Rachid Taha

Central Park SummerStage; Sat 5

Folks the world over love to rock, but it’s not just language barriers that cut off many foreign performers from stateside audiences. French-Algerian singer-songwriter Rachid Taha learned this the hard way—through trial and error. He was always leery of being pigeonholed as a proponent of the Algerian pop style raï, which sometimes led him to overplay the rock card before he and Brit producer Steve Hillage came up with the Arabic blend that set Taha’s punkishness ablaze. As a result, a piece like “Barra Barra” envisions Moby in North Africa, while “Voilà Voilà,” Taha’s potent anti-xenophobia rant, is desert disco. Those are just two of the 15 tracks on the infinitely listenable new retrospective Rock El Casbah: The Best Of (Wrasse; U.K.), which serves as a primer–crash course for Taha’s current trip to Central Park.

Up before Taha is Dengue Fever, a West Coast phenom that’s basically a Western pop band in clever disguise. The not-so-secret weapon is Cambodian chick singer Chhom Nimol, whose Southeast Asian songs put an eerie twist on the band’s psychedelia-lite. The music manages to be jump-around fun while paying homage to one of the more lighthearted aftereffects of the Vietnam War—the rock listened to by American GIs apparently took hold in a region that had every reason to want to excise that dark period from its past.