His rise to national fame was mainly due to the efforts of Lieutenant-Colonel Hosni Snoussi, director of the state-supported arts and culture Office Riadh el Feth, who took Khaled under his wing and invited him along with other rai stars to perform at the state-sponsored Festival de la Jeunesse pour la FГЄte Nationale in Algiers in July 1985. In the 1980s, Khaled started producing and singing songs in the RaГЇ genre. Musical career ДЄt the age of 14, he founded the Cinq Г‰toiles (Five Stars) band and started performing in nightclubs and at weddings. When a traditional Oranese poet wants to describe love, Khaled says he prefers to take a different approach. Khaled was a playboy and a partier, rejecting the polite traditions of Algeria's poetry. It's calculated and slick and not the place to start if you want to hear where he came from, but the music stays on the right side of overdone.just barely.Khaled Hadj Ibrahim was born in 1960 in Oran's EckmГјhl neighborhood, Algeria. He's pretty much taken his Western pop influence right to the limit of where the watered-down crossover criticisms he receives become valid. Sahra is slick international pop Khaled, with his Algerian roots used mostly as flavoring. But the flip side is just as apparent on 'Mektoubi,' where the Jamaicans nail down the groove, Dean Fraser lets loose with an unusually rowdy sax solo, and Khaled fits his vocals in perfectly. musicians haven't gotten the feel down, and the song suffers. The tentative 'Haya Haya' shows the pitfall of attempting Khaled's style blend - you hear the L.A. The synths alternating between Arab strings and galloping prog rock sounds make the chic, upscale Euro-disco set the likely target for 'Le Jour Viendra.' Mexican rocker Saul Hernandez sings Spanish verses on 'Ki Kounti,' a nondescript Saharan sirocco-meets-SoCal-Santa-Ana-desert reggae tune. The strings on 'Hey Ouedi' are more light Euro-classical than Arabic pop majestic (not surprising since the players are French), while 'Detni Essekra' is almost old-style Europop lounge music with tinkling piano, rich accordion, and Bernard Paganotti's acoustic bass. After that reasonably cohesive start, Sahra goes all over the map. Written by Goldman/Khaled and sung in French, 'AГЇcha' sports a magnetic hook carried by Khaled's vocal charisma over a nice mid-tempo trot and atmospheric keyboards. Real strings add an Arabic touch to the convincing title track, while 'Oran Marseille (Oran Mix)' starts with kazoo, of all things, and winds up as kind of a high-tech, tweaked roots rai with a pronounced Jamaican organ. The credits make it seem likely that the overseas tracks were recorded there and then shipped to Paris for final touches. with high-priced session heavyweights, one with Marseilles rappers Iam, and the rest by Frenchmen Jean-Jacques Goldman and Philippe Eidel.

The lack of flow is understandable because it's a total patchwork effort - three tracks produced by Clive Hunte in Jamaica with reggae session heavyweights, three songs produced by Don Was in L.A. It worked - 'AГЇcha' was a breakthrough pan-European pop hit, and even though the disc jumps around from song to song and style to style, it still basically hangs together.

If Khaled and N'ssi N'ssi introduced Khaled and incorporated rai into the hip, global dancefloor mix, the gleaming production and lush arrangements on Sahra leave no doubt that French pop mainstream is the target here.

Cheb khaled aicha