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