Look who's rocking the casbah: the revolutionary implications of Arab music videos - Culture and Reviews

Reason, June, 2003 by Charles Paul Freund

ONE OF THE more interesting music videos released last year features an attractive brunette who, according to the video's narrative, is involved in a liaison taking place in a Paris hotel room. The visual narrative seems to offer the woman's often disconnected impressions of this apparently illicit relationship: Sometimes a man with a calculating smile is in the room with her; sometimes she's there alone, as if waiting for him. Naturally, the video is drenched in images of desire, especially the woman's erotic perceptions of the liaison and of herself.

For example, in one imagined sequence she isn't wearing much more than a skimpy bustier; in another she's lying suggestively prone, apparently thinking about the mysterious smiling man (who is seen in the background but not really present). Several times the camera invites the viewer to assume the role of the man, with the woman gazing at us with all the erotic intensity she can muster. As is usual in music videos, many shots feature the same woman in the role of singer, appearing onstage and performing the song we are hearing. But there are shots where she is both the singer and the character, including a curious shadowy sequence where several makeup women are busily applying powder to her exposed cleavage.

Eroticism like this, which seems to emerge from the pages of a Victoria's Secret catalog, isn't usually very noteworthy. Indeed, the video's assumption that there's something "forbidden" about its subject matter that must be approached in an "artistic" fashion may seem outdated. But in this case it is exactly such elements that make the production compelling. The reason is the video's cultural context: This is not an American or European or Japanese video; it is an Arab artifact. The woman is a singer named Elissa; her song, which has made her a leading celebrity in the Mideast, is entitled "Aychaylak" ("I Live for You"); and both her song and her video were among last year's biggest music hits in the Arabic-speaking world.

Elissa's video appears to establish a new extreme of what is visually permissible in Arab media; she herself has said that some of its sequences embarrassed her, though as the video was embraced by an enthusiastic audience she has also taken credit for what she calls her "daring."

While Elissa's imagery may be especially bold, the suggestiveness of her video is increasingly typical of what is happening in the contemporary Middle Eastern music scene. More and more Arab women singers are presenting themselves in provocative terms, as figures who express and assert themselves erotically through fashion, movement, expression, and voice. Nawal Zoghby, one of the region's biggest stars (she's been Pepsi's spokeswoman there), appeared in a hip-shaking video last year dressed in a tight and, by Mideastern standards, revealing leather outfit. She was backed up by a trio of black women singers in leather who were even more provocative. Suzanne Tamim offered a video (set partly in an American-style drive-in theater) in which she spent most of the running time striking a series of cheesecake poses in a tight outfit. This year's most notorious video thus far features a woman named Haifa Wehbe whom nobody in the region takes seriously as a singer at all. (She claims only to be an "entertainer.") Th e whole point of Wehbe's video is to show her dancing in a rain-soaked outfit (inspired perhaps by the "wet sari" sequences of popular Bollywood movies) while staring into the camera with her sultriest expression.

Many of these women singers, it should be noted, are Christians, and their videos are set in an obviously secular context that is sometimes specifically Western. But this new world of Arab videos is a pan-Arab project. The recording label for all these acts, Rotana, is based in Dubai, the Gulf state with the region's most open economy. Rotana's acts can be seen throughout the Arab world but are showcased via ART-TV; a multiformat Arabic-language satellite service established by Saudi investors, based in Jordan, and with studios in Cairo, Beirut, and elsewhere in the region. Most of the video production houses are in Lebanon, and the videos' credits (often in English) reflect diverse crews of Muslim and Christian Arabs, along with a smattering of Turkish names. The most notable director of these videos is Said El-Marouk, a Muslim filmmaker based in Germany whose work stands out because of its scale, spectacle, and excess. (He's the Ken Russell of the genre.)

Muslim women singers are also starting to bring erotic provocation to traditional, even specifically Muslim, contexts. A singer named Samr, for example, has released a video in which she appears dressed as the bride in a traditional Mahgrebian wedding celebration, complete with intricately decorative henna. Although she is clothed modestly and moves with decorum, her song is about her happy anticipation of her wedding night. Samr winks repeatedly at the audience even as she adopts an expression of mock modesty, rolls her eyes happily, and invites the audience to share in her anticipation of pleasure. Given that a woman's enthusiasm for sex is often considered suspect by traditionalists, Samr's performance is astonishing.