Raï

Rai is the popular music of Algeria, born in Oran in the 1920s when singers such as *Cheikha Rimitti* carried rural melhun poetry and Bedouin song into the city's cabarets, scandalising respectable society with frank verses about love, wine and hardship. After independence it absorbed rock, funk, reggae and synthesizers, and in the 1980s a young generation of chebs, led by *Khaled*, turned it into an international pop form recorded between Oran and Paris. Rai survived exile and the violence of Algeria's civil war years, and UNESCO inscribed it as Algerian heritage in 2022.