Cheb Mami was born Khelifati Mohamed in a small town near Oran, the Mediterranean port where rai music originated in the 1930s. Like his father before hime, Mami took a job in a factory. He was a welder who sang at weddings on weekends. But after he sang on the broadcast Les Voix et les Jeunes (Voices and Youth) in 1982, Mami's welding days were over. He soon began recording cassettes and building a career as "The Prince of Rai," his elder Khaled being already the crowned "King of Rai." Rai, which means "advice" or "opinion," was becoming very controversial in Algeria at the time, because it demystified the allegories of Arab poetry and speaks directly--mostly about love. As Algeria's political situation unraveled violently in the late `80s, Mami, like many rai singers, went to France and began building an audience among the second-generation North Africans there.

Mami's three international releases of the `90s--Let Me Rai (1990), Saida (1994), and Meli Meli (1997)--reveal his growing confidence as a composer and arranger, and his ever expanding stylistic vocabulary. His appropriation of rap on Saida was particularly significant. "Before that," says Mami, "young people in France listened to a little rai, and a lot of rap. Saida was the first time rai and rap were mixed. Now there are young rap singers in France who try to imitate us, the rai singers, and that is very encouraging."

Still more encouraging is the fact that today, rai is no longer seen as a pariah art form back in Algeria. In 1999, Mami performed there for the first time in over eight years. During that period of bloody political and religious turmoil, writers, journalists, and rai artists, including singer Cheb Hasni and producer Rachid Baba, were brutally murdered by extremists. Mami simply refused to go there and sing amid an atmosphere of death, despite many invitations from concert promoters. Now, attitudes are changing. "It's a little like rock music here," says Mami. "Rock music spoke directly and that upset people. But it became popular because young people liked it, and people ended up accepting it. That's the way it was with rai. Now it has changed to the point where the president and his ministers say that rai is Algerian culture."

Meli Meli proved a breakthrough album for Mami as it caught the ear of British pop superstar Sting. Among the album's clever adaptations of rap, reggae, funk, flamenco, was the song "Azwaw," perhaps the most satisfying Afro-Celtic hybrid to come along yet. The track features bagpipes. "Bagpipes!" Sting told Afropop Worldwide, "He has my culture in there! Now I respect pure ethnic music, but I don't necessarily find it very interesting. What I like is a melange." Sting soon "melanged" with Mami, inviting him to collaborate first on a song, "Desert Rose," and then on a series of concerts that ultimately included the Grammy Awards and a free concert in New York's Central Park in 2000, and the Super Bowl in 2001. An open-minded fellow and a confirmed modernizer, Mami is keen to see rai become an international idiom, like reggae. Or rap. But he has a caution about rap. "There's negative rap and positive rap," he says. "Negative rap is the guy saying, `The police are killing us in the streets!' In negative rap, there is no future. We just talk about the present. I don't like that, I like the rap in France that talks about improving life, that says, `Our parents were oppressed, but we don't have to live like that.' We understand life. There are people who succeed, like [North African soccer star] Zidane, who is the toast of the football world. That's the stuff that gives you oxygen."

Contributed by: Banning Eyre