|
By
Walter Armbrust
In quantitative
terms one could say that video clips dominate Arab satellite
television. At any given time as many as a fifth of the free-to-air
channels on Nilesat may be broadcasting video clips. Other programming
categories that preoccupy observers of Arab satellite television
-- specifically news, religion, and dramatic serials -- are
broadcast by fewer specialized channels, and probably receive
a smaller proportion of airtime on variety channels.(1) But
the ubiquity of video clips may overstate their popularity.
Video clips are free content in an economically troubled business,
paid for substantially not by the networks that broadcast them,
but by mobile phone service providers and music producers. Mobile
phone service companies underwrite the production of video clips
because the text messages flowing constantly on the margins
of the screen during songs advertise their business, and because
of selling ring tones. The same goes for music producers --
video clips advertise cassettes and CDs, and they create stars
who can command high fees for live performance. Because video
clips are quasi-advertising for a limited set of businesses
rather than a simple response to demand, their conspicuous presence
among the free-to-air satellite channels is an unreliable gauge
of how many people watch them.
But while
the size of the audience is in question, it cannot be denied
that they are a significant component of satellite broadcasting
in the Arab world. The music at least must be popular. If it
was not, the mobile phone service providers and music producers
would surely not go on producing video clips. This type of music
is both commodity and culture, and must therefore be understood
as both. However, the commercialism of video clips is so much
a part of the art form that to look at one side of the phenomenon
without acknowledging the other defies both common sense and
critical sense. The intrinsic commercialism of videos inevitably
invites scorn from cultural gatekeepers, who almost uniformly
condemn them for lack of artistic merit.
Everything
You Wanted to Know about Sex
Other factors
shape attitudes about video clips. One is that the video clip
is an art form that revolves around sex. There are exceptions
to this rule, and some of them are important. Nonetheless, those
who condemn video clips do so on the grounds that they feature
excessive display of women's bodies, in a narrative or lyric
structure that they take as an invitation to break social conventions
that prohibit sex outside of marriage. Worse, video clips seem
to sell unsanctioned sexual behavior. That they give a whiff
of salesmanship is unsurprising. Video clips are, after all,
quasi-advertisements for mobile phones and recorded music. Sex
and advertising go together like spaghetti and tomato sauce.
Selling with sex is as predictable and common in the Arab world
as it is in France.
Nor is it new. For example, a 1926 cover of the Egyptian magazine
al-Fukaha revels in sex (Figure
1).
It shows an ink drawing of two couples who appear to be three
sheets to the wind at a party, dancing on their hands. The caption
says, "The future of the fine arts: dancing on the hands
after the legs get tired." One couple is modern and chic;
the other is more homely, and the man is a caricatured African
drawn in golliwog style. The image foreshadows some of the conventions
of the video clip and other forms of audiovisual culture that
were still in the future in the 1920s. One is simply selling
the product through sexualized imagery. Sexy women sold the
magazine, just as the sexy women in video clips now sell music
and ring tones. The appeal of sex could be made more directly,
as a cigarette advertisement from a 1933 of the magazine al-Sarih
shows (Figure
2).
It sells Amun Cigarettes with a drawing of a topless dark-skinned
but European-looking woman wearing an evening gown (below her
exposed breasts). Breasts sold cigarettes, or so the Amun company
hoped. In the case of the Fukaha image the operative
principle is literally to sell the book itself (or magazine)
by its cover. The publisher encouraged just the opposite of
the saying "Don't buy a book for its cover." The maxim
made no sense before books were mass marketed in the print age,
and the same principle applies to other new media. Music and
ring tones are sold in video clips "for their cover."
Another
premonition of the video clip suggested by the Fukaha
cover depicting drunken dancers doing handstands is the rather
ambiguous appearance of one of the women. In the foreground
of the drawing we see a European-looking woman in a flapper
dress (which the law of gravity dictates ought to be falling
off). Or is she meant to be Egyptian? Perhaps she is. On another
front cover from the same period (Figure
3)
a lecherous hairdresser addresses a European-looking customer,
again in flapper dress and with a shocking expanse of leg exposed,
murmuring in her ear: "Cutting your hair won't tire me
out even if I stand doing it for an hour. If only you had a
beard!" But though the sexy customer dresses like a flapper,
shows leg and décolleté like a European, and appears
to be quite unconcerned at the hairdresser's improper advances,
we know she is Egyptian. She is drawn on the cover of al-Fukaha
sitting in the hairdresser's chair reading none other than al-Fukaha,
which she could only do if she were Egyptian, or at least Arabic-speaking.
Anyone who
has watched Arabic-language films or television can confirm
that the same convention transfers across different forms of
mass media. The salience of actresses and models who sport a
carefully cultivated European look is so marked that one cannot
help noticing those who do not fit the pattern. Roughly the
same is true of men. Of course roles in film or television often
call for much more localized imagery -- not every character
in a film or musalsal can be shown dressing like a European.
But almost without exception, the persona of stars elaborated
through secondary media (magazines, television interviews, public
appearances), as opposed to roles in films or television serials,
is European. The convention of favoring European looks -- in
clothes, hair style, and to some extent skin color -- extends
seamlessly into the video clip. Consider, for example, Maysam
Nahas. Nahas is no superstar, but she does typify much of the
rhetoric on video clips. She is a Lebanese singer who appeared
two or three years ago as a sultry blond in a video clip titled
Kull al-Shawq (All Desire -- Figure
4).
The clip is both narrative and lyrical. The narrative part is
simple: it is about a lover's quarrel. They break up in the
beginning, and get back together in the end. Visually it is
about men desiring the singer. The video could easily be labelled
a "porno-clip," as Egyptian detractors of the genre
sometimes call the video songs they object to most strenuously.
Kull al-Shawq even hints at some borrowing from the pornography
genre. (Figure
5)
The camera certainly focuses on body parts fetishistically.
At one point, she drinks from an open faucet, bending over,
camera lingering on the breasts a moment, luscious lips drinking
the water. She raises her head and a drop rolls suggestively
down her neck, while a group of voyeuristic men look on.
However,
the salience of sexualized European looks as an ideal of female
beauty occurs in every decade from al-Fukaha in the 1920s to
Maysam Nahas in the 2000s. But while the prominence of European
appearance has been a stable convention in mass mediated visual
culture, it is nonetheless one of the aspects of video clips
that draws scrutiny and invites comment. Of course the availability
of visual mass media -- illustrated magazines, films, television
-- is historically uneven. Cairenes had access to these visual
conventions since the 1920s; Yemeni tribesmen may have only
encountered them in recent decades with the advent of television
and labor migration to more cosmopolitan parts of the Arab world
and beyond. Nonetheless those who promote the notion that such
images are new and potentially disturbing implicate the entire
Arab world -- urban Cairo as much as an isolated village in
the Yemeni highlands. In the end it may be the idea of novelty
rather than novelty itself that invites attention. In one sequence
of Maysam Nahas's All Desire video, she is ogled in the
street by a crowd of relatively dark men (she ends the video
in the arms of a blond lover). (Figure
6)
The gist of it is identical to another al-Fukaha cover
from the 1920s, in which men on a tram are astonished to see
a woman exposing her legs. They sit on one side of the tram
so that they can all get a good look at the woman, who sits
alone on the other side. The conductor enters, saying, "Why
all this crowding? They're all one lot over there, and she's
another lot all by herself!" Plus ça change, one
might say. The men on the tram and the men ogling Maysam Nahas
are cut from the same cloth. But of course things do change.
The point is that it pays to bear in mind that novelty in "new
media" must be held to a high standard. Video clips may
be more remarkable for their brute accessibility compared to
previous "new media," for the ways people consume
them, and for the places in which they consume them, than for
the nature of their content. And yet whether or not one likes
them or respects them as an art form, the ways they create meaning
must also be taken seriously if one wants to understand them.
This
Brings Us to Youth
One might
expect opposition by cultural conservatives to the use of sex
as a marketing tool in any society. In the Arab world, this
opposition is shaped by the fact that video clips are made for
youths. Though we may not have precise quantitative data on
viewing habits, this we can be sure of. Everyone knows it. From
the style of the music, the text messages constantly flashing
across the screen, and the age of the performers, video clips
scream "youth." As a category, youth is quintessentially
modern. It exists because mass education creates a stage in
life between childhood and adulthood. Without mass education,
the boundary between children and adults would be marked by
marriage. Since transition to sexual maturity takes place during
the years of education -- the defining feature of youth in a
modern society -- school years are a potentially uncomfortable
stage in life. This is a generic feature of all societies with
mass education, but it is a particularly acute problem when
marriage is the only sanctioned outlet for sexual behaviour,
as is the case in Arab society.
There are
all sorts of strategies for controlling youth. School, of course,
is the main "work" of youth and hence the primary
means of structuring their lives. For the increasing number
students who do not work after school hours in family trades,
agriculture, or businesses, various extracurricular activities
have been devised over the years to structure the "free
time" of youth -- scouting (once a significant movement
in many parts of the Middle East, and much emulated organizationally
by more politically minded movements) and sports for example.
But the problem of leisure remains. Arab society gives almost
no social sanction to sex for unmarried youths, particularly
girls and young women. This is the reason that the insistent
marketing of products through sex is the primary lens through
which video clips are viewed -- it rubs salt in a particularly
sore spot. Consequently, the dominant attitude expressed toward
video clips in public is hostility or scorn. Even the youthful
patrons of video clips are often inclined to mirror the dominant
hostility. Survey research on attitudes toward video clips rarely
capture the ambivalence of opinions, because to state an opinion
openly requires respondents to make choices about how to position
themselves vis-à-vis patriarchal values. Furthermore,
depending on the respondents' class background, people almost
everywhere disavow an interest in television to the degree that
they want to be associated with elite taste. Consequently, surveys
tend to show that youths are as sceptical about video clips
as their elders, inevitably leading to the conclusion that whoever
likes video clips, it is not these youths (i.e., whichever ones
were asked the survey questions). And yet the music industry
and mobile phone companies go on churning out new video clips
at a furious pace.
The oblique
nature of video clip fandom came home more forcefully with my
first encounter with Nancy Ajram, who is one of the dominant
stars in the video clip business. On the first night of Ramadan
of 2003 (1424 A.H.), I attended an iftar at the home of a family
in Cairo I had known for almost two decades. After the meal,
the television came on, as it almost always does, and the first
program my friends tuned in was a nightly televised popular
music concert. The first singer presented in the program was
none other than Nancy Ajram, who appeared singing on top of
an open bus by a seashore. She was wearing leather trousers
and a skin-tight tube shirt. Her movements, her song, and her
interviews between numbers all proclaimed sex. But I had not
followed Arab popular music during several years of an overworked
first teaching job, and had never heard of Nancy Ajram. When
I asked who she was, the 22 year-old daughter of the family,
who I had known since she was five, was incredulous: "You've
never heard of Nancy Ajram?" With unfeigned enthusiasm
she told me the Nancy Ajram story. She was Lebanese. She began
singing at the age of eight. She started off singing in children's
contests until she broke into the big time, and now she was
the biggest star in the whole Arab world. And here she was singing
on top of a bus in leather trousers and a tube top, as my muhaggaba
(veiled) interlocutor who lived in a lower-middle-class neighborhood
dominated culturally by Islamists told me in no uncertain terms
that I was an idiot for not knowing who Nancy Ajram was. This
young woman bore all the signs of social conservatism. And she
is socially conservative. Despite her obvious enthusiasm for
Nancy Ajram, and extensive knowledge of the singer's biography,
it took nothing to get her to switch into the register of social
disapproval. One moment a fan; the next moment an opponent.
Hostility
to video clips is ubiquitous. As Palestinian poet Tamim Barghouti
put it, "Video clips are full of half-naked, lovely women,
and rich, young, handsome men driving convertibles, flirting
in backgrounds of European green, or extravagant mansions."
For him, video clips are a form of cultural imperialism:
Instead of forming and reforming identity
and imagination, and redefining what beauty means, the video
clips on Arab channels make Arab youth want to become what they
can never be, and make them want to become an image of their
colonial masters. While the masses try hopelessly to imitate
the elite and become it, despite the socio-economic barriers
that would insure the impossibility of that dream, the elite
is hopelessly trying to imitate the American model and become
it.(2)
English
professor and cultural critic Abdel-Wahab M. Elmessiri focuses
more directly on the capacity for video clips to undermine the
foundations of patriarchal society:
Critics of the video clip, I've noticed, tend
to focus on the partial nudity it makes available, the erotic,
like-this suggestiveness. And I would agree with them if not
for other concerns of my own -- the effect on society and the
family.… By focussing on carnal pleasure in a social setup
that makes marriage increasingly difficult as a practical course
of action, the video clip contributes to a libidinal voracity
we could well do without.(3)
These are
normative positions in the press and in most public discussions
of video clips. In this formulation, video clips are a form
of Western cultural hegemony that "make Arab youth want
to become what they can never be," and they undermine patriarchal
society through the marketing of sex, which "makes marriage
increasingly difficult as a practical course of action."
One has to search fairly hard for a contrarian position. In
fact, one has to go outside the Arab world.
If there
is an alternative to the video-clip-as-cultural-threat position,
it may be a "video-clip-as-discourse-of-liberation"
argument. If one were to do an ethnography of the video clip,
one would surely want to ask video-clip producers if this is
what they see themselves as doing. I have not done video-clip
ethnography, so I can shed no light on the matter. I do know
that I would be surprised to hear the argument made very insistently
in the public sphere outside of the video-clip industry. Barghouti
and Elmessiri's views are very common (though of course expressed
in different forms and degrees of sophistication).
But Arab
video clips have been championed outside the Arab world. Charles
Paul Freund, a senior editor of Reason magazine (4),
argues vociferously that "there is a revolution going on
in Arab popular music," and that the political implications
of this revolution are huge:
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.
Freund's take on video clips sounds eerily like the reception
that initially greeted the Al Jazeera network in the West before
the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attack on New York. In numerous
academic conferences between the establishment of Al Jazeera
in 1996 and the 9/11 attack, Al Jazeera was the Great White
Hope for civil society in the Arab world. It was going to bring
real debates. It would be independent. It was the thin end of
a democratic wedge. Of course then 9/11 happened, and shortly
thereafter Al Jazeera was vilified in the American press when
it began contradicting the American line on the invasions of
Afghanistan and Iraq. Freund's article has the same breathless
quality as the early discussions in the West of Al Jazeera.
The civil society promised by Al Jazeera didn't quite work out
(in the estimate of the American press). But Freund says don't
worry, the Arab world will be revolutionized through sex! He
ends his article by contrasting the "liberated" sex
of the latest video clip hit, by a singer named Elisa, who is
shown having a liaison with a man in a Paris hotel, with the
puritanical outlook of Islamist thinker Sayyid Qutb, whose sojourn
in the US turned him into a fierce opponent of decadent music
and dance.
It isn't hard to imagine [Sayyid Qutb's] reaction
to the sight of Elissa's substantial cleavage looming out of
her bustier … Yet Elissa in her hotel room … could
hardly be [a] more apt response … to the Islamist moral
constrictions that have been advanced, in part, as a result
of Qutb's work.
Sayyid Qutb
might well have been outraged at Elissa. But he might have tried
to get even rather than to get mad. Believing Muslims -- possibly
not in the Sayyid Qutb mold, but believing nonetheless -- can
also pursue their vision through this genre.
What
Would Sayyid Qutb Say?
One of the
impediments to better understanding the significance of video
clips is the tendency of observers to see only what they want
to see. The most common fixations of all commentators are women
and sex. It is perfectly true that some aspect of sex features
in the majority of video clips. But despite frequent claims
that video clips feature nothing but "partial nudity"
and "substantial cleavage" looming out of bustiers,
sex is handled differently from one video clip to another. Some
are about controlling women. For example, there are a small
number of honour-killing videos. Some video clips feature married
couples with children. Others are narrative videos about meeting,
falling in love, getting married, and having children. Despite
the obsessive concern by critics with "libidinal voracity"
there are in fact a number of different models of sexuality
on offer in Arab video clips. There are even a few video clips
to which even a hardliner like Sayyid Qutb might give at least
qualified approval.
A'azz Itnayn (The Dearest Two) by Ali Gohar is a good
example. It is virtually an anthem to patriarchal values. The
singer, an unshaven (though not quite bearded) thirty-something,
is shown being awakened by his mother (Figure
7).
He gets up, kisses his father, and goes off to work teaching
at an elementary school for girls. One sequence in the song
shows a mother in hijab (rare on most Arab television) dropping
her daughter off at school. (Figure
8)
While at play, the girl slightly skins her knee. So strong is
the maternal instinct that the mother, far away preparing food
in her kitchen, feels a pang of sympathetic pain from her child's
minor injury. The song is essentially a lesson to teach kids
a lesson in filial respect. Gohar drives the lesson home throughout
the song, telling his young charges and the viewers that their
parents "sold everything for their sake." In one sequence,
he is shown asking a question explicitly. (Figure
9)
He holds his hand up, on the point of calling on a student who
will answer his question. We see the eager students with hands
raised. He calls on the little girl who skinned her knee on
the slide. She writes on a whiteboard. The answer? "Baba
wa Mama." The question? "Who are the dearest two?"
Of course the viewer knew the answer from the beginning, since
the thoroughly adult singer is shown very much in the care of
his parents. His mother wakes him up. The final scene shows
his father putting him to bed. Sayyid Qutb might not have exactly
approved of the song, but he surely would have found it preferable
to Maysam Nahas's "porno-clip."
The great
Islamist thinker was no Sufi, but he might nonetheless have
given qualified approval to Sami Yusuf's Al-Mu'allim
(The Teacher). Yusuf is a British Muslim whose family is of
Azeri origin. Though not a native Arabic speaker, he has become
a global star through singing anshad (devotional songs, sg.
nashid). (See Patricia Kubala's article, The
Other Face of the Video Clip: Sami Yusuf and the Call for 'al-Fann
al-Hadif' in
this issue.) Anshad are conventionally associated with Sufism.
In much of the Arab world, particularly Egypt, Sufi musical
performers occupy a kind of parallel universe, completely separate
from the circuits of both officially sponsored and commercial
popular music. The Teacher conspicuously crossed over to the
popular music universe. It was broadcast right alongside Nancy
Ajram, Elissa, and Maysam Nahas. Just as Yusuf crosses into
the commercial musical world, his video clip crosses into the
urban space of commercial music (Figure
10). He is depicted living in a modernist suburban villa
-- a mansion really. Cairo is increasingly surrounded by such
housing. Developments carry names such as European Countryside
(Al-Rif al-Urubbi), Dreamland, and Beverly Hills. When
conventional video clips represent urban space, they lean very
heavily toward these areas, and they conspicuously abandon the
urban center of Cairo that was once the seat of political and
economic power. There is no Arab analogue to the American hip-hop
"keeping it real" aesthetic, which often uses gritty
urban streets as a backdrop in music videos. In Egypt (where
Al-Mu'allim was filmed) almost all location shooting
in video clips is done in the new suburbs. Lebanese and Arab
video clips follow the same convention. Many video clips use
exotic foreign locales. By contrast, nearly all "traditional"
imagery is fabricated in studios, and the "old modern"
Cairo is simply ignored, or filmed only at night and from a
distance. Al-Mu'allim is no exception. It asserts an
Islamic presence in precisely the same imagined space as many
"porno-clips."
In Al-Mu'allim,
Sami Yusuf is shown kissing his mother's hand while she sits
on the stairway landing in his "Beverly Hills" modern
mansion reading the Qur'an. (Figure
11) He then goes to his Jeep outside in the street. As he
loads the Jeep, he spots a blind man crossing the street. The
man is about to stumble over an unseen stone in his path, but
Yusuf rushes to help him, saving him just before he trips. (Figure
12) Another sequence shows him going to a mosque to pray.
(Figure 13) He goes to an
old mosque, but is filmed very tightly against the exterior
of the building, and in all-male crowds, so that the urban space
around the mosque (probably the Mamluk-era Sultan Hasan mosque
is used for the exterior shots) is invisible. (Figure
14) At the mosque, he is shown teaching a group of boys
how to pray -- an obviously fitting image for a video clip entitled
The Teacher. But in this sequence also he actually follows
an Arab video-clip convention. Children appear in many clips,
including many of the sexual ones. Even Maysam Nahas at one
point in Kull al-Shawq is shown casting a motherly eye
on some boys playing basketball (they in turn stand and stare
at her in exactly the same lascivious manner as the dark adult
men ogling her on the street).
Al-Mu'allim
differs from conventional video clips in that it refrains from
running text messages in the margins (bottom and sometimes top
as well) throughout the song. (Figure
15) The text messages, sent in both English and Arabic (and
sometimes Arabic written in English characters) are personal
correspondence in a very public venue. The senders of course
are anonymous except to each other, and the content of the messages
is often about love and relationships, real, imagined, or perhaps
incipient. But that does not happen in Al-Mu'allim. Religion
is kept firmly separated from profane love. It is not, however,
kept separate from corporate sponsorship. Periodically throughout
the video clip Coca-Cola advertisements appear, the logo on
the upper left, and on the lower right a red bottle cap that
metamorphoses into red female lips mouthing silently at the
viewer (saying, perhaps, "buy coke").
Al-Mu'allim
is a strongly narrative video clip. It tells the story of
a pious nature photographer trying to capture images of God's
creation. (Figure 16) Yusuf
drives his Jeep into the desert, perhaps to Wadi Digla just
outside of Cairo, and quite close to some of the new bourgeois
suburban developments. There he takes out his camera and photographs
nature. Nature photography is often used in the imagery used
in televised calls to prayer. God created the universe; hence
depictions of nature are inherently consistent with belief.
They also get programmers out of potentially thorny dilemmas
of social representation -- no need to choose who or where to
show; no need to worry about class; no need to worry about whether
or not women need be represented. Al-Mu'allim also does
not delve into such difficult areas as how to show the handsome
Sami Yusuf interacting with women (many of whom are alleged
to be fans in a way that confuses his stardom with his message).
And it must be said that Al-Mu'allim is, in the end,
a hyper-patriarchal document. Its Islamic message, however,
is in some ways contrary to the social trends that have been
labeled "Islamist" over the past few decades.
In the video
clip, Yusuf goes on photographing into the night. (Figure
17) When it is completely dark, he spies a light shining
at the top of a rocky cliff. After climbing the cliff, he finds
himself facing a glowing image of the Kaaba, the symbolic
heart of the Muslim world. He stares in astonishment, but does
not fail to take pictures. (Figure
18) Later he is shown in his darkroom developing the pictures.
It is a crucial part of the video clip's narrative that the
glowing Kaaba be shown not as a vision or a fantasy,
but as completely real. The material lens, a creation of science,
picked up the image of the glowing Kaaba just as much as the
human eye. Hence Al-Mu'allim neatly ties together spirituality
and science, a maneuver certainly more consistent with Sufism
than with the sort of Salafist tendencies associated with someone
like Sayyid Qutb (or, more importantly, with the broader Islamist
movement as it would have been understood not much more than
a decade ago). (Figure 19)
The final frame in Al-Mu'allim, complete with the Coca-Cola
advertisement and the Melody Hits logo, summarizes the paradoxical
nature of this artifact. However, paradoxical though it may
be, Al-Mu'allim is not an anomaly. It is rather an instance
of a niche in the video clip market. Video clips are not as
simple as either their proponents or their detractors claim.
Conclusion
In conclusion,
I would like to reiterate two points. First, video clips are
far more interesting in historical context than they are as
putatively unprecedented "new media." Even the rhetoric
of dismissing them as vulgar and cheap resonates with the past
one hundred years of Egyptian history. It is an inevitable consequence
of canons of taste, which are historically changeable, quintessentially
modern, and still emerging. Video clips will not undermine the
foundations of society, but they are part of longstanding tensions
over the status of youth in a patriarchal culture. Nor will
video clips liberate the individual and usher in a blossoming
of democracy, though there is no question that they are a powerful
palette for sketching out ideas about sexuality and the body.
It is, however, crucial to recognize that some of these ideas
have historical roots. One must be on guard against overstating
the novelty of new media.
My second
point is simply that one must not ever take for granted claims
that "all video clips" are anything. Basic reservations
about analytical conflations apply as much here as anywhere
else. Video clips are all made in a structured economic and
social system, as is any form of expressive culture. The system
itself is of interest, but so are the products of the system.
Even if one grants that video clips are about sex -- which they
certainly are in a quantitative sense -- there are, one must
be compelled to admit, many different things that can be said
about sex. Video clips are both the agents and the products
of important social currents. They should therefore be taken
seriously.
Walter Armbrust, publisher and senior editor
of TBS, is Hourani Fellow and University Lecturer in Modern
Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford. He is a
cultural anthropologist whose research interests focus on popular
culture and mass media in the Middle East. He is the author
of Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt, and editor of
Mass Mediations: New Approaches to Popular Culture in the
Middle East and Beyond. Dr Armbrust is currently working
on a cultural history of the Egyptian cinema.
NOTES
1. My estimates
of air time allocated to video clips and other thematic categories
on free-to-air Nilesat broadcasts is impressionistic. In the
year 2005 there were 10-12 channels (new channels are added
and old ones subtracted constantly) that specialize in video
clips out of a free-to-air package of around 90 channels. Many
other channels, such as the private Dream TV, and national channels,
broadcast video clips as a part of their program. News, religion,
and dramatic serials have fewer specialized channels. Their
proportion of the total content of Nilesat free-to-air broadcasts
is similarly difficult to pin down precisely because of the
shifting content of variety channels.
2. For full text see http://dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=4&Article_id=5043
(accessed May 9, 2005).
3. For full text see http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2005/734/feature.htm
(accessed May 9, 2005).
4. Reason is published by the Reason Foundation. It styles
itself as "a refreshing alternative to right-wing and left-wing
opinion magazines by making a principled case for liberty and
individual choice in all areas of human activity" (http://reason.com/aboutreason.shtml,
accessed May 9th, 2005).
5. Charles Paul Freund, "Look Who's Rocking the Casbah:
The Revolutionary Implications of Arab Music Videos." Reason
June 2003 (http://www.reason.com/0306/cr.cf.look.shtml,
accessed May 9, 2005). All subsequent Freund quotes are from
this source.
[printer friendly version]
|