Tayfa is more than music, it is a message of hope and freedo
Blanca Madani | Washington, D.C., USA | 10/20/2001
(5 out of 5 stars)
"Tayfa combines the rhythms of Amazigh, Other African, and Celtic music in a harmoniously enjoyable background for a striking message of hope, love of freedom, and love of the language.It is deplorable, gravely ironic, and seriously erroneous, in the face of the message of this exciting music to label it as Arabic. This is music of the Amazigh, sung in the Tamazight language (known also as "berber"), and as part of the Amazigh struggle against the forced arabization of their lands!The third song in the series, "Timeslayin," is precisely about the right to one's own language and culture, in this case, Tamazight. The fifth song, "Mazal Mazal," is a song stirring hope in the young people who have known nothing but broken promises, such as promises of recognition of their language, their culture, their history, their identity. Other songs deal with escaping their lands to the diaspora and thinking of returning home someday to peace.Is it too much to ask for song editors to get a language and music straight? Particularly when it is an endangered language of a people who have too long suffered, and for whom music has been the main, and sometimes, the only way, of getting across their message?Arabic music is very distinctive from Amazigh. Please, learn to distinguish. And the two languages are also separate languages, Tamazight being a very ancient language (several thousands of years old), formerly classified as "Hamitic" (Coptic and a few other east African languages belong to this group) now, under the umbrella of "Afro-Asiatic languages," distantly related to Arabic, which was formerly classified under "Semitic.""
Track Listings (12) - Disc #1