From Morocco to Sudan, nostalgia lives in the memory of car rides and in the kitchens of our elders. Any roadtrip to visit your grandparents, holiday by the beach or accompany your dad to the souk started with sliding in a cassette tape or turning up the radio. Out came Mohamed Mounir, Cheb Mami, Samira Said and Amr Diab.
Beyond its music, the warmth and intensity of North Africa’s soundscapes come from the familiar yelling of men selling fruit or collecting old household items in the street, several generations talking over one another, and the cacophony of bustling traffic.
Growing up at the geographic crossroads of many different worlds, young North Africans often long for a time before they were born, when their grandparents admired Umm Kulthum and their parents listened to traditional folk as well as Michael Jackson and ABBA.
Nostalgia is forever preserved in Moroccan Aissawa, Algerian raï, Libyan Ghaita and Sudanese haqiba, but North African coming-of-age stories also include US rap, Bollywood and pop divas like Sherine and Najat Aatabou widening the horizons of what it means to be young and North African.
“Nostalgia sounds like the music made when we actually took the time to listen to it. I think of getting into the car, putting on a CD and letting an album play from beginning to end, as a piece of work. There was something about that slowness and attention that I still associate with music itself. And because we took the time to experience an album, and because album cycles were longer, it allowed artists to actually take the time to make one too.
Nostalgia also feels somewhat more hopeful to me. I associate it with a time when there seemed to be less shame around art as a form of escapism. There was something beautiful about allowing music, and art in general, to take you somewhere else completely. Maybe that’s what I miss most: not just how music sounded, but how fully we allowed ourselves to immerse in it.
And more specifically, nostalgia to me sounds like Mohamed Rouicha, Najat Aatabou, Cat Stevens, and early Shakira. It has an analog quality to it. A texture that feels warm and human. - El Mehdi, Moroccan.
“Nostalgia for me are long road trips around Egypt with Mounir, Dalida, El Masreyin, Nawal El Zoghby, Michael Jackson and ABBA sometimes. Hours and hours of listening to the same songs and my dad taking me shopping for new tapes before every long ride. And we would assess them together always! I also used to force them to put on “El Fol Wel Yasmine” by Mounir, because it had my name. So it had to be the first song in every car ride all year long.” - Yasmine, Egyptian.
“Nostalgia for me sounds like the dusty melodic sound of electronic instruments, more precisely melancholic Sudanese folk, pop and urban music, singers like El Nour El-Jilani, Mustafa Sid Ahmed, and Mahmoud Abdel Aziz for me it carries a feeling of hauntology.” - Lotfy, Sudanese.
“It sounds like language and beats you knew from elsewhere. It sounds and looks like my parents vibing to something familiar to them, confidently humming or drumming on the steering wheel. I close my eyes and I could be in a car driving east from Benghazi towards Derna, my parents hometown. The Green mountains outside my right car window and the turquoise Mediterranean outside the left. Nostalgic is music in the kitchen while my mom prepares dinner singing old songs transporting her elsewhere. Could be the dead of winter outside but the music takes you elsewhere.” - Ayat, Libyan Canadian.
“Nostalgia, for me, is all the things I grew up around without really paying attention to at the time. As I’ve grown older, I’ve come to appreciate them so much more, because they bring back memories that touch my heart. For example, ‘Meen Habibi Ana,’ the duet by Nawal El Zoghbi and Wael Kfoury, immediately takes me back to my childhood. I can picture myself standing in the kitchen with my mum, singing the song together. She would sing, ‘Meen habibi ana, rod 3alaya w 2ol,’ and I would reply, ‘Enta el bahbo ana, enta el bahbo ana.’ It’s such a simple memory, but whenever I hear the song, I’m right back in that kitchen with her.” - Mahmoud, Egyptian.
“Old ‘Haqiba’ songs, specifically Ahmed Al-Jabry’s ‘Seed Al Isim.’ This song takes me back to when I was six or seven years old, going with my father to the old Khartoum market when he used to fix old apple computers. I swear that I heard that singer every day on the bus from Bahri to Arabic Market in the morning, when everything was easy and every street corner had thousands of stories. Small cafeterias still played his songs using an old sony radio, serving beans and water in aluminum plates. A shoe fixer would be in one corner, a lady who sells tea and a fresh copy of Al-Dar newspaper in the other. I can hear the noise right now and smell the scent of incense in my nose.” - Kreem, Sudanese.
“Nostalgia sounds like my grandmother's voice singing along to the daily nighttime airings of Um Kulthum's concerts. A sound I would hear regularly as I passed by her bedroom on my way to the kitchen at around 10pm every night. Nostalgia sounds like a gas stove, the train passing, and birds chirping in the early hours of the morning. It sounds like the robabikya man and the mesa7araty, the men who walk in the street and yell for you to bring down belongings for donation or wake up for suhoor during Ramadan.” - Hana, Egyptian.
“Nostalgia sounds like old Libyan music to me, especially the Tripolitanian music I grew up with and artists like Salam Kadri. His voice takes me back to my childhood in Zawiya, to days spent at my grandparents’ house, between orange trees and the sound of my tata’s prayers filling the house.
There’s one song in particular, ‘Arjoun El Fol,’ that takes me back to my nana Warda. I remember sitting with her under the jasmine tree in her saniya, picking flowers while she made little jasmine necklaces for us. She would tell us stories about the past, about our culture, everyday life, and her memories of growing up under Italian colonial rule.
I think that’s what nostalgia in music is for me. It’s not always about remembering a big moment. Sometimes a song brings back the smallest details: a place, a smell, a person, a feeling of home. Both of my grandparents have passed away, so hearing this music now feels like briefly returning to a time and place that no longer exists in the same way.” - Shaebi, Libyan.
“I grew up between different countries and languages, so I don’t really associate nostalgia with one specific place. It’s more like hearing a song and suddenly being transported somewhere: a family car ride, a summer spent in Morocco, a kitchen where several generations are talking at once, or those long evenings when the same songs would play over and over because everyone was hyper-fixated on them. The artists could be Samira Said, Oum Kalthoum (of course), Kadhem Saher (my mom’s secret crush), Cheb Mami, Amr Diab…
There’s also something very specific about the sound of older North African music, especially when it comes through old cassettes: the voices, the percussion, the warmth, the slightly imperfect quality of the recordings.” - Hajar, Moroccan French Italian.
“For me, musical nostalgia is mainly divided into two types: local Libyan nostalgia, and Arab and Maghrebi nostalgia. When I think about Libya, the first thing that comes to mind is reggae music. At the same time, Libyan rap was very present and had a major influence on me.
When it comes to traditional local music, there were also important styles such as Merskawi music, represented by artists like Ibrahim Al-Safi and Hamid Ben Nokta, as well as Ghaita music, with names such as Al-Akshi and Douma. This music has a particularly strong emotional impact on me because it is connected to old Libya and to the environment in which I grew up. Whenever I hear it today, I feel a deep sense of longing for the past. Music does not simply bring back a memory; it brings back an entire feeling that you once lived through.” - Ahmed, Libyan
