Souad Massi: The hard-rocking rebel
Exiled from her native Algeria, Souad Massi's soulful songs fuse flamenco, country – and a little AC/DC.
By Nick Hasted (Independent Online edition)
Published: 30 November 2007
Still the rebel: Singer Souad Massi
When Souad Massi was playing with the Algerian hard-rock band Atakor, at the height of the civil war in the Nineties, she was desperate to let out a young lifetime of frustrations. It took six months for her to follow a friend's advice, and pour out to her authoritarian father everything she thought of him. Finally, her voice was freed.
The results can be heard on the four albums that have made her a star since she moved to Paris in 1999. That voice is a supple instrument of throaty sensuality and multi-layered longing, a vehicle for cultural nostalgia and personal loss. The music is just as distinctive.
Her last studio album, Honeysuckle (2005), switched smoothly between Algerian chaabi, flamenco guitar, and sub-Saharan African and Indian styles. As a girl, Massi obsessively taped flamenco from Spanish radio, and used the Morricone scores from Clint Eastwood Westerns as a pathway to US country and folk. Living on the cusp of North Africa and Europe, she felt closer to AC/DC than the chaabi of her Maghreb roots.
This open mind marked her as an outsider in Algiers' garden suburbs. "It's crazy," she sighs. "Because everyone was listening to Algerian music, chaabi or rai or modern boy-bands or rock. And when I'd listen to Aretha Franklin, or Kenny Rogers, everybody would say, 'What's happening with her? She's mad.' I was listening all the time to AC/DC, too. I was very hungry when I was young. I wanted to scream, and because of this I was listening to hard rock, because it helped me live what I couldn't say. I didn't feel good with my society or my family. I was really introverted and detached from all that, I refused it. So I built my universe with music."
Massi felt stifled by her place as an Algerian girl, too. "In an Arabic country, it's so hard. I refused that mentality. I wasn't searching for freedom to go to a dance; I was searching to be respected like a human. But I understood later that you can be a man or a woman. We all have the same problems."
Atakor backed Massi for her Algerian debut, Souad (1997). But its success, and her forthright views, made her dangerously visible in a civil war between fundamentalist Muslims and a repressive government. "It's bizarre, and very strong. A civil war is very special. It's only just finished, after 12 years. And people are still choking."
Massi attracted death threats with her new-found fame. When she was invited to Paris in 1999, she didn't return home for four years. "I stopped singing in Algeria, and said goodbye to the music, because I had so many troubles," she says. "France was my last try, and I was surprised at my acceptance. But I wasn't free there – no. Freedom isn't so absolute."
In her first months of exile, the repressed tension of her life in Algeria cracked open, then deep nostalgia for everything she'd lost set in. It suffuses her albums, sung with a peculiarly accepting sadness. "We have no choice," she laughs, of her Algerian blues. "When you have nostalgia for your family, your country, your friends, you are sad. But you can live with this."
Does Massi feel like she has no home now? "No. For me, my house is on stage. When I'm not on stage, I feel lost. It's horrible. Because I've had a daughter for two years, and she travels with me. I feel guilty, because it's no life for a baby. And afterwards, you're alone at home. Each time I stop work, I'm sick. Depressed. I understand now why a lot of artists commit suicide. It's very hard to pass from the stage and a lot of people and la-la-la. Afterwards, it's very strange to feel alone. My daughter gives me lots of courage to do this work. She helps me to continue to live."
Massi remains outspoken and socially engaged, discussing democracy with the Algerian diaspora, sometimes in the middle of her gigs. This attitude went down predictably badly in the US recently, when a sharp retort to a customs officer asking if she wanted "to kill our President" earned her 24 hours in jail. "Every time I go to get a visa, they treat me like an animal," she says. "My husband doesn't speak English. And they speak between themselves like he's not human. I ask them, 'Why don't you respect him?' But I know not all Americans are like that."
At 35, Massi is still the rebel who felt her society closing in on her when she was 16. But she is more accepting of where she came from now, even if she can never really return. "I've come back to Arabic culture, African culture," she says. "Because living in Europe, I miss it. I've even tried to sing chaabi, the Maghrebian music of the very old poets who speak about love and nostalgia. Now I'm older, I know it's not culture or history that's the cause of my problems."
Massi's life of conflict and isolation has led to music of such unifying ease, she deserves a little peace of her own.
