A Revolution in its Day

Here's an interesting editorial on Arabic music videos giving accolades to one Amr Diab.

Celluloid dream: TV and films project a Middle East fantasyland
By Nadia Wassef and David Blanks Special to The Daily Star

CAIRO: Imagine if the only source of information about the Middle East for Westerners were Arabic music videos ... Larry King would invite sociologists and medical specialists to discuss Middle Eastern dating patterns and why the women there are so much better looking than the men ... High school students would write essays about how wealthy Arabs are - and how they live in palaces and drive Porsches and Jaguars. College girls learning oriental dance would wear short, tight skirts and clingy blouses that showed maximum cleavage. Their boyfriends would walk around in unbuttoned white shirts with designer beards, sunglasses and gold necklaces ...

In the early eighties, anyone could make a video - and they all did. The problem was that some of these people were seriously ugly. (For verification check the oldies clips on VH1.) Mick Jagger and Keith Richards weren't exactly poster boys for the British Dental Association. But the boy bands of today, hubba, hubba! ... The Rolling Stones could well afford to be ugly; they wrote great songs. It no longer works that way - not after the accounting department at MTV explained to the producers that it's easier to increase the number of viewers (hence advertising revenue) if they showed lots of images of really gorgeous faces. This is the law on Mazika, Nugoom, Music Arabia and Melody. ... In the days of Abdel Wahab and Abdel Halim Hafez, music was about love and yearning and romance; now it's about love and yearning and selling shampoo ... It seems the Arab dream consists of consumerism and consummation...

More than the recording industry has changed, though; music television has altered the way we look at things, the way we see our world. Watch any serial, sitcom, movie or ad from 15 years ago and you'll want to stuff your head in a plastic bag... Today all music clips are mini movies and all movies are extended music videos. The culture has changed forever. Some of this is for the better; the genre has improved...

Remember the first time you saw the video for Amr Diab's "Habibi Nour El-Ein"? Shot in El Gouna, Egypt, with its attention to color, costumes, choreography, set design: it was a revolution. Some say this revolution comes from elsewhere, that it's a sad imitation of the West. But honestly, who the hell cares? ... Do you think for a moment that seventeenth-century European courtiers sat around worrying if drinking coffee was too Eastern? Of course they did. But so what? Look who won in the long run. And don't you worry ... it's bound to all come round again.

Copyright (c) 2006 The Daily StarTuesday, January 10, 2006
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