Music and Media in the Arab World

Michael Frishkopf, Michael Frishkopf

• Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781617976032
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Música

Since the turn of the twentieth century the dramatic rise of mass media has profoundly transformed music practices in the Arab world. Music has adapted to successive forms of media disseminationfrom phonograph cylinders to MP3seach subjected to the political and economic forces of its particular era and region. Carried by mass media, the broader culture of Arab music has been thoroughly transformed as well. Simultaneously, mass mediated music has become a powerful social force. While parallel processes have unfolded worldwide, their implications in the Arabic-speaking world have thus far received little scholarly attention.This provocative volume features sixteen new essays examining these issues, especially televised music and the controversial new genre of the music video. Perceptive voicesboth emerging and establishedrepresent a wide variety of academic disciplines. Incisive essays by Egyptian critics display the textures of public Arabic discourse to an English readership. Authors address the key issues of contemporary Arab societygender and sexuality, Islam, class, economy, power, and nationas refracted through the culture of mediated music.Interconnected by a web of recurrent concepts, this collection transcends music to become an important resource for the study of contemporary Arab society and culture.Contributors: Wael Abdel Fattah, Yasser Abdel-Latif, Moataz Abdel Aziz, Tamim Al-Barghouti, Mounir Al Wassimi, Walter Armbrust, Elisabeth Cestor, Hani Darwish, Walid El Khachab, Abdel-Wahab Elmessiri, James Grippo, Patricia Kubala, Katherine Meizel, Zein Nassar, Ibrahim Saleh, Laith Ulaby.

Cultural Critique,
Cultural Analysis

6

Music of the Streets: The Story of a Television Program

Yasser Abdel-Latif

Since its inception in 1998, I have worked for Nile Variety Entertainment (NVE), one of several specialty channels launched around the same time. NVE was based on the model of MTV, offering primarily music and songs. It operates under the aegis of a sector of Egyptian state-owned television known as the ‘Nile specialized channels,’ today comprising about ten satellite channels in all. Each of these channels concentrates on a particular field, such as news, sports, drama, or culture. The establishment of such a sector within the framework of the state-owned Egyptian media establishment represented one direction in the government’s attempt to invest in new media. Indeed, these specialty channels are carried by two new state-owned satellites (Nilesat 101, launched in 1998, and Nilesat 102, launched in 2000), following closely upon the government’s 1996 inauguration of its state-of-the-art Media Production City, built on an enormous site just outside Cairo.

As is typically the case for music channels, NVE focused on the mainstream commercial current of Egyptian and Arabic music, a sort of Arabic pop, suitable for the urban middle-class viewer. NVE video clips, and even the stars hosted on various talk shows, present a shallow pomposity that bores one to tears. Whether this Arabic pop focus resulted from a conscious decision on the part of policymakers or from the tastes of channel programmers is a question to ponder. Certainly, the channel excluded all other contemporary music, regardless of its popularity with audiences. For us, this was a strong indicator that the middle classes were dictating their own tastes and choices, and presenting them as though they were the sole product of all human endeavors in the music area.

Thus, it occurred to me and to Nader Hilal—television director, colleague, and friend—to make an experimental music documentary presenting other modes of singing, in order to interfere with the channel’s unremitting transmission of the commercial mode, day in and day out. The program Nader and I decided to make was conceived as a benevolent ‘bug’ to be introduced within this channel, where we both felt a strong sense of alienation, both from coworkers and from content. Chance alone had led us to work at that place.

We chose to make a documentary about the musical currents prevalent among the working classes. Such music is incorrectly known as ‘folk song’ (al-ughniya al-sha‘biya), when in fact its principal characteristic is low-budget, marginalized production. It is far from the academic category of ‘folk,’ which implies a collective creation with no known author. The adjective sha‘bi (meaning ‘popular’ or ‘of the people’) was applied because such music is disseminated largely among simple artisans and (via cassette) microbus drivers. The microbus, a typically Cairene mode of transport, is this music’s most important channel of distribution. Microbus clientele represent a mixture of various sectors of society, which means that a variety of tastes and value systems intersect inside these vehicles.

Our choice was also derived from my personal admiration of this ‘wild’ music, whose lyrics challenge the niceties that prevail in the upper echelons of the music industry, which stultified into a set mold of specific aesthetic and moral codes decades ago.

Beginning with Ahmed Adaweya, but by no means ending with Abdel Basset Hamouda, this sha‘bi music, which first appeared in the 1970s, developed a large popular base within an audience otherwise regarded as vulgar and unworthy by the conventional middle-class arbiters of public taste. The songs in this genre typically open with the folk mawwal, including its layali prelude,¹ following which the singer takes up the song proper and its core themes, often cursing time—that divisive, destructive factor invariably doing away with human happiness—and treating sensual love in a manner rarely, if ever, found in the big song productions approved by ‘respectable’ media. With the artistically primitive performance of the singers and their gravelly voices, resonating with the music, the effect presents the din and rhythm of the crowded city interspersed with melodies flirting, here and there, with folk themes.

Such songs are produced by small production companies in Cairo’s popular areas, recorded in unknown studios, and published solely on cheap cassette tapes, with enormous distribution. We have not found as yet that any of the singers in that market have published their music through more sophisticated technology, such as the compact disc.

Nader and I decided to film the singers going about their daily lives, and to gain access to their studios and production companies. We wanted to understand their conceptions of art, to interpret what singing means to them. We wanted to come to know the nature of the relation between them and the musicians who accompany them, and to film weddings and ‘concerts’ that take place in Cairo’s alleyways or in the popular night clubs that are their forum and their stage. We wanted to witness as closely as possible their relation with their audience, live and directly. We planned to devote one TV episode to each singer.

At this point, I should mention a precedent that strongly influenced our project. On a program that aired during peak-hour Ramadan programming in 1998,² a celebrity female announcer from Egypt’s Channel 2 hosted three sha‘bi singers, Shaaban Abdel Rahim, Abdel Basset Hamouda, and Magdi Tal‘at. Her prejudices, and presumptuousness, were more than clear from the start. The announcer behaved as if she were holding a public trial in which the three singers were the culprit representatives of poor, vulgar taste and artistic corruption, and as though television audiences all over the country held the same views. She used every possible rhetorical trick to belittle and embarrass her ‘guests’ and to portray them as alien and ignorant beings. Abdel Basset Hammouda was the most true to his nature as a self-made man. His responses were confident and reflected awareness of the nature of the place where he was being interviewed. Unabashedly, he announced he had no need for either the radio or the television. He was perfectly happy and satisfied, he said, with his fans who attend his live performances and buy his cassettes, and proudly announced that those could be counted in the millions.

Magdi Tal‘at, meanwhile, came across as defensive, weak, and unsure of himself, even frightened in the awesome presence of the lady and her paraphernalia. It is of interest to note that Magdi is the most highly educated of the three: he holds a second-degree diploma in commerce, which qualifies him as a clerk in the lower echelons of the bureaucracy.

In the long run, Shaaban Abdel Rahim was able to turn the tables to his advantage. He did this with masterful cynicism (in the Greek sense of the word). He played the announcer at her game and gave her the answers she so obviously wanted to hear, and more, countered her sarcasm with self-directed sarcasm she was unable to follow. For example, when she asked him about the secret behind the flashy colors he wears, he replied that he is always careful to match his clothes with the sofa on which he sits! The ‘clever’ announcer did not understand his humor, and, though somewhat thwarted, she looked at the man disdainfully, surprised by what she called his “strange” logic.

Nader and I viewed ourselves as occupying a different position from that of this announcer. We presented our program concept to the channel’s management, which forwarded it to the highest committee in the sector, the body that approves or rejects programming (based on production viability more than censorship). Our program was approved, and we received a relatively good budget, by the 1999 standards of Egyptian television, to shoot thirteen episodes. Each episode, we calculated, would require three days of shooting and sixteen hours of editing in order to produce forty-five minutes of film—something like a low-budget documentary. But we were used to making do with the limited financial resources offered by the program production department in that sector.

Channel management had no censorial objections to the proposed program, television being a more accommodating institution than radio. To the present day, Egyptian Radio refuses even a mention of Ahmed Adaweya’s name by means of listening committees that act as a barrier to the broadcast of any singer not in perfect accordance with the station’s rules and standards. This is done under the pretext of protecting public taste, whereas in fact such committees merely serve to protect ‘official’ currents in song and music. Indeed, until recently, singers like Amr Diab and Moustafa Amar, quintessential representatives of popular commercial shababi (youth) music, contemporary, and recognized both by the market (as testified by sales) and by the middle classes, were banned from radio, as their voices and musical styles did not conform to the solemn standards of the listening committees.

At any rate, management in the production sector approved our idea and so did the channel, not only because television is more accommodating but also because any system is always both stupid and clever. In this case, it is stupid because it allows its rules and regulations to be infiltrated despite the efforts expended on maintaining its bureaucracy, and it is clever because, from a pragmatic point of view, such a program would present interesting material to television viewers in all cases.

We had to start a search for the artists we wished to interview and decided to begin with Tarek al-Sheikh and Shafiqa as good representatives of what we were after. Tarek al-Sheikh was at the time a new name in the world of sha‘bi song. In the season he first appeared, he had been exceptionally successful. One heard him everywhere, in taxis, microbuses, and popular shops. Tarek had produced just one album and was in the process of recording a second. He deserved an episode of our program all to himself. He had about him all the question marks that excited us, making us want to know how he found his way to sha‘bi song. Tarek’s voice—exceptionally wide-ranging and broad—clearly indicates training in the arduous discipline of chanting and reciting the Qur’an. His first album, Ya eini ‘allena (Woe Be unto Us), demonstrates a musical education and experience with writers and musicians, alongside high-caliber execution.

Shafiqa, on the other hand, comes from Tanta, in the Nile Delta north of Cairo—a large rural town noted for its mystical traditions and the moulid³ of the famed Sufi saint, Ahmad al-Badawi, as well as for its music and songs. Shafiqa earned her fame in the towns of the Delta during the 1980s, using the name Shafiqa Mahmud. She abbreviated her name as she became known among the popular classes of Cairo and, especially, Alexandria. In timbre and pitch, her voice lies somewhere between the masculine and the feminine. To her audiences, she is reminiscent of their favorite, Badriya al-Sayyid, or Badara the Alexandrian, as they called her.

We began our search with Shafiqa. Shafiqa sings the opening mawwal expertly, and her songs contain heated feminine emotions. Our only contact was her production company. We phoned and arranged an appointment with the company’s owner, visiting him in his office in the center of Tanta. The company was modern, with the right degree of grandeur—fit for a town like Tanta. The producer met us with the warmth of a local businessman, and talked to us about his work and the stars for whom he had produced albums, one of whom was the late ‘Abdu al-Iskandarani, “the dean of the mawwal,” as he is known. From this, we understood that the producer had a fairly strong position in the field of music production, despite his location far from the Cairo metropolis.

We talked about our program and asked for his assistance in putting us in touch with the artists. He showed instant readiness, but as soon as we mentioned Shafiqa, he retreated, becoming evasive and making excuses that her husband was a very conservative man who would not allow his wife to appear on television! We swallowed the paradox, but felt sure there were other reasons for his refusal. Still, the man promised that he would speak to her and get back to us. (He never did.)

So, we postponed Shafiqa and went looking for Tarek al-Sheikh. Tarek was easy to find. We obtained his cell phone number from a young cigarette vendor who owns a kiosk next to the television building in Cairo. This young man happened to be one of Tarek’s fans, and even knew him personally, which to us meant that these stars were not far removed from their audiences. We called Tarek and set an appointment in the coffee shop of a three-star hotel of his choice.

As is typical with such artists, he was almost an hour late for our meeting. But he seemed enthusiastic about the project, and we began interviewing him on the spot. We asked about his life and work. He grew up in the impoverished Cairene quarter of Sharabiya. He had been preparing since early childhood to become a Qur’an reciter. As a teenager, he started singing in weddings in his neighborhood, together with the late Ramadan al-Brins. He gave us the names of the places where he sang and even details of his personal life, so we had quite a collection of material with which to go to work on the scenario. He told us he would be singing in a certain nightclub in Alexandria the following week; this was perfect for us, as we wanted to begin shooting our program.

At the appointed time and place, the work team was ready: the director, the writer, the director’s assistant, the photographer, and the production manager, together with three assistant technicians and all the necessary equipment. We had located several areas in which to interview him in Alexandria, and planned two more days of shooting in Cairo in his old neighborhood, in his new house, in a live performance, and finally in the recording studio.

We arrived in Alexandria around ten o’clock in the morning and proceeded to shoot the inserts without Tarek al-Sheikh. We thought to call him around noon, in ord...