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The massive pop Festival Mawazine in Rabat, which has starred the likes of Rihanna and Stevie Wonder, this year drew a record crowd of more than 2.6 million over nine days, and conveyed a message of Morocco as a more tolerant, open Islamic country. Photo: Festival Mawazine
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* “The North African nation hosts three festivals that dwarf Glastonbury – and which are designed to send out a message about the country’s tolerance… They are fascinating festivals; and Fes in particular is, for my dirhams, the best world music festival anywhere.” *
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Festival hero … Mehdi Nassouli at Morocco’s Timitar festival. Photo: Rachid Bourhim/PR
London Guardian, by Peter Culshaw (July 1, 2014) — You may not have noticed, but Morocco has become one of the leading destinations for music festivals in the world. There’s the Fes festival, a leading world music festival, and the snappily named Jazzablanca in Casablanca. But the biggest ones are the funkier Gnaoua festival in Essaouira on the coast, the massive pop Festival Mawazine in Rabat — which has starred the likes of Rihanna and Stevie Wonder — and Timitar in Agadir. Each attracts crowds of up to 500,000 people (that’s three times the size of Glastonbury). All of them, too, are not just music festivals — they have specific social and political agendas as well.
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Timitar, which I went to the weekend before Glastonbury, is a case in point. That was where I saw a rapper called Muslim — a great name if you don’t want to be Googled — appearing at an event that is at root a celebration of Berber culture. Muslim’s best-known song, which he delivered to a crowd of more than 100,000 at the “urban” stage in Place Bijawane near the beach, is Al Rissala (The Letter) a fiery anti-authoritarian condemnation of corruption and ignorance in high places.
On another stage, Alpha Blondy’s 10-piece reggae band was singing about “spiritual terrorists” who think it’s OK to kill in the name of religion. Image may be NSFW.
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The next night, local heroine Najat Atabou was singing songs in support of women’s rights in a more traditional style, while Mehdi Nassouli was positively postmodern, almost Prog Berber. In previous years at the festival I’d caught Marcel Khalife, a Palestinian who sings rousing revolutionary songs, and the rock band Hoba Hoba Spirit, whose Will To Live — a setting of a poem written in the 1930s — became an anthem for the demonstrations in Morocco a couple of years ago.
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[Continue Reading at The Guardian…]
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