Khaled - Kenza (1999)

It's an amazing cosmic coincidence that I wind up listening to Kenza immediately after listening to Shalimar. To my biased white boy ears the music is superficially similar. The tones and styles are what I would stereotypically label "middle eastern music." But relying on my own limited musical sense is really unfair in this case.

While Shalimar was the soundtrack to a 70s Bollywood film, Kenza belongs to a musical style known as raï. On the surface it feels like the Arabic equivalent of pop music. It's got a beat you can't help but dance to, a full arrangement of instruments, clean and sincere vocals, and a generally bright disposition. Sort of like George Michael but not in English and with more than just cheesy synthesizers. It turns out raï is more like an Arabic version of afrobeat. Afrobeat draws heavily from funk and groove music to get you to dance to it, but also tends to be infused with political messages, particularly about how much the ruling military government sucks monkey butt.

Khaled's raï is very poppy. You could easily see most of these melodies used as a backing track for Bruno Mars or whoever is still trying to recapture the "glory" of 1980s Americana. I'm sure if I spoke any of the languages Khaled uses for his vocals the music would sound very different. As it is I can't get the full charge of the message involved, so I just hear mostly fun and sunny Arabic pop music.

This album includes a cover of "Imagine", a song originally by John Lennon. It might be several years until I get around to listening to John Lennon's Imagine, so maybe I should rant about how much I hate this song now. On the other hand it's not really Khaled's fault. I guess I should save the vitriol for the one who really deserves it.

Kenza isn't a bad choice if you're looking for something cheesy, fun, and ethnic to jump around to and don't mind looking slightly foolish to your Arabic-speaking friends. Though I supposed in my Zombie review that Fela Kuti might have appreciated people getting down to his messages of how oppressive his country was. Maybe that's also the case with Kenza. Anyhoo, for a guy like me Kenza is pretty meh. I didn't hate it but it was really long and didn't do much more than play extended poppy jams that I couldn't understand. 2 stars.