domination of the immigrants has appeared, questioning and challenging the French fragile republican values on integration, and issues like national identity, alterity and racism and how the figure of the ‘Maghrebian immigrant’ raises the issues of social relations based on difference. However, the cultural specificity of North African diaspora has been little studied until now as it has been constructed in terms of the ‘double culture’, that is, a culture that cannot integrate with the French one because of their irreducible differences.

The emergence of Islam in the public sphere has made Islamic rituals visible and thus has raised the idea of its incompatibility with French ‘secular’ values. For a long time, the North African immigrants have remained faceless and invisible in French society. But by the 1980s, the invisibility of the single male migrant workers of the 1950s and 1960s was strongly challenged by their descendants or so-called “Beur” who have been marking the public space with their various artistic, literary, political and social interventions.

The North African Diasporic population or the Franco-Maghrebians are still perceived, like their parents, as immigrants, which implies the exclusion of these young people from French society, as they are seen as having the same status as their parents though they have not migrated from anywhere.

They are defined by their belonging to the context of their parents’ immigration and thus linked to the history of their parents, which constitutes a part of their identity but not the only element of it. This is done for the purpose of classifying them in the same economic roles as their parents (never to climb the social ladder) and thus denies their ‘Frenchness’. The debate as to whether they can be integrated into French society is still ongoing, while most, if not all of them, believe that they already constitute a part of that society.

http://www.best.uni-mainz.de/modules/AMS/article.php?storyid=96

So, what does it mean to have a group like ONB active and popular in France?

Not only does it mean that singers like Faudel and other traditional Rai vocalists have a place, it also means that collaboration between musicians has created a space within which French musicians of all ethnic backgrounds can communicate and create.

It also means that people are, at least sometimes, living the way the music sounds:
http://jta.org/news/article/2009/09/22/1008042/in-one-paris-neighborhood-jews-and-muslims-live-as-they-did-in-n-africa-together