前途: A Year in Morocco

I’m not really sure how I ended up at this music festival, except that I knew a guy who knew a girl who knew a girl who was working there and got us VIP wristbands. So it goes…

The setting was by the side of the Bouregreg River, which separates Sale and Rabat, and the festival apparently included a few hours the previous day, and then twelve full hours of music yesterday. I have never been at a concert with so much security. The crowd was overwhelmingly young, predominately male, but also included plenty of young women, women with children, families, and not as many foreigners as I had expected. I *really* enjoyed seeing young Moroccan hip hop, hippie/Rasta (although neither word is quite right), skater, and punk fashionistas and fashionistos hanging out in one place, and there were plenty of interesting t-shirts, kicks, dreadlocks, sunglasses, and even a few tattoos and piercings.

We arrived at the end of Casa System’s set and were able to hear two songs. I liked one and didn’t like the other, but I plan to look up more of their music. Following Casa System, a band started setting up. Things seemed to alternate between bands and rappers, which is smart because the rappers can start their sets while the band before them cleans up. In classic Moroccan style, the whole festival was casually running an hour later than the printed schedule.

Anyway, the band seemed pretty cool, two guitars, a bass, drummer—and then a keyboardist, saxophone, and backup African lady singers in matching colorful dresses appeared on stage. Their name was Africa United, and as the name suggests, the music was a mishmash of musical styles, complete with an African lead singer who spoke mostly French with a little English and a few Darija phrases and had some hella funky dance moves.

Following Africa United, a rap group called Ghost Project was up, and I was really digging the first song, but we decided to leave at that point to find water and dinner so we could come back later in time for Would Chaab. 

When we made it back, a band called Thaghrast was playing. One of the Moroccan girls we were with informed us that they were Berbers from the Rif and actually didn’t speak much Darija, and the lead singer confirmed this after a couple songs with a few well-articulated but halting sentences in Darija.

Would Chaab was up next, and he was probably the most popular/well-known artist in the whole show. People say that rap all sounds the same, and it’s true, because the beats are really just a vehicle for the words AND when you don’t understand the words because you don’t really speak Darija [that fast], some of the value of the music is lost. Despite this, I enjoyed his charisma and the crowd’s reaction to it.

One of the things I realized as I was watching both the bands and the crowd is that there was really no common language. Casa System and Would Chaab rap in Darija, of course, which is Arabic/French. The Africans used French, but also some English, and there was a group of English-speaking Africans in the crowd, as well as our little group of Darija/French-speaking Americans and English-speaking Moroccans. The Rifi band’s lead singer spoke some Darija, but not a lot. It made me wonder about how the techies deal with all the crazy language needs.

The other thing I was struck by is how much fun the Moroccans in the crowd were having, just dancing and singing along, from the women with babies on their hips swaying in time to the music to the guys cyphering in the back of the crowd. The ambiance of an outdoor music festival in Africa is probably pretty high on my list of awesome things I’ve experienced in life, and was a great picture of Moroccan and African diversity.

Here’s the full list of who played, with stars on the bands we saw at least part of. Vivez la musique!

DJ Funk Atlas
DJ Awson & Ily
DJ Younes B
Groupe Shayfeen
Dealeuz de Rim
Pepper Mint Candy
Casa system*
Africa United*
Ghost Project*
Gnawa Stone
Mehdi K-Libre
Thaghrast*
Would Chaab*
Mayara band
L’Bramelz

In other news, it is hot.