Best Arabic Music

I grew up in Davis, California, where my parents were graduate students recently arrived from Egypt. There was a large community of Egyptian students at U.C. Davis in those days, all doing graduate studies in agricultural sciences of some kind. Most were on scholarship from the Egyptian government and had very little money, and we […]

Outspoken. Blunt. Gritty. Rebellious. These adjectives have been used to describe American rap music - but they can also describe Algerian raï music, pronounced “rye” or “rah-EE” and translated as “opinion” or “point of view” (it is also colloquially used as an exclamation similar to “oh, yeah!”)