Mehdi Ben Yahia Documenting Tunisia’s Alternative Popular Music (1970s–1980s)

When discussing music in Tunisia, public narratives most frequently foreground “traditional” repertoires, particularly mezoued and rboukh, and canonized figures such as Hedi Jouini, Saliha, and Lotfi Bouchnak. Far less attention is paid to artists and ensembles associated with Tunisian Western-oriented popular music, including groups such as Carthago and Marhaba Band, as well as musicians such as Sadok Gharbi and Khaled Mellef. Yet these actors can be considered pioneers of a local “alternative” sound that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, a hybrid aesthetic combining elements of funk, rock, and pop with distinct Tunisian musical inflections. This convergence produced a recognizable style that complicates strict divides between “heritage” music and imported genres, and invites a broader understanding of Tunisian musical modernity.

The limited visibility of these artists today is due, in large part, to the brevity of their period of activity and the fragility of the material traces they left behind. Documentation is scarce, and the digital record remains fragmentary, resulting in a significant lacuna in the historiography of Tunisian music. In response to this absence, Mehdi Ben Yahia has undertaken a sustained research and documentation project aimed at reconstructing, as rigorously as possible, the trajectories of Tunisian solo artists and bands operating within funk, rock, pop, and related genres.

Over a period of approximately two and a half years, Ben Yahia has pursued a multi-source, archival and ethnographic approach, consulting both private and public collections, conducting searches in Tunis, Sousse, and Hammamet for vinyl records and cassette tapes, and interviewing individuals who witnessed or participated in this period. The initial phase of research was constrained by the dispersed nature of the evidence and the difficulty of establishing reliable connections among partial or inconsistent accounts. Progressive accumulation, cross-referencing, and verification, however, have enabled the construction of an increasingly coherent archive, through which Ben Yahia has been able to map the activity, concerts, and broader historical contours of alternative musicians active between 1960 and 1990.

The project’s next phase centers on identifying audiovisual documentation, particularly video recordings, capable of enriching and corroborating existing materials such as photographs, newspapers, audio tapes, vinyl records, and cassettes. In parallel, Ben Yahia is reportedly developing additional initiatives intended to disseminate and publicize these findings, though details remain limited at present. Taken together, this ongoing effort represents an important contribution to cultural memory work in Tunisia. It seeks not only to recover overlooked musical practices, but also to restore their place within a more inclusive and analytically grounded account of Tunisia’s popular music history.