A Trip to Nouri Brothers

Discs plucked from the shelves of Paterson, New Jersey's greatest self-proclaimed"shopping center": Nouri Brothers, where new stock butts heads with decades-old, dust-covered gems we didn't even know were available on this continent.

This three-hour tribute features Morocco's Grande Voix d'el Aita, Syria's King of the Oud, some long out-of-print Oum Kalsoum, mid-period Nass El Gihwane and Jil Jilala, nascent raï, jaw-droppingly rare Fayza Ahmed, and much, much more.

Listen to the show in the archives

Khaled | Yal Malblia

Listen to the title song

Reupped, due to the supreme awesomeness that is this album, here.

[Originally posted on April 29, 2012.] A very rare CD of early cassette recordings of what technically should be Cheb Khaled songs from 1979, when he was 18-19 years old. If you only know Khaled's later, over-produced work of the late 80s and 90s, this is going to be a revelation.

Found in Bay Ridge at one of the now-defunct Arabic music shops that used to dot Fifth Avenue below 70th Street.

Asala Yousef | 2008 CD

Listen to the mind-blowing last track

Reupped by reader request in 320 HFS-level KBPS, here.

[Originally posted in May 2010.] On July 4 of 2009, my [now ex-]wife and I spent the day wandering around Atlantic Avenue and Flatbush in Brooklyn, a tad southish of downtown, an area we almost never get to in the normal course of our daily lives.

At one point, we stopped in at an Arabic-run phone card and doo-dad store on Court Street, a couple of doors down from Rashid Music, which is perhaps the oldest, and certainly one of the greatest Arabic music stores in the country. I'm pretty sure that this especially unflattering photograph of me:



was taken in this very phone card and doo-dad shop. Note the hookahs to my right. But, far more importantly, note all of the CDs in glass cases and cassettes against the wall. You're seeing less than 1/3rd of the bounty this place held. Rashid may have the reputation--and the staying power--but the doo-dad place sure did have an impressive heap o' steamin' mess o' music on your choice of polyester film with magnetic coating or polycarbonate plastic.

As I've claimed a number of times on this blog, there are really two kinds of store keeps: (a) those who are puzzled but absolutely thrilled to see people beyond their usual customers interested in "their" music; and (b) those who view such intruders as though they were Vikings, there to do what Vikings are generally known, and not terribly much adored, for doing.

The woman in the back of the phone card and doo-dad place was, happily, one of the friendliest shop keeps I've ever met. She wanted to know what we were doing for Independence Day--not, mind you, July 4, but the next day, July 5, Algerian Independence Day. She, as an Algerian immigrant, had a number of ideas of how we might want to spend AI Day in America, all of them involving cutting out coupons for discounted "whole lamb" from the Arabic newspaper she brought forth and proceeded to spread out on the glass casing housing the CDs. She thought it was nothing short of crucial for us to buy a lamb--"they are so cheap for you if you buy the whole thing at one time"--and invite all of our friends out to whatever park we, as White People, clearly lived within walking distance of. (Prospect Park, duh.) Where, presumably, we'd find a grill big enough to accommodate a whole, dead, skinned lamb.

Our conversation, like a fat summer fly, hovered around lambs and elaborate Independence Day picnics for a solid fifteen minutes, and then I started getting--I'll just fess up to it--a bit impatient, frankly. I mean, we were lying, Nada and I; we were not actually going to celebrate Algerian Independence Day, just as we had not actually celebrated U.S. Independence Day. And, even if we were, it was pretty to super doubtful that we would do so in a way that might involve the purchase of a whole, mid-sized mammal--however cheap.

I tried to steer the conversation over into the realm of music. We had just seen a film starring Abdel Halim Hafez, and one scene in particular, with Hafez in a boat on the Nile with some friends, singing to the object of Hafez's romantic obsession, had been much on our mind. The song was terrific and haunting. We could almost hum it for her. Did she know this movie or song and whether or not the song might be on CD somewhere in the shop?

No, she was Algerian, she reminded us, BUT she had a friend who was Egyptian who knew everything about the movies. Everything! She called her. Within 6 minutes she had our film and song titles (both of which I've since forgotten) and, after flipping through a series of CDs, determined they didn't have the song anywhere in the store.

Did we want the coupon for the lamb?

I asked her to recommend a more-or-less recent CD that she really, really, really loved. She stared at me blankly for a few moments, then suddenly smiled. "Aha!" she said, disappearing beneath the horizon line of the CD case for a bit, then reappearing with the CD you see above.

"Have you heard Asala Yousef?" she asked. I flitted through my memory banks. Asalah Nasri, yes. Yousef? No. "Who is she?" I asked.

And here, things get a bit hazy. I'm almost positive that she said that Asala Yousef was from her home country, Algeria. Like, 89% so. But I'm probably totally wrong about that, as I've found nothing online to suggest this is the case.

There's almost nothing about Asala Yousef online--just links to MP3s and YouTube videos. In one list of famous Druze singers, she's included as a Syrian. In the comments of several YouTube videos, people are claiming she's either Palestinian or Israeli--mostly Israeli. There is at least one YouTube video of her where the person who uploaded it is writing in Hebrew as opposed to Arabic. And, really, that's extremely rare. So it's possible she is Israeli--though she's obviously singing in Arabic. Which is less rare, but still not super common.


Asala Yousef vid, uploaded by Hebrew speaker


Asala Yousef vid, uploaded by Arabic speaker

So, I'm at a loss. Who is Asala Yousef and where does she come from? The music sounds Lebanese to me. Anyone out there know? [Update: Someone out there did know and left the answer in the comments.]

Meanwhile, she's got an incredibly powerful voice and you really should be downloading this shit, since it's free & all and double-since the phone card and doo-dad place where I bought this?

Not there anymore.

Various Artists | Kabylie Chantee

Reupped by reader request in 320 Kick Ass KBPS here.

[Originally posted May 23, 2011.] For a guy whose last name conjures up horrifying visions of torture, torment, agony, anguish, nightmare, misery, suffering and pain, Richard Hell is probably one of the sweetest people I've ever met. I can't remember exactly how we got in touch, although I think it had to do with a fake interview with John Ashbery that I ran in an issue of Readme, an online literary arts journal I edited from 1999-2001.

Whatever the case, we wound up having brunch--yes, brunch--a couple of times in the East Village in the mid-2000s. Richard claimed to be a fan of my comics; I said nothing about how I had always considered him one of the greatest people on earth for having come up with what I still think is the single greatest title of a pop song, ever: "Love Comes in Spurts." Or for having practically single-handedly inventing the whole punk-DIY aesthetic; I mean, I think that had everything to do with my having been an "artist" in the first place.

After we hung out, we exchanged CDs and tapes. He sent me a CD of TIME (his greatest hits along with a live CD) and I sent him a cassette tape of a bunch of music I'd found in bodegas--including some of the stuff I've posted here over the last year or so. Including, significantly, to me, the song you'll hear in the sample below.



I was convinced--*convinced*--that he was going to be bowled over by the raw pop power of that Kabylie song, and write me back, singing my praises as the Greatest Digger On Earth..("OMG! Where did you *find* this gem of etc. etc. etc.?!?") Well, that's not exactly what happened. But I've always remembered his response, which I think was one of the greatest tossed-off bits of philosophy I've ever read: To paraphrase (since I no longer have the e-mail), he basically said that it was incredible to imagine all of us, all over the world, walking around with each of our unique "life-soundtracks" going on in our heads. Something like that, but far more eloquently, if off-the-cuffedly--put.

It was a kind way of saying that my soundtrack wasn't his. But that he certainly respected that I had one. And that it was, finally, so different from his own. Or anyone's.

I admit, part of me was a bit disappointed that he didn't thrill to the Kabylie pop as I did, and still do. Pop music is such that, one wants to know others are not just listening to what you're listening to, but mesmerized by it. It isn't an art of intimacy.

So I offer it to you, anonymous reader and potential downloader. What do you think? What are you liking? What are you disliking? What do you want to hear more of? Let me know ...

As for this CD, I know almost next to nothing about it, other than I got it at Princess Music & Electronics in Bay Ridge, which closed sometime last summer. And that it remains one of my all-time favorite pop CDs, ever.

Cheb Hasni | Hasni

Get it in 320 rockin' kbps here.

As some of the Bodega's regular customers know, your proprietor is a poet. Worse, he is a postmodern American poet. Given his thus obviously tenuous-at-best grasp of reality, why then, why oh Sir or Madam Customer, will you bother to listen to him when he hands you some long-winded BS explanation, circling around ye olde tired notions of gender and genre, class and (pre- and post-) colonialism, race and rhizomatic structure, as to why all of these rai songs are beginning to, um, sort of sound the same?

YOU: But I didn't say any--

BODEGA POP: I'm sorry. Are you an expert on rai, now? [Stares into your eyes with a questioning-yet-condescending look.] More like ham on rai. [Deep chuckle.]

YOU: But--

BODEGA POP: Shush, now. There's someone I'd like you meet. Sir or Madam Customer, I give you Ms. Helena Blavatsky.

HELENA BLAVATSKY: Accordeengk to my Weekee-peedee page, I was small gorl of 10 years when thees, my family, retorns to Ukraine and I contract zee herpeez.

YOU: I don't--

BODEGA POP: Is this your blog? I'm sorry, Helena; please, continue.

HELENA BLAVATSKY: Many of people zey tell me "Zis rai, she sounds always zee same to me. Which song is deefernt from next? How tell?" [Pause.] How tell, you are asking of me? [Wry smile.] To you I am saying there is no telling. Is like zee fonny accent, no? All blend into one, like zee single fonny accent. Could be Rohshan, could be Portugeesa, who is counting? Why count? Is not enoff zer is fonny accent or rai song in forst place? Why you need to know deeference?

[To be continued ...]

Cheb Hasni | Talghiyabek Ya Ghozazi

Get it here. 

Get other Hasni albums here.

Cheb Hasni | Tehroub Omri

I've never understood why Algerian Rai never took off as one of the hot, new "world musics du jour" here in the U.S. the way that, say, Afro-Cuban, Reggae or even Bulgarian music once did. (I'd probably never have had this conversation, if it had.) Not that I particularly care one way or the other, but it's my suspicion that, if it had taken off, we'd have seen more books in English than just Marc Schade-Poulsen's Men and Popular Music in Algeria: The Social Significance of Raï.

Born Hasni Chakroun in Oran in 1968, the year after the last French forces left the Mers El Kébir naval base, Cheb Hasni recorded more than 100 cassettes worth of songs before Islamic extremists assassinated him outside his parents' home in Oran in 1994.

That same year: 

• American-Israeli mass-murderer Baruch Goldstein senselessly takes the lives of 29 Palestinians; he is beaten to death by surviving victims and his grave subsequently becomes a pilgrimage site for Israeli extremists
• Hutus hack more than 800,000 Tutsis to death while the rest of us watch Friends, snicker at Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan jokes and mourn the self-inflicted death of heroin addict, Kurt Kobain.

Get the album here.

Cheb Hasni | Menayfa

Get it here. 

Read more about the legendary Cheb Hasni and grab more albums this way.

Listen to "Sabrra" 

Cheb Hasni | Rani Khlitha Lik Amana

Grab the album.

Listen to the title song:



See previous posts this weekend to read about Hasni and to pick up other albums.

Cheb Hasni + Cheba Zahouania | El Baraka

Pick it up here.

In the summer of 1987, after gigging at wedding parties and cabarets, Cheb Hasni, whose star was clearly on the rise, was given the opportunity of a lifetime: a chance to record with Cheba Zahouania. 

Zahouania had made a huge splash the year before recording "My Uncle, Oh, My Uncle" with Cheb Hamid, who along with Cheb Khaled and Cheb Mami, were  modernizing Algerian rai and riding the last big wave of the cassette culture revolution sweeping in new generations of pop from North Africa to South Asia. Zahouania was, in a word, hot.

Hasni and Zahouania's duet, "El Baraka" ("Lady Luck"), did Z and Hamid's "Uncle" one better: its outrageous lyrics, bright-n-chunky rhythm guitar and Casio-tastic trills and fills wormed their way into the ears of over a million Algerian youth, ensuring a bright future for the pair as international superstars.

I have no idea how faithful this CD, which I almost certainly found at a now-closed Algerian bodega on Steinway Street in Astoria, is to the original cassette in terms of the track list. The recordings themselves sound stressed and occasionally cut out, or allow moments of overlay, as though whoever recorded this did so with the jack only tenuously plugged in. It was clearly digitized directly from cassette rather than any (no doubt long gone) master tapes.

Spotty though its quality may be at times, it is the only copy I have ever seen or heard of this history-making music.

Here's a translation of "El Baraka," for which a very kind reader, Mark, supplied the following:

LADY LUCK

We made love in a tumbledown shack
It was me who took her, the others can fuck off
When you’re drunk you get these ideas
When you’ve been drinking, you get these ideas

Tough luck for me but not for my friends
Leave me to my problems, I can’t stand any more
Tonight he’ll sleep at mine
Oh, you know this night won’t end

I’ll telephone her and she’ll come tomorrow
I want a real brown-skin girl, not a suntanned one

We get together nicely and we have a good time
There is but one God and the passion keeps growing
Tonight we’ll drink at mine

Tough luck for me, but for her, she was sent by fate
I won’t get over her, I’m burnt and she’s made up her mind

Have pity on me, I'm shattered
We stayed up all night and we’re dead, get a car to fetch us

I picked her up in Gambetta and it’s none of your business 
Have pity on me if I say too much and I’m wrong 
We’re drunk, bring a boat to get us away
We got drunk or else forgotten

I’m with the people I like
Drunk we fell down, get a car to fetch us
We’re noble and free and we’re// good company
And eloquence is found among people of wisdom


Listen to a Hasni and Zahouania sing this legendary duet:

Cheb Hasni | Gualou Hasni Met

Grab Gualou Hasni Met ("They Say Hasni Is Dead") here.

[Originally posted in 2010; reupped at 320kbps with cover embedded.]

Algerian rai superstar Cheb Hasni was born in Oran to working class parents in 1968 and assassinated 26-1/2 years later in 1994. Read more about him and grab another album here.

I found this CD--my favorite of Hasni's--in an Algerian bodega on Steinway Street in Queens years before I moved to this neighborhood.

"Do you have any Cheb Hasni?" I asked the guy behind the counter.

"You are Algerian?" he countered. It wasn't really a question.

"No, why?"

"Ah, you are French!" he spat triumphantly, as he dug through the piles of CDs behind him, pulling out the one you see above and setting it down on the counter.

"If I'm French, why are you speaking to me in English?" I asked.

He looked momentarily confused, then a sort of sly "gestalt of recognition" passed over his face. He smiled widely. "For you? Four dollars."

"How much are CDs normally?" I asked.

He waited a bit before answering. "Four dollars."


Hasni in the studio

Cheb Hasni | Sid El Kadi

Get it here.

Born Hasni Chakroun on February 1, 1968, in Oran, Algeria, Cheb Hasni dreamed of becoming a soccer player, a "goal" that was abandoned (chortle) as he became increasingly interested in music. Or, as Google Chrome has translated the French website where one of his many mini-biographies resides, "He turned to another passion, music mome, we already knew in my corner because I still had deployed his throat, threw the satchel off is in a lively by night."

Lively by day as well--hell, lively any time one lends one's ears to such sweet throat deployment, nein? 

Ach, forgive me; it's late, I've worked very hard all week. So. You know the story of Hasni, right? After working the wedding circuit a while someone hooks him up to record with Chaba Zahouania in the late 80s and he becomes an overnight sensation, going on to record some 200 cassettes, stuffed with Casio-tastic tales of debauchery, of women, of drinking, and then, in 1992, rumors of his death sweep northern Africa, he gets wind of them, records Gualou Hasni Met ("They say Hasni died"), then, eerily, creepily, soon after, at the height of his now international fame, he's assassinated outside of his parents' home in Oran in 1994 while still in his mid-20s.

I have no idea at what point in his staggeringly short but super-brilliant career he recorded this album, but it's one of my favorites and, as exhausted as I am, I love it so much I want you to have it before I crash.


Listen to "Sarhak":

Cheikha Rimitti | Source of Rai

Listen to "La Camel"

Get it all here.

An absolutely sublime collection by the legendary grandmother of rai. Born in rural Algeria in May of 1923, orphaned at an early age, Rimitti began singing with a troupe when she was 15 years old. She recorded her first records in the 50s, scoring a hit and gaining notoriety with "Charrag, Gatta" (the 9th song in this collection), which implores young women to lose their virginity. ("Charrag, Gatta" means something like "tear, lacerate.") While we think of such a thing as remarkably brave (even suicidal) in an Islamic country, it bears reminding how depraved musicians and performers in Algeria were already considered. Until a later religious awakening, Rimitti could be said to have been playing into the stereotype of the sheikha.

Over the course of 50 years, until her death in 2006, she recorded more than 400 cassettes, 300 singles and 50 78s, essentially creating the model for what is thought of as modern rai. Read more about her here. 

Found in Paris many years ago, perhaps at the Institut du Monde Arabe, but more likely at a used CD place somewhere.

Warda | Necessary to Say Goodbye

Get it here.

Here's the third and last Warda album that I have, the bad Google translation of which seems, sadly, ironically, all-too-fitting. RIP, Warda. (Read more about her and get other albums, below.)

Warda | I Will Give You All My Life, My Love

Get it here.

If you haven't heard, the great Arabic singer Warda died Thursday evening at her home in Cairo. She was 72 (some reports say 71) years old. Pick up another album and read a bit more about her life in yesterday's post, below (where, if nothing else, you'll appreciate the irony of this album's title).

Watch a truly mind-blowing performance by Warda:

Warda | Layaly El Ghorba

Get it here.

This week in the U.S., we lost Donna Summer; in the Arab world, they lost Warda, one of the greatest singers of the region.

Warda was born in France in 1939 to an Algerian father and Lebanese mother. She started her career very young--some reports suggest as early as 11 years old--singing at a club in Paris owned by her father. In 1958, the family moved to Beirut and with Algerian independence, Warda moved to Algeria, where she married and gave up her singing career for 10 years. In 1972, she was asked by the president to perform for the 10th anniversary of Algeria's independence, which she did, much to the chagrin of her husband; they divorced soon after. She dedicated the rest of her life to music, settling down with a composer in Cairo, where she died last night of a heart attack at the age of 72.

Arabic music scholar Daniel Caux: "How are we to define Warda's specificity which is so much easier to feel than to put into words? I think Warda plays on a specific emotional range combining successfully strength and frailty: on the one side will-power, self assertion, even challenge; on the other side sweetness and a tenderness implying some kind of vulnerability. But the paradox is that this vulnerability acts as a strength on the emotional level since it moves and fascinates us. In turn, and sometimes simultaneously, her voice gaining strength sings out to the whole audience. In doing so she never overstrains her voice to the extreme but she sooner changes its texture. Becoming more diffuse, her voice widens subtly till it fills the whole space."

Watch and listen to a short version of this song:

Cheb Khaled | Ana Dellali

Another great early Cheb Khaled collection, most likely found in Bay Ridge, although I seem to recall having picked up at least one Khaled CD from this no-longer-there Algerian bodega on Steinway Street (where I got this). If you've stopped by the Bodega this week you already know it's All 70s-80s Cheb Khaled Week--I think I have two more CDs to go after this one, so stop by again if you you like what you're hearing.

There's some problem with my Divshare account; I can't upload. Which also means I can't make one of those song sample thingies. So, I found a video of the title song if you want to listen before you grab.

Listen to the title song of this CD

Get it all here.

Cheb Khaled | Best of Vols. 1-2

Listen to "Chaba" from Vol. 1

Listen to "Dalali" from Vol. 2

Get both at once here.

Contrary to how it looks, this is not a collection of Khaled's late-80s to present greatest hits. It's pure early to mid-80s Cheb Khaled, including raw versions of many songs that were re-recorded and spruced up for later albums--for instance, "Chaba," which you can listen to above. If you only know the Don Was-produced (and later) Khaled, you'll definitely want to check this out (as well as this and this.)

I'll be posting everything I have of Cheb Khaled from the 70s and 80s over the next few days, so check back tomorrow evening if you're a fan.

Cheb Khaled | Hada Raykoum

Given the response to the posting of Khaled's 1979 Yal Malblia yesterday, I hereby declare this Cheb Khaled Week at the old Bodega. Every night after work I'll be posting another great 70s or 80s collection by the King of Rai, stopping just shy of 1988's Kutche ... not because I don't like that album (I love it), but because most people visiting this blog will already be familiar with the later Khaled stuff. 

Although the recording in yesterday's post predates this one by some six years, it's this album--Hada Raykoum--that is generally considered to be Cheb Khaled's first studio recording. The sound on this copy is not the greatest--unlike everything else I'll be posting this week, it didn't originate with me; I found it online somewhere and I have no idea whether it was ripped from LP, cassette or CD. 

But, like I say, it's considered to be his first studio album, so it's sort of obligatory. And, yes, it does indeed rawk. You'll want to let the sample song below go on for 30-40 seconds to see what it's really going to do--although it starts out sounding a bit tame, it quickly winds itself into brilliantly fucked up, off-kilter territory the likes of which you've probably not yet experienced.

Listen to "Hadak Hobi Laoual"

Get it all here.

Cheb Mami | Douni El Bladi

Listen to the title track

Get it all here

This 1996 CD from early in the Prince of Rai's career completely blew my head off the first time I heard it after plucking it from the now-gone Princess Music electronics and Arabic music store on 5th Avenue in Brooklyn's Bay Ridge.

Shockingly, in 2009, the wildly popular singer was sentenced to five years in a French prison for allegedly forcing a former lover to undergo an abortion. (He was released on parole in March of this year.)

His last CD was released five years ago, in 2006; he says he plans to continue performing and recording, though I don't know whether he's begun to do so yet and/or how audiences will respond to him today.