a preview of Poplak’s upcoming The Sheikh’s
Batmobile: In Pursuit of American Pop Culture in the Muslim
World (Penguin, 2009).
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shared by Ed Webb on 02 Apr 09
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Feminist Review: Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema - 0 views
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Iran cinema film popularculture gender women feminism
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Saudi Gazette - Hip-hop and 'Khaleeji' music fusion creates national tribute - 0 views
BBC NEWS | Middle East | Islamic hip hop, or a load of hype? - 0 views
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This Magazine: Libya: Is it me you're looking for? - 0 views
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I thus broached the fact that I was in the country on false pretences with no small amount of trepidation. My reasons for being there sounded silly when I said them out loud, so I wasn’t sure how I’d explain that I’d travelled to Libya to confirm the story of a music video reenactment that had occurred in the Tripoli medina. But told him I did, bracing myself for a blow that never came. It was, in fact, remarkably easy convincing my chiselled praetorian to forgo the usual itinerary for some investigative work. “So, you don’t want to go with the Germans on a walking tour of the ruins?” asked Eder. “No,” I said. “I sort of lied about that on the visa application form.” “You want to find out about this music video?” “Yes. That’s why I’m here.” Eder shook his head. “Man, people come here and ask the weirdest shit. But what you are asking—this is not to fuck little boys or such.” I agreed. Vigorously. “But I warn you,” he said, presaging the fact that working in Libya was the journalistic equivalent of sculpting quicksilver, “the tour group will only allow you so much freedom before you make people suspicious. And people here don’t like to give information. They’re afraid, and maybe they should be.”
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Eder felt more allegiance to East coast hip hop than he did to Middle-Eastern Arab culture. American popular culture was his popular culture.
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The Tripolitan shore is, after all, where America’s centuries-long relationship with the Muslim world properly began. Operation El Dorado Canyon was but another in a long line of American military engagements with the variegated rulers of Libya, a legacy that dates back over 200 years. Within the DNA of those dusty, forgotten battles lies the code of enmity that continues unabated. But this concomitant history also hints at a lengthy cultural involvement— a mutual fascination that was tinged with both revulsion and wonder.
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The stage darkens. Lights swing back and forth, illuminating the Hanna House. Then all goes quiet. An icon of the 1980s— onetime member of R’n’B supergroup the Commodores, 90 million solo records sold, over a dozen Top 10 singles on the Billboard charts—stalks up to the spotlight, a smile on his face, the velvety Mediterranean breeze fluttering his navy-blue shirt. He then belts out five of his most beloved hits in front of the enraptured guests, culminating in a rousing sing-along, accompanied by 40 angel-costumed children typical to this sort of proceeding, of the “We Are the World” anthem he co-wrote with Michael Jackson. “Hanna will be honoured tonight because of the fact that you’ve attached peace to her name,” Lionel Richie tells the crowd. “I love you Libya! I’ll be back.” Yes, but how did he come to be there in the first place?
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The take-home message was that the man who wrote “Dancing on the Ceiling” was a greater nuncio for peace—or at least common ground—than any number of official envoys, roadmaps or summit meetings. But there was one item in the story that made me choke up, Beaches style. I played it again—just to make sure I hadn’t misheard. Then I made my way through the blustery autumnal day to the newsstand to purchase a copy of Gentlemen’s Quarterly. In print, the story hit me with a wallop I usually associate with passages from great literature (or first-edition comic books). Richie told GQ that when he visited the Tripoli medina, a contingent of Libyan children had massed around him, closed their eyes, made wavy gesticulations with their hands, and moaned “Hello.” This was not a séance, but rather a passable rendition of the “Hello” video clip (a staple on MTV in the station’s early years, and a landmark moment in the history of the music video), in which a gorgeous blind woman, who knows Richie only from his mellifluous voice, somehow sculpts a perfectly representative clay bust of his Jheri-curled visage. “What’s going on here? How do you know?” begged Lionel Richie of the Libyan children. “How do you know?” How did they know? Lionel Richie’s videos are prominent in the cultural memory of a generation of North Americans; a friend once described Richie’s “All Night Long” clip as “a profound piece of eschatological imagination.” Indeed, to a scion of the 1980s, the Richie oeuvre carries an almost oneiric weight. Like “All Night Long,” the “Hello” video was an indelible piece of my childhood, a kiln-fired shard of memory now flung into the quandary of the Muslim world.
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popular culture as a binding force. Hundreds of millions of people in over a 100 countries know Lionel Richie’s music, and adore it. According to the GQ article, anti-Ba’athist residents of Baghdad had blasted “All Night Long” as the Shock ’n’ Awe™ commenced. “The only thing Shiite and Sunni now share, aside from their hatred of each other and their worship of Allah and his prophet, is their abiding love for Lionel Brockman Richie Jr.,” wrote Mr. Corsello.
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Did hundreds of young Libyan children really have the “Hello” video downloaded onto their cognitive hard drives the same way a Westerner born of the 1980s did? In no way did I think that GQ or Lionel Richie had willfully fabricated these details. I just wondered if something had become garbled in the translation. I had to find out if that video reenactment had happened. Mr. Corsello put it perfectly: “We … have a strategic, even moral, obligation to know: What is the freakin’ deal with Lionel Richie?”
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The Libyans I’d met so far were polite but reticent. “Such questions!” they’d remark, sounding like so many Peter Lorres in Casablanca. “Behind the questions, what do you hope to find, Mr. Richard? There is only darkness.” Indeed, it was impossible to get a peripheral sense of what was going on in Libya: I felt out of my depth, immersed in an ostensibly bright world that was defined by brutality. Securing an interview felt like pinning live butterfly specimens. I kept in mind the recent case of five Bulgarian nurses, sentenced to death on trumped-up charges of injecting the AIDS virus into poor Libyan children. They had been horribly mistreated; it took some filthy dealing on the part of European governments to secure their freedom. And I knew that any locals implicated in my quest could expect much worse.
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we spent our evenings haunting stores that sold bootleg DVDs of titles that had yet to be released stateside
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in the vanguard of a new Libyan generation, surfing the demographic wave of a massive Middle Eastern birthrate, pulled west by the accident of his tribal affiliations, plugged in because of an unprecedented technological sea-change in how media were disseminated. And that put him as much at odds with the Libyan mainstream as I was.
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One thing I was slowly learning in the Muslim world: There is no Muslim world. There is no monolithic, stand-alone Other.
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Cultural critic Greil Marcus once described early rock and pop as “music that affirmed meaninglessness and in that affirmation contained every conceivable kind of meaning.” This stands as a testament to what popular culture does best: unite us in an indefinable, unrefined moment of merriment, sadness, sentiment, titillation. There are two great equalizers: Death and pop culture. That’s what Lionel Richie meant by his story. And that’s why his story meant so much.
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hawgblawg: New video from DAM: Palestinian rap - 1 views
Turkey's tantalising television: Happy Arabs, outraged Israelis | The Economist - 0 views
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shared by Ed Webb on 11 Mar 19
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Patriarchal pop: the latest sexist trend in Arabic pop music - The National - 0 views
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music popularculture popculture Arabs TV television satellite misogyny patriarchy
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a list of admonitions to females disguised as tips to achieve domestic bliss: “When the man speaks, the women shouldn’t argue back/ She shouldn’t say ‘yes sir’ and forget the next day/ She should understand and appreciate his value if she wants to continue the relationship with him.” And this is only the first verse. Sabry continues his diatribe with suggestions regarding a women’s modesty, private and public behaviour. Perhaps sensing such instructions are abusive, he ends the track by basically telling his prospective lover to keep his indiscretions private. “The woman who keeps her house, and its secrets, she’s perfection/ And the woman who accepts her lot will see a quick correction/ But the woman who causes problems will find nothing but rejection.”
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Ever since its release in July, the title track of his album has amassed more than three million views on YouTube. in addition to being a mainstay of Arabic pop stations regionwide.
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“Al Ragel provoked some females because of its lyrics,” he said. “But I ask, why don’t they take this song as form of advice for them?”
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the May release of Te’rafy Teskoty by Medhat Saleh. It translates to Do You Know How to Shut Up? and the veteran Egyptian singer released a complementary video where he and partner get into a heated argument in an elevator. The reason behind the row is that she became jealous of Saleh taking selfies with young female fans. Saleh’s face is full of controlled rage throughout the elevator scene. He almost spits out the lyrics, which begin from the relatively benign – “Do you know how to shut up, stop getting ideas” – to the more unpleasant – “Do you know how to shut up or should I shut you up?”
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“This is something new. Arabic songs never really had songs with such hurtful meanings,” stated the Jordanian novelist Fadi Zaghmout on his popular Arabic popular-culture blog The Arab Observer.
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“This only popped up in the past few years, where men seem to feel they have the right to be vocal about women’s behaviour, stating what seems to them be social criticism and disapproval on how modern women are claiming their independence and equal status.”
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Mohamed Eskander’s 2010 hit Joumhoureyet Alby, in which he scuttles the notion of his wife (or daughter) getting a job: “Your work is my heart and my emotions/ You’re not going to have time for anything else/ It’s enough that you are the president of my heart.”
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Lebanese bad-boy pop star Fares Karem has always had a more-direct approach. His testosterone-filled brand of thumping Lebanese folk is best exemplified in his 2005 hit El Tanoura (The Skirt), with lyrics that border on verbal stalking: “Her skirt is very short, a hand span and a half/ And her blouse is see-through.” Karam, who is no stranger to criticism regarding a body of work that includes other alpha-male anthems Neswanji (Player) and Shefta (I Saw Her), says that his songs merely reflect the conversations being conducted in society. “It is because I am talking about daring issues,” he told The National in May. “With respect to my peers, none of them are as direct as me. I talk about real-life situations that people face, but in a way they identify with.”
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Ghazi is not surprised by the seeming glut of misogynist Arabic pop songs. The notions expressed in these songs were always there, she says, but the explosion of privately owned television and radio stations have allowed these songs to find a home.
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“You are seeing such misogyny also in western songs from pop to hip-hop music. But what happened in the region [is] before you only had access to state-run media. Now there are so many privately owned channels. “The fact that these songs are shown on these channels, which are for profit and with no regulation, points that there is a whole industry regarding these songs.”
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the latest salvo in an ongoing struggle for gender equality in the region that came to the fore during the demonstrations
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“What we seen from the Arab Spring is that when women are on the streets calling for change, they don’t just talk about politics. Everything is out in the open, from systemic privileges, marginalisations and all kinds of challenges. That’s because social diseases and politics are a reflection of each other,”
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an added responsibility that Arab songwriters must now bring to their work, says Lebanese artist Tania Saleh. The indie singer-songwriter is one of the small contingent of female lyricists working in the Arabic music industry; her list of collaborations includes songs for Egyptian-Belgian singer Natacha Atlas and the soundtrack to Lebanese films Caramel (2007) and Where Do We Go Now (2011). Her five albums of Oriental folk have evocative lyrics dealing with societal issues from a female perspective, in songs such as Hal Ouyoun, Lezim and Reda.
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decades ago during the apogee of the Arabic song, the 50s and 60s – you would never think about writing such things. Think of the classic songs of Umm Kalthoum and Mohammed Abdel Wahab. They sang about deep and sensitive emotions. And who wrote those songs: men.
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Before pouring all that ugliness into society, artists should think about what they are producing and to whom.
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shared by Ed Webb on 10 Aug 17
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Prison for dabbing: Saudi entertainer locked up for 'inciting drug abuse' | Middle East... - 0 views
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Saudi KSA popularculture popculture narcotics drugs media music idiocy
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The move is officially banned by the Saudi Interior Ministry’s National Drug Control Commission, which consider the move to be a reference to cannabis consumption.
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“the move is a well-known move…known to represent smoking hashish which leads to addiction.”He added that there was “no doubt” that anyone taking part in the move would be subject to questioning and punishment.The move could warrant a prison sentence, a fine or both.