Saudi Funded Arab pop culture
The newest thing in the Arab countries is for pop stars to use their influence. All of this from a Saudi Prince.
Problem is that this creates such a conflicting bizarro world where outward conservative society clashes with what they see on TV inside the homes and creates psycological problems. A world of two extremes is created with very little middle ground or balance. Old tribal traditions, extreme high doweries, the inability to get married, arranged marriages mixed with highly sexual images.
This is why it is not strange to see the repressed youth indulge in these things even to the point of whistling at women that are covered from head to toe with no flesh showing at all.
It is for this reason that people like Dr Heba Kotb are popular with those seeking some type of balance in this instead of pretending it does not exist at all. Why is one extreme or the other always the only choices?
Behind the pundits’ outrage lies the story of a revolution in Arab pop culture that started in Lebanon and has turned seductive young vocalists and dancing divas into influential public figures. In most Arab capitals recently, street protesters hoisted banners cheering Hezbollah and demanded that Arab elites adopt a similar stance. But Wehbe and other top-selling Arab pop stars don’t answer to the Arab street. If they take orders from anyone, it’s Al-Waleed bin Talal, the wily Saudi prince whose entertainment empire dominates Middle Eastern music and satellite television
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The music empire he built, Rotana Audio Visual Company, is like MTV, Atlantic Records, and Ticketmaster merged into one entity. It manages the careers of about 120 leading Arab vocalists, owns the rights to their songs, and produces their American-style music videos—known as “video clips” in Middle Eastern parlance. Prince Al-Waleed and Co. “looked at the video clips and the songs in the United States and the West,” explains Rotana managing director Hazem Abdul Al, “and did the same with the Arab songs. They shoot it as a story. It has become a new thing here in the Middle East, and the people love to watch.”
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Video clips produced by Rotana have become more than just a lucrative business venture. In addition to offering viewers a taste of Western-style pop culture, they are a vehicle for self-expression of a sort that is truly revolutionary. While Haifa Wehbe sings and dances a slow flamenco in the rain wearing a slinky red dress, a steady stream of Arabic text—messages that viewers have paid to transmit via their mobile phones—crawls underneath the image like the stock exchange ticker tape on CNBC. Subscribers to the service can express their personal desires in a way that was unimaginable even five years ago. “People are sending in messages, saying, ‘Hi, I’m 23, looking for a hot girl in Cairo,’” says Patricia Kubala, a Cairo-based graduate student from the University of California at Santa Barbara.
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In a society in which sex and flirtation have long been relegated to the bedroom, Rotana and other music networks have given young people a risk-free outlet for self-expression. “That’s a major component of the ‘video clip’ phenomenon that bothers and perplexes a lot of people,” Kubala says. For the prince, who claims credit for innovating the concept, it’s also good business. “My channel pays for itself with just these messages and advertising,” he told his biographer. Tens of thousands of text messages scroll across the screen each week, according to a source at Rotana, in response to which a leading reactionary social critic in Egypt slammed the so-called “culture of the video clip” for broadcasting “a bias toward individuality—as if individual pleasure is the only purpose of life.”
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After Al Qaeda bombers killed scores of Egyptians and Westerners in the Sinai resort town of Sharm el Sheikh in July 2005, Ajram announced her plan to hold a two-day charity concert on behalf of the victims. She called the move “a step against terror,” decrying some people’s apathy at the carnage. “We can’t just sit in our homes,” she lamented. The benefit concert never materialized—but over the ensuing months, Ajram toured hospitals in which bombing victims were being treated and reportedly donated proceeds from her concerts to their medical fees.
All these liberal pronouncements by Rotana artists in turn seem to affirm the tradition of progressive Arab politics Prince Al-Waleed grew up with. As a young man, his father, Prince Talal bin Abdul Aziz, called unsuccessfully for sweeping political reforms, declaring himself a socialist in the early ’60s and briefly broadcasting anti-monarchist radio propaganda from his exile in Cairo. The elder prince eventually reconciled with Saudi leadership and returned to the kingdom, on condition that he refrain from all political activity. By way of Rotana, the young Prince Al-Waleed appears to have found an indirect way to channel his father’s values through dozens of sexy singers.
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Prince Al-Waleed’s major performance venues have been hosting a series of fund-raising concerts to support the reconstruction of Lebanon. Among the lyrics sung at those concerts is a popular refrain by al-Zoghby:
“I do not want you to burn my life,” she sings. “I want to live. I want to live.”
In the context of rising Islamic extremism, which promotes an eagerness to die for a sacred cause, that’s a pretty radical idea. As the late Al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi put it, “We have men who love death as you love life.” It’s nice to know they also have at least one prominent woman, with flowing auburn hair and sultry eyes, who’s willing to lend her powerful voice to the opposite sentiment. [MORE...]
Filed under: Changing World, The Culture of Denial and Pretense
This is a great post
And proves once again that change in a society comes from the young, whenever they get a chance to express themselves against the repressive mores of their elders. It happened in the West also, in the 1960s. It is not always a good thing, but it is a necessary thing if any social progress is to be made at all.
Ya Haqq!
If what has happened in America is called social progress I will take regression.
Its social decay. Shaytan is very patiently working what works best. Sex and music.
The new singers in Arabic pop are mostly crap anyways. I listen to Arabic music, but it usually tens to be the older stuff, like Fairouz, who didnt feel the need to dress like a slut or to have a dozen plastic surgeries. The modern Arabic music I listen to mostly like Natacha Atlas, who really mixes east and west, old and new, and her songs dont all sound the same.
Salaam ‘Alaikum
The writer can call it whatever he / she wants. It is not a rise in “Islamic extremism.” If anything, I see people rejecting that.. it’s a rise in public piety. More young people listening to the Qur’an instead of the crap pop music that Rotana churns out. Or perhaps listening to that crap, but still bringing the Qur’an into their lives. Putting on hijab… young ‘Hip” guys praying in the masjid…
Those channels are a disaster. They take up at least 25% of the satellite channels we get free-to-air here on Nilesat and Arabsat (that’s the whole Arab world). I think we have four or five Rotana channels alone.
The thing is that all these writers see it as a revolution, but it’s not. In terms of the text messaging, first of all, ALL the channels except the news ones have that, including the Islamic ones (where people txt dua’s). The other thing is that this element of star worship has been present here for a LONNNNNG time (see: Abdul Halim — women were jumping out of buildings when he died, Um Kulthum, Fairouz, M. Abdul Wahab, tec)… the only difference is that they’re putting out MORE of it than in the olden days and it doesn’t have any quality or poetry to it at all. Bleah.