RFI/Musique: What exactly does the title of your new album, Utopie d’Occase mean? What’s your vision of «Secondhand Utopia» – high ideals at knockdown prices?
Moustapha: There’s something of that in it, yes. It’s like ideals at knockdown prices but ideals that are accessible too. The title’s really about the relationship between ideals you can have in dreams and ideals that translate into reality. It’s about the values of the Republic which, when it comes down to it, don’t always work too well in everyday life. We try to accept that principle and live in some sort of coherence with it, trying to be happy in life and at the same time fight for the causes we believe in.
The thing is, we have a personal history that has marked us – even traumatised some of us at times. Growing up as sons of immigrants and Arabs, you know … we’ve experienced all kinds of discrimination and that leaves its own psychological mark. Personally, up until the age of twenty I must have been stopped in the street and asked for my ID at least twenty times! So I know what it feels like to be the usual suspect. I know what it’s like when your face doesn’t fit. And growing up under those conditions I think it’s normal for us to have grown a bit desperate and disillusioned.
Magyd: I think the thing is you shouldn’t have too many illusions about society and the way it works. And that’s part of what we’re trying to say with the title ‘Second-hand Utopia’ really. It’s essential for everyone to have a sense of their own personal Utopia – after all, everyone needs to project their life towards the best possible future but reality always gets in the way somehow, so you find yourself on the end of a piece of elastic zinging back and forth, getting closer to your Utopia then being pulled back again … At the end of the day our job is to give people an hour and a half’s worth of entertainment, to make them travel somewhere else in their heads. And you don’t need to go any further than that if you don’t want to. But if our fans want to scratch away at the surface and discover the deeper thoughts behind the entertainment then we’re very happy with that.

After the phenomenal success of your last album Essence Ordinaire in 1998 – which sold 600,000 copies and over a million singles* - how did you go about setting to work on a follow-up?
Magyd: Well, I think we ended up making an album that more or less conformed to what we set out to do. We wanted to give things a slightly deeper, darker edge and pare things back a bit this time round. We wanted the production to be less smooth, too. We didn’t want to give people the impression we were covering things up in any way. We wanted our voices to have the tremors and faults they have in everyday life. You know, when you finally make an album that resembles you it does you a lot of good because you feel you’ve been as authentic as possible as far as the whole creative process is concerned. We have a pretty complicated objective after all – I mean how can you possibly sound as authentic as possible when you’ve got seven guys with such radically different tastes in music working away together?
Moustapha: The thing we’ve always tried to do with Zebda is have some sort of progressive control over what we do – and by that I mean we always try and look at what we’re doing and think about where that will take us. We really discovered the success of Essence Ordinaire and Tomber la Chemise firsthand when we were out on the road touring and playing to live audiences. And it was a brilliant motivation for us after all the hard work and all the years we’d put in on the road.
These days, you know, we don’t bother ourselves overmuch about the success of Essence Ordinaire. We realise that it won’t be too easy to come up with another Tomber la chemise – and if it were maybe we’d end up taking ourselves for U2 or something!(Laughs).

It’s pretty hard to pin Zebda’s style down into any one music category but your fanbase appears to be expanding all the time. How do you explain that?
Magyd: I think it’s quite simply down to who and what we are! Basically, I’m the kind of guy who’s never subscribed to political, philosophical or style trends. I’ve always been into loads of different things at the same time. I can really get off on music by Pierre Perret and at the same time I can listen to something by Rage Against The Machine and get off on that too! And I don’t see why you should have to choose between the two! The only essential thing is being coherent in the multiplicity of your choices and the complexity of the subjects you tackle in your songs.
Somewhere down the line your songs have got to correspond to who you are when you get out of bed in the morning and the attitude you have towards others in your everyday life. I want to get up on stage and start preaching about respect? Then I should make sure I don’t start pissing people off. I want to start talking about fraternity? Then I should wonder if I actually open my heart enough and give enough place to other people in my own life! You see, it’s a continual headache… We don’t really have any control over our success, you know. To be honest we’re on a continual quest for our own Holy Grail to discover the truth about ourselves.
Establishing a fanbase in the early years was actually pretty anxious-making. You know, after you’ve done hundreds of concerts up and down the country and you feel like the public still aren’t really going for you, then you have to turn round and ask yourself what you’re doing wrong. And then all of a sudden the public get behind you and start supporting what you do and it’s like "OK, so your music’s a bit of an old hotchpotch really, but we like it anyway. We like listening to Pierre Perret and hardcore stuff at the same time too and we don’t see why we should have to choose!" People started coming up to us and saying "OK, so you don’t play any particular style but when it comes to your albums and your live stuff it’s the ambience we like!» And, believe me, that’s what the fans are into.

On your 1995 single Le bruit et l’odeur you subverted a phrase from a controversial speech Jacques Chirac made about the noise and smell immigrants caused in France. So what did you do in the second round of the French presidential elections earlier this year (when voters had to choose between Chirac and the far-right candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen)?
Moustapha: Zebda have always been a reasonable and responsible group. I’ve always voted tactically so my vote would count for something. And this time round it was no different; I convinced myself that I had to vote for Chirac. I have to admit I didn’t feel so great afterwards though, I did feel a bit bitter about the whole thing. It was like «OK, so now we’re back on track for another five years of heavy rightwing government and they’ll take all their usual repressive measures and start harassing kids on housing estates again.» And lo and behold! a few days after the right got back in the police did a raid on Dammary-les-Lys and searched 300 apartments for practically nothing. When I was talking about the kind of psychological hassle you go through growing up as second-generation immigrants here that’s exactly what I meant.
Magyd: When I stuck my vote for Chirac in the ballot box I couldn’t help thinking it was all totally surreal. I mean there was Jacques Chirac ten years ago sticking the immigration issue in a dustbin and closing the lid because ‘immigrants make too much noise and they stink!’ And ten years later we had to come out of the dustbin and crown him President. And even worse than that we had to crown him saviour of the French Republic and all the Arab kids had to turn out and cheer and dance…

Talking of which there seem to be plenty of songs on your new album denouncing racism and xenophobia in France. I’m thinking of songs like Le paranoïaque and Mêlée ouverte…
Moustapha: Yes, because we don’t have any choice in the matter! Do you think we can sit back and do otherwise when you take a look at what’s happening to Arabs in France today? It’s like the French are all too happy to run out and embrace Zidane, Khaled and Zebda. But what about the Arabs as a whole?!? The danger in that whole 'celebration of multi-culture' vision – which reached an absolute pinnacle after the French football team’s victory in the 98 World Cup – is that it hides the real issues. It’s like the French are willing to have Arabs in France but only the ones who are successful, not the rest! It’s like here we are in the shit but you treat us like shit. So don’t turn round and ask us to be understanding and objective about things when you treat us like that. That’s the kind of response we get, you know, when we go out into the ‘problem neighbourhoods’ and try and encourage kids to vote… It’s normal that the way they’ve been treated they turn round and tell us to get lost!
Jean-Marie Messier (the former CEO of Vivendi/Universal) frequently cited Zebda and Noir Désir as proof that his record label was open to alternative groups. Did he invite you to his leaving party after he was sacked?
Magyd: No, he didn’t! But you know at the end of the day Messier’s actually pretty harmless – after all, if it hadn’t been him, it would have been someone else! Messier and his like simply feed the capitalist machine. They’re not our real enemies. The real evil is the aggressive freemarket economy where everything revolves around profit, where everything obeys the law of the strongest crushing the weakest. We’ve spent our career fighting for solidarity and equality – but as things stand right now we don’t carry much weight against the capitalist tanks so right now we’re losing the battle.

So to go back to your Arab roots, when are Zebda planning to do a tour of Algeria?
Moustapha: As soon as we get the chance! Honestly, we’d love to go out and perform there but only if we had a certain freedom in the matter and could do things exactly as we want to. It’s all very well for Khaled and Faudel to go out there… after all, they play Raï. I don’t think we’d attract quite the same number of fans to our concerts though! But yeah it would be great to go and play in Algeria and show people we love Algeria with a real undisputed and animal passion!

Eric Pittard’s film Le bruit et l’odeur - about a young Arab boy who’s gunned down by a policeman - is due to hit French cinema screens this autumn. Why did you decide to get involved in the film?
Magyd: Because we felt like there was a real place for us – that our songs were perfectly suited to the content of Pittard’s film. You only have to touch on the smallest issue of immigration for all the evil and exclusion of French society to come to the surface. Pittard’s film bears a real historical testimony. I mean look at the French history books, there’s no trace of our existence – not yesterday or today! There’s hundreds of thousands of us waiting and imploring for someone to open the door called France to us. All we’re asking is that a few pages should tell our story in the history books of France.
Moustapha: Why did we get involved in the film? Because you can’t kill a teenage boy because he’s stolen a car, that’s why! The death penalty was abolished in this country twenty years ago – and either that’s a reality or that means it’s OK for some people to die but others not. And that's absolutely mind-boggling!

Zebda Utopie d’occase (Barclay / Universal) 2002
Zebda's very new website

*Tomber la chemise was the hit single from the album.