Mehdi Ben Yahia Documenting Tunisia’s Alternative Popular Music (1970s–1980s)
By Hedy Ben Hmida ·
Tunisian Alternative Music: A Forgotten Chapter
Discussions of Tunisian music often focus on traditional genres such as mezoued and rboukh, alongside celebrated figures like Hedi Jouini, Saliha, and Lotfi Bouchnak. Yet Tunisia’s musical history extends beyond these established repertoires. Artists and bands such as Carthago, Marhaba Band, Sadok Gharbi, and Khaled Mellef explored a different musical landscape, blending international influences with distinctly Tunisian sounds.
During the 1970s and 1980s, these musicians helped shape an alternative current in Tunisian popular music. Their sound brought together funk, rock, and pop with local musical sensibilities. This combination challenged the boundaries between cultural heritage and imported genres, offering another perspective on Tunisia’s musical modernity.
Today, however, many of these artists remain relatively unknown. Their recordings rarely appear in mainstream accounts of Tunisian music, and accessible documentation remains scarce. Recovering their history requires more than listening to surviving records. It also means tracing the networks, venues, performances, and cultural conditions that allowed this music to emerge.
Eshkounjay and the Rediscovery of Khaled Mellef
The renewed circulation of this music also depends on collectors and selectors who connect overlooked recordings with new audiences. Eshkounjay, a Berlin-based DJ and record collector who has lived in the city since 1995, introduced Mehdi Ben Yahia to the records of Khaled Mellef.
As a resident at Refuge Worldwide, Eshkounjay brings a broad international music archive and an interest in connecting listeners with lesser-known musical histories. His work illustrates how collectors and radio platforms can help recordings travel beyond their original contexts and reach new audiences.
These connections also reveal the importance of informal networks in preserving musical heritage. A record passed between collectors can open a path toward an artist, a forgotten band, or an entire period of cultural history that official documentation has largely overlooked.
Mehdi Ben Yahia’s Research into Tunisia’s Musical Archives
For approximately two and a half years, Mehdi Ben Yahia has pursued a research and documentation project focused on Tunisian solo artists and bands associated with funk, rock, pop, and related genres. His work addresses a significant gap in the historical record: the limited documentation available on musicians who helped shape Tunisia’s alternative popular music.
Ben Yahia has combined archival research with interviews and fieldwork. He has consulted private and public collections, searched for vinyl records and cassette tapes in Tunis, Sousse, and Hammamet, and spoken with people who witnessed or participated in this musical period.
The research has presented considerable challenges. Records remain scattered across private collections, while surviving accounts often provide only fragments of a larger story. Dates, names, and details can be difficult to verify. By gathering these materials and comparing different sources, Ben Yahia has gradually assembled a more coherent picture of the scene.
His research maps the activities, concerts, and historical trajectories of musicians active between 1960 and 1990. It also helps place individual recordings within a broader cultural context, connecting artists and bands to the communities and musical movements that shaped their work.
Preserving the Sound and Its Memory
The next phase of the project focuses on locating audiovisual materials, particularly video recordings. Such documents could complement the photographs, newspaper articles, audio tapes, vinyl records, and cassettes that already inform the research.
Video footage could offer valuable evidence of live performances, stage arrangements, audiences, and the visual culture surrounding these musicians. It could also help researchers compare existing accounts with surviving images and recordings.
Ben Yahia is also reportedly developing initiatives to share the findings with wider audiences, although further details remain limited. These efforts could help bring the research beyond private archives and specialist circles, making the material accessible to listeners, researchers, and future generations.
The significance of this work extends beyond rediscovering forgotten songs. Tunisian alternative music forms part of a wider cultural history in which local musicians absorbed, adapted, and transformed international influences. Recovering their stories challenges narrow definitions of musical heritage and expands our understanding of how popular culture developed in Tunisia.
By bringing scattered recordings, photographs, testimonies, and historical references together, Ben Yahia’s project seeks to restore these artists to the story of Tunisian music. Their legacy deserves attention not simply because their recordings have become rare, but because they reveal a more complex, interconnected, and diverse musical past.