Cosmopolitanism, scholar Paul Gilroy tells us in his 2004 work After Empire, is a dangerous framework when applied from the top of the power structure downward. Too often, he writes, powerful agents who participate in such “have never paused over the actual history of past imperialism and the ongoing effects of colonial and imperial governance” (66), an eliding of the experiences of those subjected to such–the majority of the world’s population, Gilroy notes.
In the world of reissued 1970s records originating in the Global South, there is no shortage of narratives—and counternarratives—that emerge from cosmopolitan phenomena. Ken Andi Habib, an album by Algerian singer-saxophonist Freh Khodja, has just been rereleased on the archival French label Wewantsounds, providing us with one such example.
The story of Freh Khodja is a tale of migration, of mobilities and frictions, of the complex power structures and lived realities that underlie and challenge utopian notions of cosmopolitanism. Born in Algeria in 1949, just five years before the start of the country’s war for independence, Khodja studied music first at a nearby conservatory before moving to Paris in 1968, where he continued his studies in the heart of the nation that had for so long been his homeland’s colonial oppressor.
Originally released in 1975 in Algeria with Les Flammes, a Parisian group featuring members from Portugal and Cabo Verde, Ken Andi Habib is a culmination of it all: jazz meeting funk, meeting Latin and Caribbean styles, cosmopolitan genres on cosmopolitan genres in a whole cosmopolitan assemblage.
I know all this not just from listening to the music itself, but from the reissue’s new liner notes, written by Algerian journalist and musicologist Rabah Mezouane, who has worked with Wewantsounds on vintage Algerian work in the past. Compact though the notes are, they serve as an intervention against the ease with which globally minded crate-diggers often sort through stacks of exoticized, decontextualized albums, extracting cool sounds from complicated histories.
These are indeed cool sounds. Brassy grooves bridge raï and disco on “Habibtek”, while “Ya Coladera” introduces the Cabo Verdean style of the same name. “Hawa” undercuts 1960s-esque pop melodies with elated ska beats. Everything comes to a head on the final track “Ani Jit El Youm”, which moves dramatically between bouncy verses and poignant crooning and closes the album with a full display of the band’s impressive range. It’s a delightfully unsurprising choice for a contemporary reissue, and worth appreciating simply as an addition to any good summer DJ repertoire.
That’s the easy part, at least in the interconnected world of 2025; surely no label is better positioned to disseminate postcolonial French-Maghrebi pop to the world than Wewantsounds. They’ve made a good selection. The real work of a reissue, though, is in the packaging. Mezouane’s liner notes add crucial context to the danceable sonic layers of Ken Andi Habib. It’s a seamless incorporation into the original album design that helps to complicate the romantic notion of flowing cosmopolitanism that is too easy to uncritically accept when all we want is to have a good musical time. Wewantsounds let us have both on this reissue of Freh Khodja’s fantastic debut.