Hot Chocolate - I Believe in Miracles
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLIvhPRetpAwillingness to play "L'Arabe de service" on French media is enough.
This is what disturbed be about Henri Salvador and Manu Dibango. But isn't it the awkward, often cringe-inducing
Arabes/noirs de service who start the process of assimilation, the slow erosion of prejudices that cannot simply be banned and wished away? (Being an Arabe de service in Algeria strikes me as being altogether different and wrong, for fairly obvious reasons.)
In my way I'm a gaijin de service in Japan. I dress up as a Christian priest, I bow deeply and smile sincerely. I'm an exotic ornament and a fellow human being. I am not reduced by it, as I choose not to be reduced. I hope Salvador and Dibango were playing the same knowing game. I hope Khaled is too, if not too irredeemably thick.
Errol Brown was perhaps an English noir de service; To me he was a trailblazer of the cosmopolitan, assimilative England that almost came to pass. He fused sinuous funk riffs with perfect pop songs (see above). He wrote an excellent song about racism that was clever enough to start off with black racism before moving on to white (see below).