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her sister decided to leave the band. It was a moment of despera- tion for Mezel which she’s now grateful for as it made her discover her own strength and realise that she could go it alone, albeit with tremendous support from Abdoun and Abdoun’s father, who became a spiritual father to her. So much so that she asked him to ‘name’ her, and he gave her the title Iness Mezel, meaning ‘tell him never to despair’.
Her second album, Lën (Nocture, 2003) she describes as full of rage and believes that it’s only with Beyond The Trance that she’s finally found her equilibrium. The album is a whirling mix of rock and pop blues and jazz and soul and funk and traditional Berber music. It’s cohesive and classy. Just when you decide it might be one thing, it turns out to be another, so you cannot make assump- tions about the music, you just have to sit and enjoy the ride.
The lyrics are clearly politically inspired, and dictate whether she sings in French or Tamazight. She pleads for us all to realise of the value of multiculturalism. She wants everyone to appreciate that we’re all essentially different and the same. “I’m French, but these other people are my ancestors. We should be happy that there are all these rich things in us.”
Her song Respect is about “The invisible people, ‘the other’. “M
You see them around, they work, they pay their taxes, but they don’t appear. We don’t see them. It’s not because they want to be excluded, it’s because we won’t see them. They don’t appear on the social ladder. I need to address these problems through music, otherwise I wouldn’t feel happy, it would be empty.” But for Mezel, music is not just political, it’s personal, though not neces- sarily directly autobiographical.
usic helped me a lot in finding my bal- ance. I am mixed identity and it’s a reflec- tion of this. I want to express the possi- bility, for a person who is born with dif- ferent cultural roots, that there’s a way
through. Because when you’re from one root you know from the start who you are, when you’re not there’s always a question. For me working on music is like knitting,” she mimes the action, “cre- ating a blanket, like a safety net so you don’t fall into the abyss, like a black hole in the cosmos. You have to avoid the black hole, so you knit something, you knit a marriage of identities.” A musi- cal marriage which, both because of and despite all its complexi- ties, we should simply celebrate.
www.iness-mezel.com F
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