bellious pop style called rai, meaning "opinion," has dominated Algeria's youth market since the '70s. Rai has origins in Bedouin oral traditions, in the music of Berbers who moved from the Algerian mountains to the cities of Oran and Algiers, and in Andalusian music that came to North African ports after the Moors were thrown out of Spain in 1492. By the 1930s, these elements had coalesced in a style called wahrani championed by cheikhas--female singers--in the bars of Algeria's "Little Paris," the coastal city of Oran. Cheikhas voiced the complaints of working class people in French colonial Algeria, upsetting officials. They also sang openly about sex, upsetting conservative mujahedin rebels. But there was no stopping the rai movement. The terms cheb and chebba--young man and young woman--put an informal spin on the more dignified musical honorifics cheikh and cheikha of wahrani music. Algeria's bold '70s rai singers dispensed with decorum and sang songs that proved shockingly outspoken for Algerians. Ever since then, Algerian pop rai has produced a long line of seductive chebs and sassy chebbas. Some of the top artists--Khaled, Cheb Mami, and Rachid Taha--have set up permanent homes in France, and now France is producing its own rai artists, notably the young Faudel, the first French-born singer to make his mark on the genre.

Meanwhile, Morocco now hosts its own active rai scene. In contrast to the roots groups, rai singers like Bouchra, Cheb Achab and Bouchebcheb gleefully embrace modernity--cheesy keyboards, grunge guitar, reggae organ, sizzling drum machines, and often disco's pumping beat.