It’s business as usual! I haven’t found any change compared to the last few times, there is always a good welcome, there is conviviality. Everything is here. It’s been a little over 10 years of absence for me and yet we sold out [for the first date, this Friday]. Fans were contacting me because they were a little disappointed, so we added a date.
It’s a city that I knew in the 1990s. This country has its scent, it has its difference. What I like here is that it is a city where even if it is cold, the people are warm. People want to live, to party.
Honestly, no. You know, the world has changed a lot. We have entered a new era. I thought that the young people of my time had moved on to another style, another interest. But my music, I’m told, is listened to by people aged 7 to 77. That’s what’s beautiful. It touches me, because people, when I meet them, tell me that I accompany them in their lives. Parents have introduced my music to their children. It pushes me to continue, not to abandon this music, because I realize that it brings people together.
I’m still there ! Even when I go to the United States, I am reminded that my music is part of the legend. In our time, you have to release new things every six months to last. But what I released 20 years ago still exists, it doesn’t go out of style. The songs Didi or Aïcha, they are still present.
Yes ! Sometimes even during shows, people remind me of songs I did when I was 15 and ask me to play them. So I ask my musician, my accomplice, to give me the first words, and I sing them. The pleasure is shared when I’m on stage: I sing for people and I also sing for myself, I have fun doing it and I share my joy with the fans as much as possible.
This music, raï, was locked in time in Algeria and when we broke the borders, we saw that it could marry with the fashion of each era. I shared raï with rock and roll, with reggae, with flamenco. For me, if we stay with old fashion in our music, people will get tired of it. At the moment, there is always something new coming out and you have to adapt to it. The fashion is for disc jockeys at the moment, so, as an independent artist, I wanted to rework a song from when I was 16 and I called on my friend DJ Snake for Trigue Lycée. To stay in the race, to stay on stage, you have to follow the generation, follow what people are listening to and join in so that heritage does not die. Some people are a little stuck, but I see openings there.
The United States, some are fighting to have a place in this world. But my name is already known there. So I go there for fun. Countries like Canada remain in my heart all the time, I want to go back there all the time, I am attached to them. There are quite a few Oranese and North Africans there, I feel at home there. Among the Arabs, as a singer from the Maghreb, I became a representative. It is an honor.
