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The explosive popularity of world music the last decade has brought Cuban son and Caribbean soca and Latin American salsa and African high life to the ears of many Americans, but music of the Middle East has, for many people, stayed in the domain of the belly dancing parlor and the odd Oum Kulthum cassette. A Berkeley performance by a couple of giants in the Arabic music world will show how close alongside Western pop this music is progressing. 

Appearing at the Berkeley Community Theater on Friday, February 22, is Khaled, and Hakim, “The king of rai” and “The lion of Egypt,” respectively. Their monikers don’t come easily. 

Khaled, who has dropped the traditional rai prefix, Cheb, from his name, is an Algerian-born, Paris-based singer and musician who draws from musical influence from all corners of the Arabic world and beyond to make his pop rai. Like rock and roll from the blues, rai has transmogrified over and over through the 20th century from its roots in Algerian folk chants with percussion and flutes, through influences of Western pop and jazz, into electronic beats and funky grooves underneath traditional melodies and instrumentation. 

Rai is an idiomatic word that resists translation into English; depending on who you’re talking to and how loose they’re feeling at the time, it can mean “opinion,” “advice,” “my way,” “tell it like it is,” or simply “oh yeah!” British pop star Sting had invited “The prince of rai” Cheb Mami to bring an exotic flair to his 1999 “Brand New Day” album on the “Desert Rose” track. As the modern music of Algeria, began to take its shape with confrontational and plain-talking lyrics in the early 1960s after the country became independent from France. 

The music comes with radical political baggage as the street sounds of the dispossessed. It was repressed from airwaves by the Algerian government until 1985 because it was associated with dissenting elements, and the assassination of popular rai musician Cheb Hasni by Islamic militants caused many musicians to flee to France, where they discovered studio facilities to make rai sound like it never had before. 

Khaled was one of those artists in France who rose to the top to become a global sensation. He not only admits to finding influence from Egyptian and Spanish music, but also from the Beatles and James Brown. On his new CD “Kenza,” named after his second daughter, the Paris production has Khaled’s horn section moving from funk to salsa, with plenty of electronic dance rhythms and string arrangements under the direction of New Wave producer Steve Killage (Simple Minds) and New York City’s acid jazzman Lati Krolund formerly of the Brooklyn Funk Essentials. 

Performing on the same bill, Hakim is likewise bringing the music of the back streets to a global audience by performing “al jeel” – for a new, young generation. His brand of shaa’bi music is fast with nearly delirious layers of percussion. 

Hakim grew up in Egypt the son of the mayor of Maghagha playing in bands of just tabla and accordion. He played shaa’bi, a form of lower-class music comparable to blues for its steady beats and freestyling vocals about hard times, poverty, and lost love. His father sent him to study in Cairo, where Hakim found himself immersed in the music scene on the city’s streets. 

After years of performing weddings and recording cassette tapes – the principle medium in Egypt for recorded music – Hakim has become the lion of his moniker, rivaling the sales of Egypt’s longstanding diva Oum Kathoum, who passed away almost 30 years ago and is still enormously popular. 

It’s hard to imagine cassette tapes blaring from boom boxes all over Egypt could respectfully replicate the nuanced percussive textures of Hakim’s newest release, “Yaho” (available on CD from the Mondo Melodia label). Several tracks are produced and mixed by Transglobal Underground, a group melding urban techno with instrument textures from cultures around the world. 

Both Hakim and Khaled have been wildly successful using dance beats and bass grooves to present their traditional musical heritage to a wide audience. Their live performance at the Berkeley Community Theater is presented by local DJ Cheb i Sabbah, who has been a Bay Area fixture for 10 years, championing not only Arabic, but Asian and African music in San Francisco clubs.