Changes in the interpretation of folk music in North Africa

About a year ago, in conversation with Maltese composer Charles Camilleri, I was served with this dire dictum: ?Folk music is finished. It may hang on for another 20 years, hardly more. Why not face the facts, give up on it now, and get on with the music at hand.? I was surprized to hear this from a composer who had launched his career with a symphonic adaptation of folk motives from his musical roots, the Malta Suites, but I easily dismissed it at the time as a manifestation of the very equivocal attitude Maltese intellectuals have toward the musical goings-on of their ?folk.? Nevertheless, I was shocked, perhaps somewhat offended, to hear something that had been near my heart for many years dismissed so irreverently. Recently, on the commuter train ?TGM? that leads from Tunis to some of the northern suburbs, a ?typical? scene jarred me alert and made me reflect anew on Camilleri's pronouncement: Some young men, heading out of the city for a Ramadhan evening's entertainment, were making music on the way: a common enough event as to pass virtually unnoticed. It was only in my early days in Tunisia that I would listen with charmed attention as youths played their darbuka (vase-shaped, single headed drum) or a reasonable facsimile and sang favorite folk-songs. This time, however, I suddenly realized that the scene had changed: They were strumming a guitar ?an instrument you rarely saw 20 years ago? and singing rap in English. I felt a shock something akin to that caused by Camilleri's assertion. This made another pair of contrasting scenes flash through my mind: In the early 70's when I visited certain friends in the country they would organize, almost as a matter of course, an impromptu jam session. Darbukas would come out, a relative or neighbor who played zukra,