“Music and Media in the Arab World” is a collection of pertinent essays focusing on music and its relationship with Islam, social classes, economy and women.
The editor, Michael Frishkopf, is a specialist in classical Arabic as well as Sufi music, which he studied in Egypt during the 1990s. He returned to Cairo in 2003, determined to examine in depth the overwhelming success of the current Arabic music. Frishkopf calls this overtly commercial music “mediated music” because it is omnipresent through Arabic speaking mass media channels.
Despite its academic overtone, the introduction is a well-crafted prologue on the power of music (often unrecognized) to express social and material changes in the Arab world. Frishkopf stresses the fact that a number of Arab scholars, intellectuals, music aficionados and trained musicians find this so-called mediated music “aesthetically inferior and low brow, overly commercial, excessively Westernized, even dissolute” compared to the timelessness of pre-mediated music or classical Arab music.
Cairo has played a huge role on the musical scene during most of the 20th century, and still remains, according to Frishkopf, a primary center of the mediated music business, even if it is less than before.
The economic boom of the late 1970s resulted in the formation of new social classes. Producers responded by mixing local music with an international flavor, creating a new musical trend: Arabic pop music known as “shababi.” This musical fusion was launched successfully in Egypt, Lebanon and Algeria — these three countries have truly spearheaded the modernization of Arab music.
The “shababi” songs are short, fast paced and particularly suited for video clips, unlike the incredibly long songs of older Arabic music. The iconic Umm Kulthum used to react to her audience by repeating certain parts of a song. It is well known that some songs interpreted by Umm Kulthum, like the famous “Inta Umri” (You Are My Life), could last two hours! Umm Kulthum often claimed the ownership of the songs she sang because her interpretation, unsurpassed to this day, transformed the song into a masterpiece.
The music media system in the Arab world, shaped by Western culture and driven by economic considerations, has also been totally transformed by the development of audio technology, particularly, digital audiotape. Thanks to digital technology, television channels now require less investment to establish up-to-date facilities. However, the most visible results of the exposure to this new technology was the creation of modern Arabic pop music, a fusion of Arabic and Western music, and most of all, the advancement of the video clip industry, particularly in Egypt and Lebanon.
The rapid growth of Arabic satellite channels resulted in the development of a pan-Arab media that targets all Arabs, irrespective of their cultural or geographical positions. “Arabic music today forms a coherent transnational intermedia world, a ‘music media culture’ of tremendous significance for well over 200 million native Arabic speakers worldwide,” says Frishkopf.
The impact of satellite channels has been exceptionally strong in the Gulf where according to Laith Ulaby: “In 2000, less than a decade after its arrival, this new technology reached 66 percent of the population of the UAE, 73 percent of Saudi Arabia, 81 percent of Kuwait, and 98 percent of Oman.”
Moreover, the Saudi Rotana company, founded and owned by Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, is playing a major role on the Arab musical scene. It has not only acquired the rights to a significant amount of films and concert footage, from the mid-20th century, but Rotana has also signed some of the biggest stars in Egypt and Lebanon.
Lebanese women singers have been particularly visible on the satellite channels. A number of them became known through Studio El Fan, a talent show produced by Simon Asmar for Tele Liban, Lebanon’s national television, and which started in the 1970s. This program had a highly effective and rigorous selection process, which launched the careers of some of Lebanon’s best singers such as Majida El Roumi in 1974, Nawal Al Zoghbi (1988), and Wael Kfoury winning in 1992 while Elissa came in second place.
Simon Asmar left Tele Liban to join the newly created, “Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation” (the first private TV station in the region established in 1985) known as LBC. He brought his popular talent show “Studio El Fann,” but decided to modify the concept by focusing not only on the voice but also on dress, hair, looks and movement.
“Asmar was behind a major change in the music world in the mid to late 1990s through the creation of Lebanese satellite channels and the development of entertainment programs…In this way, one of the smallest countries of the Arab world, despite its civil war and small market, has become one of the major forces driving Arab televised musical entertainment,” says Elisabeth Cestor in her essay focusing on “Music and Television in Lebanon.”
Certain programs like Star Academy, aired on LBC, shape not only consumer behavior, which shows the economic incentives behind the media industry, but also trigger the transformation of cultural behavior. In one of the most interesting essays, “Ruby and the Checkered Heart,” the author, the distinguished scholar and intellectual, Abdel-Wahab Elmessiri (1938-2008) who taught at King Saud University in the late 1980s, criticizes the video clip.
“Video clips… provide the public with a role model, promoting a particular lifestyle that, in turn, typifies a worldview, one whose starting point is individual pleasure at any price… The viewer is implicitly encouraged to pursue individual pleasures through increased consumption, the unabashed pursuit of narrow self-interest through purchase,” writes Elmessiri.
Elmessiri believes that video clips are a symptom of globalization of a world homogenized, broken down to basic economic units. “Globalization is in essence an endeavor to standardize the world, reducing it to identical units, both rationalized, subject to material laws like those of supply and demand.”
“Music and Media in the Arab World” describes the transformation of Arabic music and the reality behind the creation of new musical trends. This thought-provoking book not only highlights the political and economic motivations driving the satellite channels, but it also shows that Arabic music has become a powerful social force that has yet to be fully recognized.