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By
Humphrey Davies, TBS managing editor
Juha once
remarked, as he sat on the beach and looked at the incoming
waves, "There are more coming in than there are going out."
Critics
of Arabic music video clips may wish to ponder this wisdom and
bow to the inevitable, since their efforts to stem the tide
are sure to fail. Indeed, a historical perspective on such matters
reveals that their criticism is not only pointless but banal:
everywhere and always the older generations have grumbled about
the tastes of the young in music (and clothes, hairstyles, etc.,
etc.) and in much the same terms, grousing that it all sounds
the same, that the words don't mean anything, and that there's
too much sex. In the West, it was the walz (a shameful pandering
to the illicit desire to embrace while dancing); in Egypt, even
Umm Kalthum was attacked, at the beginning of her career, for
"immorality."
And then
there's class. The Egyptian bourgeoisie, in all its bedizened
Louis Farouk glory, has never achieved a sufficient degree of
self-knowledge to question its assumption that it is Egypt's
cultural gatekeeper and blithely dispenses accusations of "vulgarity"
against whatever the majority of Egyptians actually enjoy. Who
else would have the sublime self-confidence to label the entire
Egyptian baladi musical output from Adawiya to Shaaban
Abd El Rahim as habta (vulgar)? Who else would sneer
at Shaaban for his lack of education while failing to notice
that the ironic ironer articulates the views of most Egyptians
better than they do? Who else would be so out of step with their
own society as to thunder against Ruby at the very time when
young Egyptians see her as one of the two "most interesting
people" in their country (see Ruby:
Making of a Star in
this issue)?
Just for
a moment, however, let's pretend we are not dealing here with
the age-old song of the grinches, and look at their arguments.
First, the
blanket categorization of video clips as a single undifferentiated
phenomenon (semi-naked women gyrating to music). A quick surf
of the channels should serve to dismiss this as fantasy. In
fact, what must strike the fair-minded is the diversity of content
and form of modern Arabic popular music. Leaving aside the fact
that there are at least as many male singers (none in a state
of undress) as females, video clips cover a gamut of themes
and emotions, arguably more so in fact than their Western equivalents.
Of course there's a lot about love, but not all of even that
is "sultry" or "steamy." As of my last private
survey, soulful romance, lost love, and ethereal adolescent
longing account for at least 90 percent of all songs, but there
are celebrations of wedded bliss, of home life, of children,
and of motherhood too. Nor do video clips duck the big issues.
Shaaban has taken to politics and, of course, there's Sami Yousef
and the sugar-coated joys of religious balladry -- not an inch
of bare flesh there (see also in this issue The
Other Face of the Video Clip: Sami Yusuf and the Call for al-Fann
al-Hadif).
And where
do the critics get off asserting that "the music all sounds
the same"? Can't they tell the difference between Egyptian,
Lebanese, and Gulfi pop music, not to mention Algerian rai,
and the odd Bollywood-style extravaganza from India? And to
stick just to Egypt, does Sherine's spunky quasi-traditional
sound really seem to them like Amr Diyab's smoothly crafted
pop? Or Shaaban's funky baladisme like either of those? Does
Abdallah Bal Kheir and his troop of goofy Fujairan bag-pipe
players sound even remotely like Abbas Ibrahim and his Saudi
cellists? Or . . . I rest my case.
And even
if we stick to clips that feature young pretty singers (and
since when was it a sin to be young and pretty?) by what Alzheimer-style
aberration of obliviousness can they lump Nancy Agram - to mention
only the most obvious case -- in with others? This is serious
cultural sabotage. Nancy Agram is obviously the best thing to
happen to Arab popular culture since shawerma. Consider the
following. In Akhasmak ah and Ah wi-nuss, Nancy
makes fun of po-faced machismo-ridden men-whom she leaves punching
one another or falling off their bikes in their hard-breathing
pursuit of a pretty face. In Ma-adri keef, Nancy is a
working girl (at a hairdresser's) who falls in love with a young
hunk who (get this) makes his living digging trenches and clearly
does not and never will own a sports car. She then tells her
mother, who instead of slapping her across the face with a dish
towel and sending her to her room for thirty years, rolls her
eyes in affectionate exasperation and leaves her to lark around
the living room with her kid sister (lots of family values here).
Back at the hairdresser's, Nancy shares her bubbling enthusiasm
with her buddy, who's gay and -- for a wonder -- not a figure
of fun; and finally mother and buddy make it all come right
for her. The next video shows her getting married to her heart
throb. So much for those who say that video clips condone immorality
(and they can make what they will of the fact that the gay guy
catches the bridal bouquet). Nancy, in short, is funny, intelligent,
and -- with a light touch -- subversive; which, no doubt, is
the real reason why our self-appointed moral guardians don't
like her. And, throughout, she makes more use of persona than
of body parts.
That's leaves
us with Ruby, Haifa, and all the other ingénues. So they
waggle their butts and busts -- so what? What is belly dancing
-- Egypt's national dance -- if not butt-and-bust-waggling,
and of an overtly erotic kind? From the outset of the film industry,
the belly dance scene has been a fixture of the Egyptian mass
entertainment movie, and people watched Samia Gamal and her
ilk for exactly the same reasons they watch Ruby. If you object
to the "reification of the female body" bury your
fangs in the last eighty years of Egyptian film-making as well,
not just the last couple of years of video clips.
In addition,
there is a curious and seemingly willful blindness at work among
the critics that makes them talk as though only (slavering,
lecherous, libidinous) men enjoy watching Ruby and friends,
a supposition as unlikely as claiming that only men enjoy belly
dancing, and quickly disproved by taking a look at the adoring
female fans in Ruby's concert videos. If all it is about is
catering to men's vile instincts, what are the girls doing there?
Finally,
these same critics illogically assume that, while on the one
hand these songs are welcomed by all those drooling males, someone
at the same time is imposing them on a helpless public, which
is the victim of a campaign to undermine its morals and integrate
it, against its will, into the terrible grinder of cultural
globalization. The opposite is in fact the case. Egyptians (and
Lebanese and Moroccans and Jordanians, etc.) actively participate
in their fate by making song requests, sending SMS messages,
purchasing mobile phone ring tones and video images, and contacting
the channels and demanding to hear and see them. Clearly the
public is complicit in this plan for its own destruction, and
if the artist is to be blamed, then everyone else should be
too. Better in the end that the critics climb down from their
high horses and acknowledge that if they find these productions
vulgar, one man's (or woman's) sleaziness is another's high
art, and the only credentials anyone carries as a cultural arbiter
are the ones they award themselves.
In the end,
of course, it's all a lot of fuss over nothing. The anti-clip
lobby's fears of cultural hegemony are, according the best-accepted
research, wildly exaggerated. Like Chinese whispers, what comes
out of one society ends up as something very different when
it's been processed by another. Egyptian audiences are as likely
to interpret Dallas as a celebration of the paternalistic family
as they are to see in it a condemnation of materialism. People
take what they need from what they see and leave what they don't
and they don't change their behavior in response to a single
stimulus, especially when it comes from a box rather than another
human being.
So relax,
old fogies, the sky isn't going to fall (or if it does, it won't
be because of Ruby).
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