Meet the Muslim Madonna | This is London
Meet the Muslim Madonna | This is London
Meet the Muslim Madonna
By Jane Cornwell, Evening Standard
15 March 2006
People sneered and spat at the young Muslim Souad Massi when she first performed in public. She knew that if she wanted to be a singer, she would have to leave her native Algeria.
Now, after six years in France and three albums later, she has won the French equivalent of a Brit award for her sensual songs with social conscience.
And Britain is catching on too. The next prize she collects will be a BBC World Music Award (Middle East and North Africa category) in next month’s ceremony at Brixton Academy.
At the event, regarded as world music’s gig of the year, she will perform songs from her latest album, Mesk Elil (on the Wrasse label).
Initially billed as an Arabic Joan Baez or Tracy Chapman – even the Madonna of the Maghreb – Massi has come into her own.
“I’m a global citizen now,” she says, sitting back on a couch in her Paris record company offices, her sixmonthold daughter, Inji (“Emerald” in Persian) next door with a child-minder.
Make-up free, effortlessly gorgeous in jeans and heels, Massi is friendlier – and far more amusing – than her often sombre music suggests.
“The first 12 months in Paris were the hardest,” she says in her heavily accented English. “People were suspicious, but I still felt safer and freer. Here I have more room to express myself, to tell the truth.”
Her beautiful carillon-like voice and her wildly eclectic mix of North African, French and Sixties folk-rock influences (as well as country, flamenco, even heavy metal) have been deservedly praised. But there are other new, unwelcome pressures. “People want me to be a spokesperson for
Muslim women,” she says, her doe-eyes flashing. “It’s a heavy burden. I’m non-practising. But wherever I go in the West, it is always the first thing that I’m asked about.”
Massi’s carefree stage persona – strolling on in jeans and T-shirt, with hair loose, guitar over shoulder – can be confusing to those who regard Muslim women as subservient, controlled, covered-up. “I’m a cosmopolitan artist who happens to be a Muslim woman. Do people constantly ask Western singers about their religion?” She shrugs. “My faith is in the background, not the foreground.”
Yet it was precisely this attitude that made Massi’s life in Algeria so precarious. Though the North African country is currently struggling towards reconciliation, back in the Nineties it was racked by an ideological crossfire between the military and Islamic fundamentalists.
Life wasn’t easy for a jeans-wearing, guitar-toting girl with a fine line in socially aware ballads and a growing public profile, especially one with a habit of stopping, mid-concert, to discuss her country’s problems . (“To remain silent would mean the terrorists had won.”) She was banned from the airwaves.
There were anonymous phone calls, death threats. In 1999, after being sacked from her job as a town planner, she was invited to play at the Femmes d’Algérie festival in France. Offered a recording contract, and having met her future husband, Mohammed (the Moroccan-born owner of a French restaurant), she stayed. “How could I not?” she grins.
It is not easy being a professional female musician, she continues. “But I’ve always had a sort of enforced maturity. I’ve had to take on certain responsibilities, also because of what was happening in Algeria. But I’ve always felt like an outsider; I guess that’s made me stronger.”
While Massi’s 2000 debut, Raoui (The Storyteller) and its 2003 follow-up, Deb (Heartbroken) saw her hailed as the saviour of world music, her beautiful vocals – together with her darkly fragile looks – created an erroneous image of a delicate desert flower.
Her Arabic and French lyrics, however, told of passion, loss and harsh realities in words that could be about herself, or her country. While her brief forays into English on Mesk Elil (Honeysuckle) seem calculated by producers intent on swiping a bigger slice of the market, Massi’s repertoire remains that of an Algerian renegade trying to make sense of conflict and exile.
She doesn’t mind commenting on the recent race riots in France (“It’s no wonder, really, when Algerians there are treated as secondclass citizens”) or the law that has forbidden Muslim women to wear headscarves (“They say they are trying to make everyone equal, when they’re not; they’re doing things the French way”). She just doesn’t see why she has to.
And though grateful to her adopted homeland for kick-starting her stellar international career, Massi insists that relocating to France has given her a clearer sense of identity. “I had to leave Algeria to realise that I am an African,” she says. “Coming from the Maghreb, my roots are in Africa, not the Middle East. There’s a whole wave of immigrants in France who feel the same way.”
The second of seven siblings, Massi grew up playing football and watching spaghetti westerns, deliberately a tomboy when “being a woman in Algeria seemed such a handicap”. She listened to James Brown and the country singers Kenny Rogers and Emmylou Harris.
Her father opposed her musical ambitions; their problematic relationship contributed to a severe bout of teenage depression that was alleviated, she says, when she joined a heavy metal band named Akator: “We loved AC/DC, Metallica, Led Zeppelin, and used to rehearse in a garage near a mosque, which upset a lot of people. Hard rock was seen as the devil’s music, but it helped us young people let our anger out.”
Massi revisited Algeria in 2003. “It used to feel like life was on hold, that everyone was waiting for the danger to pass. But it was much better. People’s attitudes and the situation are improving.”
She’ll play a sold-out concert at the Ibn Khaldoun, Algiers’ equivalent of Olympia, at the end of next month, before continuing a lengthy tour of Europe and America.
“The last time I went through passport control at Los Angeles airport I was taken aside and questioned,” she says wryly. “They said, ‘Do you like our president?’ ‘What do you think of the war in Iraq?’ ‘Do you like Americans?'” She sighs. “You know,” adds Souad Massi with a smile, “There is much work to be done in the West, too.”
• Souad Massi performs at the BBC World Music Awards on 7 April at Brixton Academy (0870 771 2000 or 08700 600 100).