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The Weather Forecast Songs

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If you search for singer Rabah Driassa (1934) on Google and you go to his [Arabic] Wikipedia page, you will read this paragraph: “He started his singing career in 1953 after working across many fields, but art was the most significant station in his history. He sang for the homeland, love, beauty and the wise songs.  He sang the Bedouin song, and the committed, respectable Algerian song.

 

Sheikh Rabeh Driassa enjoys a privileged position with the public in Algeria and abroad for the peace and sweetness in his songs, devoid of rude words, making him respected by all Algerians at all levels.” This passage gives an general idea of the audience Rabah Driassa portrayed in his most famous songs.

Rabah Driassaرابح درياسةنجمة قطبية
00:00 / 08:05

Driassa had a wide presence in official channels during the years after independence, and his song Nedjma Kotbeya (North Star) was perhaps the most famous of his old songs. Briefly, it recounts the appearance of a beautiful girl to the poet who asks her about her origin, and he says maybe she is from the West, then maybe from the East, and then maybe she is from an Amazigh tribe. But she answers him in the end, I am an Algerian Arab, in line with the doctrine of the state and the party at the time.

Even after the seventies, the star of Driassa continued to shine, and perhaps the eighties was his most prosperous period, when his famous songs Yehiaw Oulad Beladi (Long live my country people) and Sameeni Sharqi Sameeni Gharbi (Call Me Eastern Call Me Western) were released and of course his distinct cartographic song El Jawla (The Tour), in which he tours around all states and cities of the country. It’s a 21-minute song, in which Driassa tirelessly recounts the names of dozens of cities, giving a metaphor with each one. It does not matter if it is real, what is important is that it feeds the rhyme.

 
 
 
 
 

What is interesting today, in the year 2021, is to see how Driassa was standing with his dyed hair and pink suit at the end of the 1980s, behind him successive pictures of ‘national unity’ featuring soldiers, athletes, scholars, students, farmers, and industrialists. Women and men building the homeland while singing Yehiaw Oulad Beladi, as he explains that Algeria is "East, West, Central, South, and Tribes" then he affirms that "the sons of my country are brothers and are not separated by enmity." Just a few years later, the civil war would burn bridges that were fragile in the eyes of many, but not to Driassa and his friends.

Rabah Driassa - El goumri
00:00 / 20:29

The Weather Forecast Songs (2)


Before Driassa, there was Dahmane El Harrachi (1926-1980), a popular singer and star of Maghreban diaspora cafes and squares in France. He drew his coveted map of a country he would only return to in the summer. Throughout the two decades of the 1960s and 1970s, Al-Harashi sang the ‘Weather Forecast Songs’ and created postcards for each city, especially his song Bilad Al-Khair (Country of Goodness), which was released in the early 1970s. Harrachi brought Shaabi songs out of the isolationism of the metropolitan when he sang about something other than the capital and ancient Algerian poems. He expanded – as a migrant among the migrants in the suburbs of French cities - the meaning of the word Algeria from city to country.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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