Habibi Funk: The Soul of the Arab World

The story of Habibi Funk begins not in Cairo or Beirut but in Berlin, where a young record collector named Jannis Stürtz spent years haunting second-hand shops and chasing down obscure leads across North Africa and the Middle East. What he was piecing together was a sound the Arab world had largely forgotten, a body of music from the 1960s and 1970s that absorbed soul, funk, psychedelia, and Latin grooves, then filtered them through local sensibilities, languages, and heartbreak. Stürtz launched Habibi Funk Records in 2016 as a reissue label, but what he was really doing was making the case that this music deserved to be heard on its own terms, as something essential rather than merely curious.

The 1970s were the golden decade, and nowhere does that feel more alive than in Morocco and Libya. In Morocco, Fadoul was the genre’s unruly spirit, a singer who absorbed James Brown and pushed him somewhere rawer, more street-level, with records like Sid Redad built on a groove that barely holds together and is all the better for it. Attarazat Addahabia and vocalist Faradjallah occupied stranger territory, blending gnawa trance music with fuzzy electric guitars and a psychedelic looseness that places a track like Al Hadaoui somewhere between Marrakech and Woodstock.

Down in Libya, the picture was equally rich. The Scorpions, not the German rock band but a Sudanese-Libyan outfit led by guitarist Sharhabil Ahmed alongside vocalist Saif Abu Bakr, were making some of the most quietly sophisticated music of the era, tracks like Seira Music and Nile Waves carrying a cool, unhurried confidence that sounds almost effortless. Ibrahim Hesnawi and Ahmed Fakroun rounded out a Libyan scene that had genuine range, from Hesnawi’s deep, stately Watany Al Kabir to Fakroun’s more cosmopolitan Sahranin, a track that could sit comfortably alongside anything coming out of Lagos or Kingston in the same period.

 

What this playlist makes clear is that Habibi Funk was never really a genre in the narrow sense. It was a moment of possibility, spread across a dozen countries and twice as many musical traditions, held together by a shared appetite for rhythm, modernity, and something that felt genuinely alive. You hear Fadoul or Fakroun or Al Massrieen, and you understand immediately that nothing was lost in translation, that these artists took what they wanted from the wider world and made it entirely their own.

 

PLAYLIST

1. Dalton - Alech

2. Fadoul - Sid Redad

3. Attarazat Addahabia; Faradjallah - Al Hadaoui

4. Magdy Al Hussainy - Music de Carnaval

5. The Scorpions; Saif Abu Bakr - Seira Music

6. Sal Davis - Quaboos

7. Ait Meslayene - El Fen

8. Dalton - Alech

9. The Scorpions; Saif Abu Bakr - Nile Waves

10. Ibrahim Hesnawi - Watany Al Kabir

11. The Scorpios - Mashena: We Went

12. Charif Megarbane - Tayyara Warak

13. Ahmed Malek - La La La

14. The Free Music: Najib Alhoush - Arb Share’i

15. Al Massrieen - Sah

16. Ahmed Fakroun - Sahranin