Lounis Ait Menguellet

hideThis article has multiple issues. Please help or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these template messages) This article includes a list of references, related reading or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (June 2015) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's notability guideline for music. Please help to demonstrate the notability of the topic by citing reliable secondary sources that are independent of the topic and provide significant coverage of it beyond a mere trivial mention. If notability cannot be shown, the article is likely to be merged, redirected, or deleted. Find sources:  –  ·  ·  · scholar · JSTOR (June 2015) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) show This article may be expanded with text translated from the corresponding article in French. (January 2016) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the French article. Machine translation like DeepL or Google Translate is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 4,175 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary Content in this edit is translated from the existing French Wikipedia article at [[:fr:Lounis Aït Menguellet]]; see its history for attribution. You should also add the template {{Translated|fr|Lounis Aït Menguellet}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation. (Learn how and when to remove this template message)

Lounis in a Concert in Algiers

Lounis Aït Menguellet is an Algerian singer born on January 17, 1950 in Ighil Bouammas, Tizi Ouzou Province in the Kabylie region. Lounis Aït Menguellet sings in the berber language (kabyle variant) and is certainly one of the most popular and charismatic artists of the contemporary kabyle music scene.^{[citation needed]}

He is a poet-musician who has become something of a symbol of the kabyle demands for recognition. Kabylie has been the setting for many fierce confrontations. Although Lounis's songs are frequently about Kabylie and its history and its present suffering and misery, he is always quick to state that he isn't a politician and he doesn't get involved in politics. However, few can deny the political clout of his songs or their political and sometimes very biting and critical messages.

Many critics of Lounis Aït Menguellet's career like to see it as two distinct parts and because that is a generally accepted view it will be the one offered here. The first part is seen as being centred on the production of love songs and nostalgia. Frequently there are references to a lost love. The songs tend to be shorter than he produces today. Typical songs from this period are Thalt Ayam (Three Days) and Tayri (Love). The second part of his career is characterised by longer songs.^{[citation needed]}

Recordings[]

Yenna-d Umghar (The Wise Man Has Spoken) is characterised by more complex music and a much more careful presentation of lyrics in Kabyle, French and Arabic with a brief summary in English. The Lounis of Yenna-d Umghar is a far cry from the Lounis of the early work which is now quite hard to come by. The Lounis of Yenna-d Umghar is more perhaps accessible to European ears, at once alien and familiar. It is indeed a beautiful work, made all the more effective once the poetry is understood. When he presented Yenna-d Umghar on 16 January 2005 at the Maison de la Culture, Tizi Ouzou, on the occasion of his 55th birthday, he said that the artist could only draw people's attention to their lives and appeal to their consciences. He added that it was still a mission and he didn't consider himself capable of bringing solutions to the problems.

The latest album is Tawriqt tacebhant - (The Blank Sheet) and was released in August 2010. The title has caused some discussion in Kabyle circles because it is only comparatively recently that Kabyle has become a written language again and many of the older generation don't read and write Kabyle though they do read and write in French. The title song talks about the struggles of writing the poem and how the poet is faced with a blank sheet, he is scared that Inspiration (which is personified) will not meet him on the page. Resigned to failure, he goes outside and finds himself thinking about the nature of his task and he realises that actually what he wants to say is there, he just has to do it. He returns to the blank page and writes the poem which he leaves as an inspiration to everyone else. Whenever we start a new task that we find daunting, the poem will be there as inspiration and guidance.

Tawriqt tacebhant was to contain a Kabyle version of Bob Dylan's Blowin' in the Wind. However, versions of the CD circulating in the UK at least, contained the lyrics to the Kabyle version but not the song itself.

Discography[]

Bibliography[]

• Tassadit Yacine, « Aït Menguellet chante », Préface de Kateb Yacine, Paris, la Découverte, 1989.
• Mohammed Djellaoui, « L’image poétique dans l’œuvre de Lounis Aït Menguellet - Du patrimoine à l’innovation » (Essai) - Éditions Les Pages Bleues, Alger, 2005.

External links[]

The official website of Lounis Ait Menguellet: http://www.aitmenguellet.net/