Rai music

Raï
Stylistic origins	Arab music, as popular and traditional Bedouin "desert music".Spanish, including al-andalus, zendani and melhun
Cultural origins	1930's/ Late 19th centuryOran, Algeria
Typical instruments	Gaspa, guellal (traditional); drum machine, synthesizer, sequencer (modern)
Subgenres
Bedoui citadinisé – Lover's raï
Fusion genres
Wahrani – Pop raï – Raï rock – Raï'n'B

Raï (IPA: [rɑi]; Arabic: راي‎‎) is a form of Algerian folk music that which dates back to the 1920s. Singers of Raï are called cheb (or shabab, i.e. young) as opposed to sheikh (shaykh, i.e. old), the name given to Chaabi singers. The tradition arose in cities like Oran, Relizane, Mostaganem, Chlef, Aïn Témouchent and Sidi-Bel-Abbès, primarily among the poor. Traditionally sung by men, by the end of the 20th century, female singers had become common. The lyrics of Raï have concerned social issues such as disease and the policing of European colonies that affected native populations.

Raï is a type of Algerian popular music that arose in the 1920s in the port city of Oran and that self-consciously ran counter to accepted artistic and social mores. It appealed to young people who sought to modernize the traditional Islamic values and attitudes. Regional, secular, and religious drum patterns, melodies, and instruments were blended with Western electric instrumentation. Raï emerged as a major world-music genre in the late 1980s.

In the years just following World War I, the Algerian city of Oran—known as “little Paris”—was a melting pot of various cultures, full of nightclubs and cabarets; it was the place to go for a bawdy good time. Out of this milieu arose a group of Male and Female Muslim singers called chioukhs and cheikhates, who rejected the refined, classical poetry of traditional Algerian music. Instead, to the accompaniment of pottery drums and end-blown flutes, they sang about the adversity of urban life in a raw, gritty, sometimes vulgar, and inevitably controversial language that appealed especially to the socially and economically disadvantaged.The cheikhates further departed from tradition in that they performed not only for women but also and especially for men.

The music performed was called raï. It drew its name from the Algerian Arabic word raï (“opinion” or “advice”), which was typically inserted—and repeated—by singers to fill time as they formulated a new phrase of improvised lyrics. By the early 1940s Cheikha Rimitti el Reliziana had emerged locally as a musical and linguistic luminary in the raï tradition, and she continued to be among the music’s most prominent performers into the 21st century.

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Wikipedia