Traditional gnawa music is intended for spiritual purification in Morocco, as highlighted in “The Blue Spirit Chose Me” chapter of Rebel Music. It is “believed to heal people afflicted with spirit possession.” When it is believed that the jinn have trailed a subject, and afflicted them with misfortunes of various kinds, the traditionalist Gnawa practitioners hold a night-long ceremony to purify the subject. This involves very rhythmic, lively music produced by the sintir and the qraqeb.

But towards the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty first, this music has become very popular on a global stage due to its energetic, dancey beats. And younger generations of North African musicians — as well as in the diaspora throughout France, Canada, and the United States — have adopted the Gnawa Moroccan music into fusion genres like gnawa jazz, gnawa rock, and most interesting to me: gnawa reggae.

Critics of gnawa reggae have bemoaned its commercial aspect. French tourists, for example, have been known to romanticize and exoticize the sacred trance culture of Sufi practice. And even Aidi comments on the irony of “gnawa chants about suffering and oppression [being] sampled by scores of producers and DJs.” Certainly, it is justified to discount the commercialization of gnawa traditions for problematic profitable touristic intentions. However, I take issue with Aidi’s assertion that lyrics about serious issues like oppression don’t have a place in popular musician. Certainly, lyrics that talk about serious social or political issues should not lose their weight, or be misappropriated. But, let us examine the roots of Gnawa, in comparison to the roots of reggae.

Right there in our reading, Aidi explains that the Gnawa people identify as the ancestral legacy of former slaves throughout Northwestern Africa. Thus, much of their music sings of oppression or mistreatment. Similarly, reggae has been utilized to express similar injustices against slave populations — just those settling in the Caribbean as opposed to remaining in Morocco or Algeria.  For example, even the King of Reggae Bob Marley sings about these issues in his most famous songs. In Buffalo Soldier, a hit song that bemoans the tragedy of black cavalry forced to fight in the 19th century Indian Wars, he croons “There was a Buffalo Soldier in the heart of America. Stolen from Africa, brought to America. Fighting on arrival, fighting for survival.”

In popular gnawa reggae music today, the influence of Gnawa spirituality and oppression as well as the protest and soulful elements of classic reggae artists like Marley are both strongly felt. Hoba Hoba Spirit, a band out of Casablanca, is a clear cut example of this, with hit songs like “Gnawa Blues” and the very name of their band is inspired by lyrics in Marley’s deeply famous song “No Woman No Cry,” which goes “hoba hoba-observin the hypocrites.”

In the above song “Gnawa Blues” Hoba Hoba Spirit directly address the fusion element of their music, and the fact that they do not fit into many of the labels the music and entertainment industry wants to give them. They sing “don’t call it world music…it’s just the music of my world.”

In this way, the modern gnawa-reggae intersections are often spiritual and soulful in the same manner as traditional gnawa. Their lyrics typically sing of injustice, love, and devotion to religion or God. But where traditional gnawa has involved rituals and lila to counter oppression, modern gnawa fusion utilizes revolutionary protesting lyrics to counter oppression. Gnawa Diffusion, which we discussed in class, features suh a message in their song “Saharagga.” Singing in English, French, and Algerian Arabic, they repeat “the targui don’t like the border…our religion is not slavery…is it so easy to be selfish?” Likewise, Bob Marley famously used his song “Zimbabwe” to speak out aginst the Rhodesian government oppressing Zimbabwe. He performed through violence and tear gas at the Zimbabwe independence celebration in 1980, thus demonstrating the trancelike affect and political power of reggae music like gnawa before it.

However, there is a clear “impure” association with gnawa fusion and with reggae that is not in line with traditionalist gnawa rituals. As with any new music form that has risen in the 20th century (jazz, rock, rap) these art forms are largely criticized for their association with, and romanticization and even promotion of, sexual promiscuity and drug use. Jamaican culture and reggae are nearly synonymous with marijuana usage. Later in the same protest song “Saharagga,” Gnawa Diffusion sing “salam min Africa, peace love and joy…and marijuana!” And their most popular chart-topping hit “Ombre Elle,” the band is not singing about freedom or injustice, but rather repeat poppy French lyrics about a woman’s rear end.

http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/ombre-elle-wm

It is fascinating to me that a genre can be so rejected from the traditional ritualistic community, and yet serve so many of the same functions like community building, spirituality, and singing in protest of oppression. And yet, in my opinion, here is the real point of contention of such a conversation in general. Why would we expect older traditionalist  communities to ever accept youth, pop culture, or change? The fact that we do not expect old rock stars to accept young rock metal stars, and yet for some problematic reason expect older gnawa generations to accept new gnawa fusion, to me points to our own flawed orientalist exoticized expectations of “traditions” that are different from our own.