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

Reason, June, 2003 by Charles Paul Freund

The show has spawned numerous regional imitators, if not an entire alternate entertainment universe. No less than BBC's famous Top of the Pops is planning an Arabic-language version of its long-running format. There are whole 24-hour cable services, like Lebanon's Dream Machine, that program only pop videos. ART-TV itself has a separate all-music service that showcases pop stars in various interview and performance formats. When the United States, in the wake of September 11, wanted to grab the Arab world's attention and offer its interpretation of the news to the region, it didn't start a new information service; it established Radio Sawa. That service programs the pop hits visualized in these videos, burying a few minutes of news and commentary in each half-hour.

If you add the voluminous press and publicity machine that has grown around this scene, it begins to take on the proportions of a cultural frenzy. Such phenomena have a long and fascinating history; they occur when a cultural form becomes available to an audience that uses it to assert and validate its quickly shifting sense of itself. The Netherlands famously experienced such a phenomenon in the 17th century, when members of its suddenly enriched middle class latched onto paintings of themselves and their world as away to express and validate their new social power. At the time, such subject matter was a departure for painters; indeed, it was the first time that anyone outside the aristocracy had owned paintings. The emerging British middle class of the 18th and 19th centuries went through a fiction-reading frenzy (of Grub Street "trash;' mostly) as it sought models for its emerging social opportunities and identified with characters grappling with an industrializing, urbanizing world. Similarly, movies and rock music were powerful forms for different generations of 20th-century Americans. They used such forms to play with the new possibilities of identity that were coming within their grasp.

Can that be what is happening with Arabic videos? While they are entertaining and titillating viewers, they are also transmitting new ways of being to an apparently receptive audience, new and multiplying approaches to being an "Arab" that combine traditional forms of cultural self-presentation with forms borrowed from an array of other sources. The combinations that promise to emerge would not be mere copies of borrowed foreign models; they would be new and indigenous cultural creations, just as is the case in cultures around the world. This syncretism is already true of the music itself, which not only uses traditional Arabic instrumentation (nye, oud, qanoon, etc.) in new ways but also borrows instruments and rhythms from the Caribbean, Europe, India, rock, rap (including rap in Spanish), and numerous other sources.

What this Low, "vulgar" genre is offering, in sum, is a glimpse of a latent Arab world that is both liberal and "modernized." Why? Because the foundation of cultural modernity is the freedom to achieve a self-fashioned and fluid identity, the freedom to imagine yourself on your own terms, and the videos offer a route to that process. By contrast, much of Arab culture remains a place of constricted, traditional, and narrowly defined identities, often subsumed in group identities that hinge on differences with, and antagonism toward, other groups.