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Ed Webb

The New Hybridities of Arab Musical Intifadas - www.jadaliyya.com - Readability - 1 views

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music hiphop Arabs MENA uprisings Adorno metal metalmusic

shared by Ed Webb on 31 May 12 - No Cached
  • Both extreme metal and hardcore rap have long featured dissonant, even jarring music that is often marked in equal measure by the sophistication of and difficulty in listening to it. Lyrically, the grittiness, anger and themes such as poverty, unemployment, police brutality, and lack of life opportunities—were at the heart of American hip hop culture before it wase taken over by bling. Similarly, extreme metal’s focus on war, corruption, and chaos played a major role in the genre’s increasing popularity with young people across the Middle East and North Africa in the last twenty years.
  • During the last twenty years in which both heavy metal and hiphop have developed in the Arab and larger Muslim majority worlds, the closed nature of the political spheres in the region helped encourage these scenes to become sites of subcultural and even countercultural production. The music they have produced is the very antithesis of the far more popular, hyper-commercialized and corporatized (or “Rotana-ized”) Arab pop, whose European and American predecessors Adorno so thoroughly despised. They also stand in opposition to the largely depoliticized and musically unchallenging religious pop of stars like Sami Yusuf and Ali Gohar, who as Walter Armbrust points out, tend not merely to leave unchallenged and even reinforce patriarchal values, but offer aesthetic endorsement of the existing system through the themes and locations of their videos
  • whether Adorno would accept it or not, the self-reflexivity and willingness to critique society by its own referents that have characterized the best exemplars of extreme metal and political hip-hop are legitimate heirs of the tradition of critical engagement that have defined Adorno's oeuvre and that of his Frankfurt School colleagues. While critics have long labeled both metal and rap as juvenile, hedonistic, and even nihilistic forms of music, this interpretation is far off the mark when it comes to the more political forms of both genres. They function not merely as the CNN—or in the case of the Arab world, al-Jazeera—of the streets, but as their oped page as well, both educating their audience about political and social realities in their societies and the possibility of creating more positive futures
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  • The best rap and metal in the region succeeds because it manages to avoid both the kind of “extreme consciousness of doom” that leads to aesthetic nihilism, hyper-stylized violence and other forms of artistic “idle chatter,” while also avoiding the kind of surrender to the culture industry which leads even the most well-intentioned of mainstream artists to “collaborate with culture as its salaried and honoured nuisance” rather than challenge it directly from the margins.
  • the ultimate function of immanent criticism: to enable a positive synthesis, or irreducible hybridization of identities. Such identities can not be subsumed under any dominant ideology or political and economic narrative and therefore cannot serve to reinforce them
  • in the Middle East and North Africa region, in the years leading up to the current revolutionary moment, the growing popularity of metal and rap music represents a return of the aura to local music scenes. Both Benjamin and Adorno believed that a remnant, or perhaps better, specter of the original aura remained within works of art even in the mechanical/industrial age. This spector becomes visible in the kind of critical art represented by the groups discussed here, contributing to the continued “excessiveness”, “aesthetic deviance”, and “pointing elsewhere” towards cultural difference and a different future that characterize the best exemplars of the music
  • As Moe Hamzeh, leader of one of the most talented and successful Arab rock/metal groups, Beriut's The Kordz6, explains, while Arab rock or rap artists obviously want to be successful, the relative lack of interest in the two genres by Rotana and other Arab media conglomerates has been a blessing from an aesthetic perspective. It has saved them from the inevitable fate of all commercialized popular music, whether American hiphop and hair metal to Arab video-clip driven pop. At the same time, the lack of commercialization has made the public performance of the music, usually in small group settings or festivals geared specifically to fans of the genres, the crucial means of creating audiences and building solidarity among their communities of fans.
  • singers and rappers were actually smiling as they performed their music. And so were the crowds surrounding them. This is likely not the vibe Adorno imagined would surround the kind of immanently critical music he felt was necessary to wake people up to the false consciousness they had been mindlessly inhabiting. But it points to a crucial problem with Adorno’s musical aesthetic, at least form the standpoint of reception. The more abstract, atonal, and devoid of recognizable harmonies or rhythmic pulse a piece of music is, the harder it will be for it to inspire a large number of people. Once people are actually on the streets protesting rather than in their smaller subcultural gatherings, they need something catchier and more uplifting to sing along to than brutal vocals and rapid fire rhymes
  • Adorno did not think much of the aesthetic and political potential of folk music, which he tied both to nationalist and fascist sentiments. In its then present-day form (rather than traditional-historical form), he believed it to foster little more than a “pseudo-folk community,” particularly in its cultural and aesthetic historical trajectory in Germany. But in Egypt as in the United States, the music has played a more critical political role in struggles for political freedom and social justice.
  • the band’s popularity is inseparable from its dual role as a voice of protest and a regenerator of traditional styles of music that recently were in danger of disappearing completely because of a combination of market forces and government censorship
  • What the kind of joyful hybridity exemplified by the production style of Armada Bizerta and myriad other rap groups around the Arab and larger Muslim worlds (and across Africa) reveal is that even within one genre of music, such as hip hop, talented artists can create innumerable sonic tapestries to match, and help shape, the national mood—from dissonant anger to joyful creativity—as the political and cultural situation on the ground changes. Their flexibility is key to their function as the kind immanent critique Adorno and other critical theorists hoped would be able to “reliquify” the “congealed” ideologically bounded identities imposed by authoritarian regimes on their citizens
  • The joyful aesthetics of groups such as Amarda Bizerta, Emel Mathlouthi, Ramy Essam, and other artists at the heart of youth-inspired revolutions challenges Adorno’s belief that critical music in the age of mass reproduction and consumption has to be, essentially, hard to listen to in order to make the listener think and perhaps even motivated to take some form of action. It seems that while in the pre-Revolutionary period, when cultural expression was still heavily policed, this indeed was the case—thus the power and popularity of genres like metal and hardcore rap. But with the explosion of political, cultural, and artistic energy of the protests a new aesthetic dynamic was born that, at least as of the time of this writing, remains quite powerful. As important, by drawing people literally closer together, the music brings them closer to its critical and transformational aura, closing a circle that was broken, according to Benjamin, with the mechanical reproduction and commodification of musi a century ago
  • It remains to be seen whether Americans and Europeans, so used to providing the “original” music and culture which others have long sampled, will prove as adept as the “new generation” of Arab revolutionaries in adapting the tools and ideas of others to create their own cultural, political, and economic hybrids. But if the experience of the last year is any indication, without doing so there is little chance of the current wave of protests across the West producing the kind of large-scale transformation now underway, however problematically, in the Arab world.
Ed Webb

hawgblawg: New video from DAM: Palestinian rap - 1 views

swedenburg.blogspot.com/...-from-dam-palestinian-rap.html

rap palestine popularculture

shared by Ed Webb on 29 Mar 09 - Cached
  • Ed Webb on 29 Mar 09
     
    Handy video if you're learning the Arabic alphabet
Ed Webb

Hip Hop Finds Its Groove in North Africa | Newlines Magazine - 0 views

newlinesmag.com/...nds-its-groove-in-north-africa

music hiphop Maghreb MENA Morocco Tunisia Algeria Egypt France Italy Belgium language colonialism identity identities

shared by Ed Webb on 24 May 21 - No Cached
  • Pop music in the region today truly represents the Westernization of classical Arabic music defined by traditional elements of improvisation (where songs often last as long as an hour), instruments native to the region like the oud, and maqam, which is a system of melodies and pitches native to Arabic music. Classical Arabic artists like Oum Kulthum and Asmahan thrived on this style and are considered icons of Arabic music because of their ability to evoke emotion through their artistry.But in conjunction with colonization, Arabic music began to shift from its classical roots with the Cairo Congress of Arab Music in 1932, organized by King Fuad of Egypt. This symposium brought together renowned composers and ethnomusicologists from the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe who created a set of proposals for the modernization and standardization of Arabic music, one of which was the incorporation of European instruments into Arabic ensembles because “such instruments possessed tremendously varied, expressive means and depictive powers.”The other notable event that pushed this modernization further was the introduction of the phonograph to the region. Phonographs could only play songs for a limited duration, making the traditional improvisation and hour-long running times of classical Arabic music nearly impossible.The final nail in the coffin was the burgeoning film industry in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly in Egypt, the cultural epicenter for creative output in the Middle East and North Africa. Movies were heavily Westernized at the time, forcing directors and producers to modify accompanying music to incorporate Western-style elements in their instruments and duration.
  • a new movement is rising in North Africa.Rappers and emcees from the region are boldly approaching hip-hop and the larger Arab music landscape by exploring taboo themes and proactively deconstructing societal markers of North African identity. They are experimenting with beat production and dialect as they go about creating a space for their music and for these conversations to be held in a public domain. This is not a knock on the Levantine or Khaleeji rap scenes; there are many artists who are doing this currently. But North African emcees are using their lyrical flows and melodic rhythms to grapple with the essential question of identity. The music sounds fresh and breathes new life into the pop-dominant Arabic music scene.
  • A vast majority of North African rappers primarily use their regional Arabic dialects and French in their music. But many artists, specifically North African artists based in Europe, also use Spanish, Dutch, and English on their albums. A few artists will even use all four languages in one song.
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  • Many emcees, more so than their Levantine or Khaleeji counterparts, utilize Afropop and Afro-fusion rhythms in their music as a nod to their home continent.
  • Dialect and slang are important in rap, Boubaker stressed, because “it is a question of using a popular spoken language in constant evolution and which incorporates foreign influences.”
  • French colonial policy in Algeria, she explained, aimed to violently prevent and suppress the teaching of Indigenous languages like Tamazight. France intentionally stoked tensions between Indigenous Imazighen and ethnic Arabs by implementing unjust laws seeking to tear at the societal fabric of the country and destroy Algerian identity.France implemented similar policies in other North African countries as well, actively working to create sectarian tensions that led to ethnic and linguistic divides that, in turn, led to brutal, violent conflicts and suppression of Indigenous culture.
  • Afrobeats is a fusion of hip-hop, dancehall, soca, and other Black genres that can be identified by its use of African drums and a 3/2 time signature — different from a Western 4/4 time signature — that gives the genre its trademark dance tempo
  • For North African artists, use of these rhythms can be traced back to Black North Africans and Indigenous communities who are descendants of the slave trade. Boubaker shared that the different genres, namely gnawa in Morocco, diwan in Algeria, and stambali in Tunisia, are the result of a distinct weaving between the musicalities of North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and Black Sufi tradition that can lead to a state of trance.
  • The stambali genre, Boubaker elaborated, is sung in a language derived from a mixture of Tunisian Arabic and the Houassa language spoken by the Hausas, a people of the Sahel, mainly in northern Nigeria and southern Niger who were part of the slave trade to Tunisia.
  • “Moroccan artists, early on, primarily referenced Malcolm X as a way to make the connection between race, Blackness, and Islam in the U.S. and embraced their own African identity through their music,” Almeida said. “The African theme has been going on for a while now.”
  • While Moroccan and Egyptian emcees found early opportunities, Tunisian and in particular Algerian artists did not have that initial access.
  • In Algeria, however, while the rap scene was up and coming, Almeida said the government actively worked to shut it down, which, she said, “really crushed everything.”That now looks different, with Algerian rappers even drawing influences from raï music and sampling prominent Algerian artists in their music.
  • Algerian artists of the 1990s and up to the present day are now primarily recording their music in France, Spain, and other European countries to then broadcast back to Algeria and the rest of North Africa. This is a subtle but noticeable diversion away from seeking opportunities in the traditional Middle East/North Africa hubs of music and culture such as Cairo, Beirut, and Baghdad.
  • “We just have to go back to our history, and we need to start loving ourselves and we need to recognize who we truly are because we’re not Arabs. 100% being Egyptian and being Moroccan is straight up being African and straight up being proud. And this is why I never have any issue representing mahraganat in my music because this is Egyptian music. I’m proud of my double cultures. I’m proud of my continent, and I really want to showcase it everywhere.”
  • North African rappers today are using hip-hop to express what it means to be who they are in the context of their country, their continent, and their lived experiences. And while there is a deep and painful colonial history associated with this music, the artistic yield has been profound not just for the region but the world.
Ed Webb

Morsi's Win is Al Jazeera's Loss - Al-Monitor: the Pulse of the Middle East - 2 views

www.al-monitor.com/...s-win-is-al-jazeeras-loss.html

Qatar jazeera Egypt MB ihwan media television TV satellite opinion analysis

shared by Ed Webb on 02 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • Al Jazeera Arabic’s pro-Brotherhood methodology is two-pronged. First, it predominantly hosts guests that it can be fairly certain would be gentle in their criticism of the Muslim Brotherhood, and second, its anchors refrain from asking Muslim Brotherhood members and spokesmen embarrassing questions.
  • The alliance between Qatar, the host and backer of Al Jazeera, with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood is no secret.
  • Al Jazeera Arabic’s love affair with the Muslim Brotherhood has done damage to more than one country’s revolutionary cause. In Syria, Al Jazeera Arabic’s championing of the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated and highly ineffective opposition Syrian National Council has cost the channel much credibility. Al Jazeera Arabic refrains from criticising the group or highlighting its repeated failures. It also instructs its reporters to follow a certain narrative, prompting numerous resignations. 
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  • Based on Al Jazeera Arabic’s online narrative, Morsi is depicted as an Egyptian warrior, born destined to fight the Egyptian army into submission and championed by oppressed Arabs while at once terrifying their archenemy, Israel. The channel, of course, neglects to mention that President Morsi repeatedly vowed to honor international treaties, in reference to the Israeli-Egyptian peace accord, not to mention his repeated praise of the army
  • in Palestine, Al Jazeera Arabic scores major coups in uncovering the rampant corruption of the Palestinian Authority but neglects to mention democratic setbacks in the Hamas Muslim Brotherhood-controlled Gaza strip
  • there is no other single channel to carry the mantle that Al Jazeera Arabic has so readily done away with. The best Arabic-language speakers can do now is to flip between two or more channels that carry a different narrative in order to arrive as close as possible to the truth
  • the same narrative does not plague Al Jazeera’s English-language version of the station
Ed Webb

Culture in Iran: Change the key, Rohani | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...culture-iran

Iran censorship music politics

shared by Ed Webb on 13 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • In Iran it is rare to hear a woman sing in public. So rare, in fact, that when Shiva Soroush did so for all of three minutes last year the entire audience took to their feet. Grown men wept. With an aria in a performance of Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, Ms Soroush, 27, became the first woman since the 1979 Islamic Revolution to sing opera for a public audience.
  • “At first I thought it would be dangerous and I wouldn’t be able to perform... [but] I can feel there is more freedom in the theatres now,” she says, adding that hopefully other women may now be blessed with similar opportunities. Her troupe, the Tehran Opera Ensemble, is the brainchild of Hadi Rosat, who returned to Iran in 2012 after more than a decade studying in Austria and Italy. But Tehran music lovers seem to place particular hope in Ms Souroush, as if she were single-handedly serenading Iran out of what many recall as the “eight dark years” under former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, which ended last August.
  • Some 600 student members of the Basij, a militia run by the powerful Revolutionary Guard, recently wrote a letter to the president. Warning Mr Rohani not to let his declared agenda of “moderation” be infiltrated by reformists, the students demanded strict supervision of the arts, cinema and press to avoid “any kind of secularist tolerance.”
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  • Just as Mr Rohani faces opposition to his recent diplomatic overtures toward the West, his social agenda, led in part by the seemingly reform-friendly culture minister, Ali Jannati, is raising the ire of conservatives.
  • Farhad Fakhreddini (pictured), the founder of the national symphony orchestra, quit his job in 2009 to protest against growing interference by Mr Ahmadinejad’s government. On March 4th the 76-year-old conducted his first concert in five years, fronting the privately funded Mehrnavazan Orchestra. In the first of four sold-out concerts in Tehran, Mr Fakhreddini felt emboldened enough to perform a muscular rendition of the old national anthem from the time of the Shah. As he spun around to conduct his audience’s singing, he was met with standing ovation.
  • censorship is more often a matter of personal judgment than government decrees. Such was the case in January when Pallett, a fusion band that mixes folk music with jazz and Western pop influences, performed on national television. For 35 years the state broadcasting monopoly has forbidden musical instruments to be shown on TV. To circumvent the rule the band performed in pantomime, pretending to play their instruments in the air
  • The video quickly went viral. “We had not expected this reaction from so many people who found it controversial,” says Rouzbeh Esfandarmaz, the band’s clarinettist. “Our music is not political.”Viewers on both sides saw it differently. While some lauded what they saw as a brave political statement, the producer of the show got a rap over the knuckles for allowing such an open mockery of a state institution.
  • there are signs of tightened censorship in other areas
Ed Webb

Al-Qaida Media Blitz Has Some On Alert : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...story.php

hornofafrica Somalia terrorism al-qaida video propaganda youth

shared by Ed Webb on 08 Apr 09 - Cached
  • While certainly any message from bin Laden is parsed for information and intelligence, it was a third video — that was released from one of al-Qaida's media arms — that made counterterrorism analysts sit up and take notice. The video came out of Somalia last week, and it was a slick recruitment tape complete with its own original rap music score that played under the opening sequence of the half-hour-long film. The production was made by a Somali militia group called al-Shabab, which has ties to al-Qaida.
  • In one part of the video he appears to be preparing recruits — who also speak English — for battle.
  • During the battle, Abu Mansour orders the small group of fighters who are with him to retreat. But here's what's important: He says it in English. "Let's go, let's go," he yells as a shaking video camera appears to record their retreat.
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  • "It'll be interesting to see the extent to which al-Qaida spins this phenomenon," said Bill Braniff, who works at West Point's Combating Terrorism Center. He says al-Qaida would love people to believe there is a connection between the missing boys and the video. "What we are seeing is al-Qaida trying to control the propaganda output," he says. "They are not trying to control the activity on the ground to the same extent as they are trying to control the propaganda about the activity on the ground."
Ed Webb

Netanyahu campaign video: A victory for the Left means an ISIS invasion | +972 Magazine - 0 views

972mag.com/...102703

Israel media politics propaganda Netanyahu ISIS Palestine israelpalestine Hamas Fatah analysis election

shared by Ed Webb on 14 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • The video opens with bearded men traveling in a pickup truck, flying the black IS flag with its distinctive white calligraphy. The driver of the truck pulls up beside another car and honks for the other driver’s attention. The IS guy in the passenger seat leans out the window and asks him, in Hebrew with a comically exaggerated Arabic accent, “Hey bro, how do you get to Jerusalem?” The driver of the car shouts back (in Israeli Hebrew), “Take a left!” Then there’s the slogan, in red Hebrew letters emblazoned on a gray, bullet-marked background: “THE LEFT WILL SURRENDER TO TERROR.” One of the IS guys fires celebratory bullets skyward and the driver peels off, ostensibly in the direction of Jerusalem, as they all shout exultantly in Arabic, “Shukran, ya ward!” (“Thanks, bro!”). The camera pans briefly to the rear of the truck to focus on a popular Israeli bumper sticker that reads, “Anyone but Bibi.” The tagline: “It’s us, or them. Only the Likud. Only Netanyahu.” The snatch of Arabic rap lyrics is excerpted from a song by an Amman-based Palestinian group called Torabyeh: “I want to be buried in the same cemetery that my grandfather was buried in. And since my childhood I’ve been dreaming to be a soldier and as time passed I discovered who I want to belong to: Mahmoud Abbas, Fatah, Hamas or…Jabha …”
  • Netanyahu has for years been promoting his message about the threat to Israeli security posed by Islamic extremism, never missing an opportunity to list Hamas along with the Islamic State, Al Qaeda, Boko Haram and even Fatah, mixing them all up so that the average Israeli Jew reflexively associates Arabs and Islam with terror. Like all accomplished populists, he understands the power of repeating a mendacious slogan, and he is an expert at exploiting popular fears and racism.
  • The popular Israeli narrative is so reactionary and confused these days, that if one were to walk the streets asking average citizens if there was a difference between Fatah and Al Qaeda, most people would be hard-pressed to answer coherently. Go ahead and try to explain to an Israeli audience that Hamas is a small offshoot of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, that it is basically a technocratic political party, that it is extremely unpopular in Gaza and that it has nothing to do with expansionist jihadism. Try telling people that if Israel would lift the siege on Gaza, disgruntled Palestinians in Gaza would probably kick Hamas out of power immediately. Just try. The best you can hope for is that you’d be told that you’re a traitor who should go live in Gaza.
Ed Webb

Morocco: Rapper gets one-year jail for insulting police | News | Al Jazeera - 0 views

www.aljazeera.com/...ng-police-191125194717788.html

Morocco censorship rap music protest politics authoritarianism youth

shared by Ed Webb on 28 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • A Moroccan court on Monday sentenced rapper Mohamed Mounir, known as Gnawi, to one year in jail for insulting police on social media.
  • The song, Aach al Chaab - which translates to "long live the people" - has been viewed more than 15 million times on YouTube since it was released last month.
  • rages against the authorities and criticises the country's widening economic gap, a message aimed at the disillusioned younger generation
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  • One passage of the song reflects on the Hirak protest movement in Morocco's impoverished Rif mountain region.
  • Most shockingly to many Moroccans, the song also directly criticises Morocco's king and his adviser, a criminal offence.
  • Young people make up one-third of Morocco's 35 million population. A quarter of those aged between 15 and 24 are unemployed and out of school, according to official figures.
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