Raï n B Fever: the unsung generational soundtrack

The first time I listened to Raï n B Fever, I was on the train from Cambridge to Oxford in the middle of my second year of university. I was looking for a curated Raï playlist, and when I typed the word ‘Raï’ into the search bar, Spotify offered me Raï n B Fever, released in 2004 by DJ duo Kore & Skalp. The title made it clear to me that this wasn’t quite what I was looking for, but, intrigued by the clever play on words and the gaudy 2000s cover art, I pressed shuffle and got comfortable.

Maybe it was my algorithm, maybe it was God, maybe it was destiny, but when I disembarked at London Paddington to switch trains, I was a dedicated fan. I listened to every track on repeat for the rest of the season, scattering in tracks from the other volumes. I played a selection of my favourites in my brother’s car two months later when he drove me back to university, leading with ‘Je suis pas d’ici’ and ‘Ya Denia’. We turned up the bass and danced for a hundred miles or more, with as much fervour as one can while seated, singing along in broken French and Darija all the way. 

DJ Kore’s debut album is a multi-textural capsule of music and culture in 2004 Paris. In each song lies a snippet of life, a singular piece of fabric, stitched seam-to-seam to other meticulously curated pieces to paint a picture: a quilt. This quilt is an heirloom that serves as a reminder of what it meant to be French-Algerian in the early 2000s, describing multiple aspects of life like marriage, immigration, family, love, origins, loss and hope. The album celebrates the interweaving of traditional Algerian Raï music and the popular French R n B sound of the era – a manifestation of a blended culture. Raï n B Fever, born of two musical genres with a strong political history, is a display of Algerian pride, but acknowledges that for some, France is, and must be, home. 

The album is human, living and breathing. It is joy and grief and love and confusion, tackling that insidious sensation of being irremediably out of place and miraculously managing to produce, in its place, a healing spirit of community. The track ‘Mon Bled’, in which one can hear echoes of infamous Algerian Raï album 1,2,3 Soleils by Cheb Khaled, Rachid Taha and Faudel, ignites a cultural pride in me that I can only describe as transportative; I feel that I have been transported to a time, to a post-independence celebration, that I was not alive to experience myself.    

I had the pleasure of speaking to the creator himself about the roots of Raï n B Fever. Born and raised in France, but Algerian by blood and by name, DJ Kore explained that his debut album revolved around bi-cultural pride. ‘You have to be proud of who you are, but it’s tricky when you have this double culture, you know, who are you really?’ He went on to say that pride for him has to go beyond verbal patriotism – ‘it’s not just ‘123, Vive l’Algérie!’… it’s about knowing yourself, your culture, your history, everything.’ 

Knowledge, for DJ Kore, is the heart of pride – particularly for a people whose culture was actively obfuscated for over 130 years – and as a product of two countries and two cultures, maintaining both is very important to him. ‘I used to spend a lot of time in Algeria when I was young, and I have some beautiful memories over there…but at the same time I can’t deny the fact that I was born and raised in France, and I think Raï n B is the fusion of both halves.’ He noted that there are still some open wounds between France and Algeria, but proposes that if there is to be any hope of healing them, French-Algerians cannot continue to deny their Frenchness. 

DJ Kore recounted stories about the French media attitude towards Algerians during the late 1990s and early 2000s, and how the itinerant quality of Raï n B Fever and its successors, the palimpsestic journey through the life of a French-Algerian, was constructed to be a reflection of that society. ‘Today, it seems like France has a problem with Muslims, but in my mind, really France has always had a problem with Algerians. At the time, it was this album versus the media. Everything they kept saying about us…this was the reality.’ With these originary albums, he pushed back against a slanderous constructed narrative about what the Algerian immigrant looks like, what he believes, and how he lives, using only the corrective power of joy and music. 

Throughout our conversation, DJ Kore expressed in numerous ways how the album, while a great love, was not born of labour for him; it was easy, it came naturally, it was somehow almost fully formed from the moment of conception. He said with great nonchalance and humility: ‘For me, Raï n B was already there. It wasn’t a strategy for me, it was just natural. The album was just who I am.’ Yet, the ease of his and Skalp’s creative journey does not take away from the complexity of their musical offering, or the multitude of joys that I find within it. 

DJ Kore has contributed a generation’s worth of work to the music industry – Raï n B Fever went double platinum and was followed by four more albums of the same name, of the same originary genre – but has operated behind the scenes for most of his career, as a writer and producer for artists like French Montana, Rick Ross and Shaggy. To me, Raï n B Fever is the first and most comprehensive exhibition of his talent, of his culture and of his mind. Raï n B Fever cannot be recreated, but the quilt can be extended as the French-Algerian experience evolves. As such, 20 years after the release of the first installment, DJ Kore is bringing us one final volume, scheduled for February 2025; an homage to where he started, and a gift to this generation. 

‘I’m doing the anniversary edition for my kids,’ he told me. ‘They’re half French and half Algerian, and, you know, maybe it’s time for them to understand what Dad used to do back then. Their mum too, Leslie, she was a big feature on the first album.’ 

Perhaps we need another volume of Raï n B Fever now more than ever, a binding agent for two cultures that find themselves pushed together by history and misfortune, but with great positive potential in the gap between the two. ‘It was hard for the first generation of Algerians who came, like my parents, but now I think it’s tougher,’ he remarked. ‘I can’t explain why.’ Perhaps culture is less malleable now, when ownership is king and appropriation is the highest of crimes; perhaps French racism has grown ever more subtle and perfidious, the chasm between Frenchness and Algerian-ness artificially protracted to such a point that those who do not subscribe to either label are struggling just to skirt the edges of the gap and survive; perhaps that knowledge DJ Kore spoke of, the beating heart of pride itself, has diminished popular willingness to embrace duplexity, for fear of associating with perpetrators of catastrophe. 

Whatever the reasons may be, and they may be plenty, the gap must close again. ‘I think it’s the duty of our generation to change this a little bit. Not a little bit, a lot, actually.’ Raï n B Fever spelled the birth of ‘Raï n B’ as a genre, duality made manifest, pride made multi-faceted. With this fifth and final anniversary album, DJ Kore hopes to offer us a reminder of the elation of an era when club flyers read ‘Funk, Hip-Hop…Raï n B’, and multi-cultural pride was a public affair.