Here’s an interesting juxtaposition of pop culture happenings.
First, Charles Paul Freund does his usual excellent job of highlighting the cultural and political implications of pop culture trends with his article on pop music videos in Arab countries.
Freund leads off his story writing,
One of the more interesting music videos released last year features an attractive brunette who, according to the videoÂ’s narrative, is involved in a liaison taking place in a Paris hotel room. The visual narrative seems to offer the womanÂ’s often disconnected impressions of this apparently illicit relationship: Sometimes a man with a calculating smile is in the room with her; sometimes sheÂ’s there alone, as if waiting for him. Naturally, the video is drenched in images of desire, especially the womanÂ’s erotic perceptions of the liaison and of herself.
. . .
Eroticism like this, which seems to emerge from the pages of a VictoriaÂ’s Secret catalog, isnÂ’t usually very noteworthy. Indeed, the videoÂ’s assumption that thereÂ’s something “forbidden” about its subject matter that must be approached in an “artistic” fashion may seem outdated. But in this case it is exactly such elements that make the production compelling. The reason is the videoÂ’s cultural context: This is not an American or European or Japanese video; it is an Arab artifact. The woman is a singer named Elissa; her song, which has made her a leading celebrity in the Mideast, is entitled “Aychaylak” (“I Live for You”); and both her song and her video were among last yearÂ’s biggest music hits in the Arabic-speaking world.
Freund notes that the interesting part is less the eroticism and sex of this and other music and videos that are increasingly popular in the region, as much as it is the fluid identity-making it offers which is so much a part of modern Western secular culture that most of us typically forget just how revolutionary it is,
Can that be what is happening with Arabic videos? While they are entertaining and titillating viewers, they are also transmitting new ways of being to an apparently receptive audience, new and multiplying approaches to being an “Arab” that combine traditional forms of cultural self-presentation with forms borrowed from an array of other sources. The combinations that promise to emerge would not be mere copies of borrowed foreign models; they would be new and indigenous cultural creations, just as is the case in cultures around the world. This syncretism is already true of the music itself, which not only uses traditional Arabic instrumentation (nye, oud, qanoon, etc.) in new ways but also borrows instruments and rhythms from the Caribbean, Europe, India, rock, rap (including rap in Spanish), and numerous other sources.
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.
It is interesting to note that, at the same time, there is also a backlash against what many people see as an “R-rated culture” in the United States. Just this week, for example, Wal Mart agreed to hide the covers, and in some cases simply stop selling, several magazines that continually push the boundary between pornographic and non-pornographic works. It will cover up Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Marie Claire and Redbook, while Wal Mart announced earlier it would simply stop selling men’s magazines FHM, Maxim and Stuff.
Sources:
Look WhoÂ’s Rocking the Casbah: The revolutionary implications of Arab music videos. Charles Paul Freund, Reason, June 2003.
Wal-Mart to Block Some Magazine Covers. Associated Press, June 6, 2003.