Zebda is a French world music group from Toulouse. The group consists of seven musicians who met for the first time in 1985. The name of the group, the Arabic word for butter (or beurre in French), is a play on the use of the word beur in French slang to refer to Arabs. Several of the group's members are of North African descent.
Their music is influenced by these roots as well as music from all over the world, for example reggae, rap, raï and rock, and their lyrics deal with issues affecting the Arab population in France. They are best known in France for their single "Tomber la chemise".
Zebda also conveys the sentiments of the banlieues' large immigrant and first-generation French populations, who feel shut off and excluded by a larger, affluent, and white French society that seems to determine "foreignness" on strictly ethnic and racial grounds.
All of Zebda's seven members hail from Toulouse-region banlieues, and all are either first-generation French citizens (like Cherfi and co-singers Hakim and Moustapha Amokrane, whose parents are Kabile), or families that arrived in one of the many waves of immigration that have periodically swept across the south-west from Portugal, Spain, Italy, and the Maghreb.
Indeed, one of Zebda's greatest strengths is not only expressing social issues by blending the musical influences of their parents' cultures with modern idioms they grew up with.
Zebda also conveys the sentiments of the banlieues' large immigrant and first-generation French populations, who feel shut off and excluded by a larger, affluent, and white French society that seems to determine "foreignness" on strictly ethnic and racial grounds.
All of Zebda's seven members hail from Toulouse-region banlieues, and all are either first-generation French citizens (like Cherfi and co-singers Hakim and Moustapha Amokrane, whose parents are Kabile), or families that arrived in one of the many waves of immigration that have periodically swept across the south-west from Portugal, Spain, Italy, and the Maghreb.
Indeed, one of Zebda's greatest strengths is not only expressing social issues by blending the musical influences of their parents' cultures with modern idioms they grew up with.
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