Highly recommended-- Houria Ivanan: Pop music From Kabylia

Thanks to Abdellah, I just learned about the music blog Cartilage Consortium. They have many interesting tracks of Middle Eastern pop music to download. Check out the most recent post, with two tracks from 1984, from Houria Ivanan, an early pseudonym for Nora At Brahim. Great stuff!

Hussein Barghouthi and Sabreen

Short doc on poet and Sabreen lyricist Hussein Barghouthi. Notable especially for footage in the beginning of Sabreen in concert. Footage must date from the early 80s?

Lebanese rap group Fareeq al-Atrash

Some great beatboxing here. The group help raise money for the Free Gaza Movement, below. Love the use of the live instruments.

A review of Fareeq al-Atrash's album "Fareeq al-Atrash (pre-album) + a link to download is here. More on the group from BabelMed here.

Speed Caravan Live, feat. Mehdi Haddab on oud, "Galvanize"

JEREMIX / SPEED CARAVAN from JEREMIX on Vimeo.

Great 'ud playing from Speed Caravan's Mehdi Haddab, ex-Ekova, and currently also 1/2 of DuOud. The percussionist, Mohamed Bouamar, formerly played with Natacha Atlas.

Mambo al-Sudani, Sayyid Khalifa

From the film, Tamr Henna, starring Naimah Akif and Rushdi Abazah.

Ali Hassan Kuban vids

In Abdeen and in his club.

In concert, in the seventies?

Karam Mourad, "Assaramessuga"

Karam Mourad is the nephew of Hamza El Din, and here he performs a song by his uncle.

Take Away Show _ KARAM MOURAD (outtake) from Vincent Moon / petites planetes on Vimeo.

More Hamza El Din

"The Wish": for a new Nubia, on the banks of Lake Nasser.

"Ollin Arageed" -- the song he used to perform with the Grateful Dead.

More on the tuffar

From an essential article, "Hizballah's Domestic Growing Pains," by Marlin Dick, via Middle East Report Online.

On Hizballah and the tuffar:

Meanwhile, Hizballah has largely washed its hands of the tuffar -- outlaws in the northern Bekaa Valley involved in cannabis cultivation. The tuffarhave remained aloof from both the government and Hizballah, having retreated to the outer reaches of Lebanon, where they represent more a voice of protest than a plan of action. The popularity of their cause stems from corruption and waste in the central government, the lack of profitable alternatives to drug farming and the specter of nearly 40,000 outstanding warrants hanging over the heads of Bekaa residents. Hizballah leader Sayyid Hasan Nasrallah has demanded an amnesty or another solution to the warrants issue.

During and after the civil war, Syrian military and intelligence officials managed the unruly clans in the northern Bekaa, whose turf battles had a propensity for violence, and since Syria’s 2005 withdrawal, Hizballah has not filled the vacuum. While continuing to sponsor reconciliation between the area’s clans, it has not acted to end the disturbances once and for all. Hizballah is not pulling the strings of the tuffar movement, but rather eyeing it warily as an offshoot of the network of Bekaa tribes it has yet to fully coopt. Perhaps because of the charged sectarian climate of recent years, the party has not lobbied hard for the canceling of outstanding warrants -- a move that would benefit the Shi‘i community. Meanwhile, Hizballah has refused to condone the acts of violent Shi‘i clan members or criminals, or to protect the mini-industry of car theft centered in the village of Barital. Clashes between the Lebanese army and outlaws have become more frequent since Syria’s withdrawal and Hizballah has generally offered its tacit blessing for army intervention in towns like Baalbek, where clan members have engaged in shootouts in the streets, sometimes with rocket-propelled grenades.

Touffar, "Habr 'Awaraq"

photo: Sam Tarling

Touffar are a terrific rap group from Ba'albak, Lebanon (I had thought they were Palestinian, but it seems not). I particularly like this song. Unfortunately, I don't have the time (or adequate skills) to try to work on translating and making sense of it, or other Touffar videos (there are lots on youtube). Here's an article in Arabic on the Touffar phenomenon (again, lack of time prevents me from further work.) So this note serves as (a) an expression of my fondness for the song in question (b) a kind of placeholder and (c) hopefully an incitement to someone who knows the dialect well to translate the song into English. The lyrics of the song, helpfully, are present as subtitles in this video.

The first I heard of Touffar (or Tuffar), was from Angry Arab, who wrote this on Nov. 9, 2009:

There is a movement that needs to be covered more in the press. It is the Tuffar movement in the Ba`albak region. Some [c]overage of the movement suffers from prejudices and from stereotypes about them as criminals and drug dealers. Even an article in Al-Akhbar a few months ago did not deviate from that norm. Tafar is being very poor, or penniless. Tuffar characterizes a movement associated with the Ja`far clan in Ba`albak and champions the poor and neglected in the region. It is Shi`ite but not with Hizbullah and not with the Amal movement, the two Shi`ite political groupings in the region. Many in Lebanon blame (often unfairly) the car theft and drug dealings on Tuffar. Tuffar is a lawless movement that champions rebellion against the government, and is more political than often assumes. A supporter sent me rappings by Tuffar which speak to their sentiments and feelings and political expressions. There is this one and this one. Listen carefully to the lyrics. By the way, the Lebanese accent of that region is my favorite accent from Lebanon. It is close to Fusha and I like how they stretch words: so jurd becomes jooord.

And after a little searching, I found a link to an article by Josh Wood on Touffar from Esquire Middle East. You can download it here. I excerpt below some interesting bits.

The disintegration of the legitimate economy means cannabis cultivation, gun-running, banditry and petrol smuggling have become a way of life for many in the [Ba'albeck] region. The illegal economy is complicated by the presence of a highly complicated system of clan politics – which, when combined with a general population that has more guns than the armies of many small nations, often leads to violence.

“Touffar” means outlaws, a reference to the men and women who have resorted to arms to protect their livelihood and land at all costs, both against the Lebanese government and others who wish to impede. It is a culture in the Bekaa resulting from absolute desperation, which the band points to in their music. The other side of the coin is the pride people feel to this region. Their loyalty to the land and to resistance are also major themes in Touffar’s music. This has helped create bridges between their music and unlikely listeners, such as Hezbollah, the Lebanese Party of God...

In Beirut, I finally meet up with Touffar at a currently hip “communist” bar in Hamra that serves up economysized beers at bourgeoisie prices, yet still attracts members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine along with plenty of Che-obsessed youths wrapped in kaffiyas.

Nasserdyn has long hair and a skinny face and enthusiastically talks about the band with good English. The author of most of the band’s lyrics, Jaafar, is slightly bearded and more reserved than Nasserdyn, butting-in at random moments of inspiration. While they are hip hop artists, the guys aren’t wearing bling, baggy clothes or stiff baseball caps. They opt instead for strikingly conventional t-shirts and shorts, making it hard for me to spot them as I walk into the bar. Together, Nasserdyn and Jaafar make up Touffar. They’re hanging out with a member of Katibe 5, a well-known local Palestinian rap group that emerged from Burj al-Barajneh, Beirut’s largest Palestinian refugee camp. The Palestinian refugees, numbering up to four hundred thousand in Lebanon, have a natural kinship in poverty and disenfranchisement with many from the Bekaa Valley.

Jaafar and Nasserdyn cut to the chase and lay out the essence of the group: “Touffar is the way of life that is outside of the law,” Nasserdyn explains. “We are the people the government wants to put in jail, and we don’t want to give ourselves up — we’re like outlaws.” Jaafar and Nasserdyn deny ever running into trouble with the law or engaging in any (really) illegal activities themselves. But they say that they took on the persona of outlaws to give the region a voice. They acknowledge that their spirit of resistance does in fact make them outlaws in the eyes of many, such as the Lebanese state...

Living as outlaws in the Bekaa, according to Jaafar, is “a way of living, because we don’t have another choice.”

“If you want to live, if you want to eat, you have to do certain things,” adds Nasserdyn.

From their brevity – and the angst in their lyrics – it seems that they might actually be the real deal: their way of life is something real and inescapable, not some lifestyle choice or teenage rebellion...

For Jaafar and Nasserdyn, rap has always been about resistance – an out to vent frustrations, to subvert the government and to bring about change. While they insist that their sound is not inspired by anybody in particular, they speak of older American rap music, written by frustrated African-American youth in the ghettos. This was long before before American rap turned more towards lyrics about dollar bills and swimming pools filled with girls in bikinis.

“Rap music is fight music,” explains Jaafar.

While the band repeatedly chastises those who leave the Bekaa, forced to move to Beirut or emigrate abroad due to the poor economic situation, it is ironic to find them in Lebanon’s capital. They assure me that they are only here for their concert and to complete their education and that they still live in Baalbek.

“If there was a university in Bekaa, the government would make sure that it was s***,” says Nasserdyn bluntly.

In the batch of songs they are currently recording, emigration to Beirut by Baalbek’s youth plays a key role. For Touffar, those who abandon the land of the Bekaa and give up the fight to protect the land, are racked up as traitors to themselves and their home. While they understand these motives, the band looks down on those from the Bekaa who take up menial jobs in Beirut (“they deserve a slap in the face every morning,” says Nasserdyn) and also the rogue clan members who have taken to armed robberies in the Lebanese capital.

Beirut bothers them, visibly...

Their song title “Al-Wasakh al-Tijari” or “Commercial Filth” is an Arabic reference to downtown Beirut’s commercial centre, which is called al-Wasat al-Tijari. The lyrics relentlessly attack the development of the city centre by Hariri’s company Solidere and question who benefits from these ventures.

“Our music is not just about Baalbek,” Nasserdyn tells me. “It’s about the people who robbed Baalbek to create this place [Beirut] for kings from Saudi and the Khaleej [the Gulf ].”

“They want to turn Lebanon into a big hotel… And we say that Lebanon isn’t a hotel or a brothel.”

This anti-commercial establishment sentiment spreads further than lyrics. Far from 50 Cent’s “Get Rich or Die Trying” model, Touffar says that they’re not in the business for the money. Given that they’ve refused to record an album onto CD thus far (they spread their songs virally through YouTube and from person to person on mobile phones) this claims might be valid. In their first headline concert in Beirut, the band charged a paltry two dollar entrance fee; just enough to cover overhead costs. If they feel that they have successfully brought about change, they suggest, perhaps they’ll stop rapping. If they start feeling that their music is doing little in the way of change, another path might be in order.

“Right now we are fighting with our lyrics. Maybe later we will fight another way to get our freedom and liberty.” says Jaafar “The real resistance is by bullets.”

Ali* al-Yaghi sits, like he does everyday, in a roadside café next to a grassy park in the relatively upscale Baalbek neighbourhood of Ras al-Ain, gently pulling on a Marlboro Light. A former hash and arms dealer, twenty-year-old Ali is now training to become a Hezbollah fighter and hopes to fight and perhaps become a martyr during the next war with Israel. He differs immensely from the arak-swilling socialist intelligentsia in Beirut, yet he is just as enthusiastic supporter of Touffar and a personification of the group’s lyrics.

“Ibn Baalbek ma yamot” he says upon being asked about the band, before breaking out into an impromptu performance of one of their songs. “The son of Baalbek does not die” — a motto of Touffar that epitomises the spirit of resistance held by the residents of the Bekaa.

We’re sitting under a large portrait of the turbaned and bespectacled Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in yellow chairs...Ali sits with his mobile phone on the table, alternating between Touffar songs and videos of Hezbollah fighters ambushing Israeli patrols...

Ali embodies the Bekaa tragedy that Touffar raps about. After finishing secondary education, he quickly realised that there were few opportunities to work. Like many, he chose to go illicit – selling hashish and guns until he was arrested by Lebanese internal security forces over a year ago. Hezbollah bailed him out. Then they handed him an American-made M-16 and he began training to join the Party of God’s military wing.

In an environment where work is nearly impossible to come by, even for the educated, the modest stipends of Hezbollah’s militia become an alluring factor for those not scooped up in the Bekaa’s illicit economy.

“Only Hezbollah saves Baalbek.” he says. “The only other work is hashish. If the government took care of Baalbek, then people wouldn’t grow hashish. Right now, all we do is sit and wait.”

The café owner looks up from his counter. “Look at Beirut: Saad Hariri p***es money!” he says scathingly, attacking the opulent reconstruction of downtown Beirut.

“We [in Baalbek] love Lebanon, but the state does not love us back. There is only Hezbollah for us here.”

Hezbollah and Touffar are odd bedfellows. While the rappers’ music obviously does not resonate heavily with many in Hezbollah, the message of resistance does. Similarly, Jaafar and Nasserdyn’s self-proclaimed secular attitudes clash heavily with the Islamist oriented mission of Hezbollah, but at the same time, they are fighting the same fight and thus enjoy a heavy following by those who identify with Hezbollah. The first line of their song “Madina al-Shuhada” (“City of the Martyrs”) gives light to the attraction: “The road to Jerusalem begins in the city of the martyrs (Baalbek).”

Yet Touffar is not a group of Hezbollah rappers. Nor are they socialists or gangsters or any other adjective that could be thrown in front of them. They are young, they are angry and they are very proud of their hometown, a city that was once an axis of empires, now fallen into disrepair. They tell me not to expect to see them on MTV or to see their albums on the Billboard charts. They just want to get their message out, they want to show the realities of life on the ground in the Bekaa and make their lives and the lives of those around them just that little bit better.

Again, inshallah someone will do more on this. If you check out the Touffar vids, you will see lots of shots of hashish plants. The Beqa'a Valley, where Ba'albak is located, is renowned for its hashish. (It's where "Lebanese blonde" comes from. You know, of course, the Thievery Corporation song by that name.) Conditions of production are pretty rough.

Zaid Hamdan & The Wings, Digla, Laal

I was recently blown away by three great rock songs from the Middle East and South Asia, so I thought I would share.

1. Zeid & the Wings, "General Suleiman."

Zeid Hamdan was formerly in the fabulously terrific Lebanese band Soapkills, described by many as "Lebanese trip-hop." Zeid & the Wings is his new project. This song is so catchy and fabulous.

I can't get all the lyrics, but they include lines like "all the militias go home," "foreign intelligence go home," and so on.

Read more about the song here. And check out this episode of The Monocle for a long interview with Zeid (in English) and several of his songs.

ADDED DEC. 11, 2012:

Here's a transcription of the lyrics, found here (and which I located thanks to the comment from Anonymous, below.)

General Suleiman

Gene Gene General
General Suleiman
Gene Gene General
General Suleiman
Salam Salam Salam Aleik
General Suleiman
You're a Miracle Man
For peace in our nation
General Suleiman
You're a miracle man
General Suleiman
You're a miracle man
Put your weapons down
Put your weapons down
Now it s time
To leave your warlords behind
Everything is fine , and they ll be no more crime
Let the country shine with general Suleiman
General Suleiman
You're a miracle man
General Suleiman
You're a miracle man
Gene Gene General
General Suleiman
Gene Gene General
General Suleiman
Salam Salam Salam Aleik
General Suleiman
You're a Miracle Man
For peace in our nation
All the milicia man GO HOME
Corrupted politician GO HOME
To Weapon dealer say GO HOME
To trouble maker say GO HOME
Foreign intelligence GO HOME
Neighbourgh influence GO HOME
All the milicia man GO HOME
Corrupted politician GO HOME
To Weapon dealer say GO HOME
To trouble maker say GO HOME
Foreign intelligence GO HOME
Neighbourgh influence GO HOME
Gene Gene General
General Suleiman
Gene Gene General
General Suleiman
Salam Salam Salam Aleik
General Suleiman
You're a Miracle Man
For peace in our nation
General Suleiman
You're a miracle man
General Suleiman
You're a miracle man
Gene gene general , GO HOME !

2. Digla, "Highlights."

This is such a catchy pop-rock song. If the world were fair, it would be on the charts in the US and elsewhere. At first brush, you wouldn't imagine that it came from Cairo, Egypt. What I especially like about it is that it is not only Top 40 material (in a good way) but that it also expresses its Egyptianness in a seamless manner. About 1 minute into the song, the singer breaks into Arabic, singing "ya layl" (oh night, a stereotypical phrase of the Arab mawwal), with the added percussive backing of a tambourine (daff) and the derbouka--which also are shown in the video. The "Arabic" elements are integrated seamlessly, however, they don't break the rhythm or the feel of the song at all. You don't get any feeling of "hybridity" here, no sense of "East" and "West" being harnessed together. It just all works as a rock song.

I've not listened carefully to the lyrics, but these have their local flavor as well. One of the lines is about the juxtaposition of a donkey cart parking beside a tourist bus.

The video is terrific too, typical scenes of Cairo, but happy, upbeat ones. Just like the song. Some day, a group from Lebanon or Egypt will make it onto the Western rock charts, without the artists having to move to London or Paris or New York. The talent is certainly there.

3. Laal, "Doob Gaya Hai" (song for Pakistani flood victims)

I've written about this leftist Pakistani folk-rock group at hawgblawg. Just check out the remarkable images, which give you some ideas of the unimaginable devastation and suffering that have been wreaked upon the Pakistani people by the recent floods. If you feel so inclined, here are some ways that you can help.

Here are some recommended avenues for making donations:

Relief4Pakistan

Via the US government, if you are so inclined. It's easy, text "SWAT" to 50555 and make a $10 contribution that will help provide tents, clothing, food, clean drinking water, and medicine to people displaced by floods.

The Nation magazine offers an array of ways to help, in this article by Pete Rothberg.

Zar music in Egypt: al-Mazaher and Rango

The zar cult is widely practiced in Egypt, the Sudan, and coastal East Africa. Anthropologists of the Middle East are familiar with it through the work of IM Lewis' classic Ecstatic Religion: A Study of Shamanism and Spirit Possession (originally published in 1971) and Janice Boddy's Wombs and Alien Spirits: Women, Men and the Zar Cult in Northern Sudan (1989). The practices associated with the cult involve possession by spirits who then must be propitiated in ceremonies that involve the playing of music. The zar cult bears a family resemblance to the Gnawa cult of Morocco.

Although the cult is quite common in Egypt among the lower classes, and especially in Southern Egypt and among descendants of immigrants from the Sudan, at the time I lived in Egypt its rituals were pretty much in the shadows, as far as I can tell. I knew a student at AUC, Hager El Hadidi, who was doing research on the amulets associated with the ritual. Here's an example of a zar amulet, depicting one of the zar spirits, Yawri Bey, as an army officer.

Photo: Sigrid van Roode, from Bedouin Silver, with permission

Hager never got me to a zar ritual, and I don't know anyone who went during the time I spent in Cairo. In this regard, the zar was very different than the Gnawa cult in Morocco, where it is not hard to get into a lila, an all-night Gnawa ceremony, if you have the right contacts. Moreover, the music associated with the Gnawa is very well known in Morocco. In the 1970s the Gnawa ritual, music, and practitioners were quite marginalized; today Gnawa is at the center of Moroccan popular culture. The annual Gnawa festival in Essaouira is the country's biggest festival.

It appears, however, that things are changing for the zar in Egypt, and it is becoming more publicly visibile, as a musical, and ritual, practice.

First, through the appearance of a group from Cairo, al-Mazaher, that performs zar music in public. It appears that the main space where it performs is Makan, a performance space established by the Egyptian Center for Culture and Arts (ECCA) in Sayyida Zaynab, a popular quarter close to downtown Cairo. In addition to zar music from al-Mazaher, Makan has featured Nubian music (from famed Nubian musician Sayed al-Gayer) and baladi music from Mawawil. Here's a video of al-Mazaher at Makan:



And here's another, of al-Mazer performing with Oficina Zoè, from Salento, Italy.

And here's a brief clip featuring dancing to the accompaniment of the tanbura (or simsimiyya), a six-stringed lyre, which, in the zar ritual, is supposed to bring down the spirits, much as the ginbri does in the Gnawa ritual. The dancer is wearing a a percussive instrument called the mangour, a leather belt sewn with numerous goat hooves.

Rango is a related genre of music, played at ceremonies that closely resemble the zar. The chief difference seems to be that rango is specific to descendants of Sudanese immigrants to Egypt and that the chief instrument is the rango, a xylophone made of wood. The wooden blocks of the xylophone are attached to gourds, the vehicles through which the spirits manifest themselves and enter the devotees of the cult, when the music is performed at rituals.

The last (apparently) surviving rango musician, Hassan Bergamon, was "rediscovered," after the screening of a documentary on rango on Nile TV in the '90s. He has formed an ensemble, called Rango, and the group has been performing in Egypt and abroad, and the group recently released an album, called Bride of the Zar.

Here's a photo of Bergamon and his rango.


You can read more about the group, and listen to samples of the songs, at the group's website, here. The samples are quite interesting, and two of them resemble Gnawa music: track one, "Sawakin," and track four, "Ahlan be etlat asyad" (welcome to the three lords). The playing on the tanbura sounds like the ginbri, and the singing resembles that of the Gnawa. And track four, a song that, I guess, welcomes the coming of three of the spirits or djinns, would appear to be like the Gnawa songs that welcome the mluk, and in particular, the song "Merhaba."

And check out the videos of the group on youtube, accessible through the group's website. I particularly like this one, "Major."



Go here for another article about Rango, from the magazine Prospect. The author is incorrect about the "lost Sudanese tribal language called Rotana." Rotana is the colloquial name that Egyptians gave to the two Nubian languages, Feddika and Kenuzi. These languages are by no means lost, but are spoken by thousands, maybe tens of thousands of Nubians.

I find it of note that zar music as well as zar ritual has become much more visible in Egypt at the same time that orthodox Islamic views, which look with great disfavor upon such rituals that involve spirit possession and in which both men and women participate, are on the upswing. Stay tuned.

Added July 8:

Check out this account of Rango's concerts in Bradford and Selby, courtesy of the invaluable blog, Tales from Bradistan.

It states that all the members are of Nubian background. Given rango's origins in Sudan, this of course makes sense, and also makes sense of the fact that Prospect (see above) refers to lyrics in Rotana, the name Egyptians in the past used to describe the two Nubian languages. It means "gibberish," and is derived from the verb ratana (رطن).

It means, "to speak an unintelligible language, to talk gibberish, jabber" (Hans Wehr). The name reflects the fact that, back in the day, Egyptians considered Nubians to be "primitives." The term is still in use, and I once heard Nubian musician Ali Hassan Kuban use the term to describe speaking Nubian.

Graffiti in Beirut

Natacha Atlas, "Habibe"

Here's a quite wonderful track by Natacha Atlas, which I learned about courtesy Neil Sparkes of Transglobal Underground. It's from a 2008 album called Big Blue Ball, put together by Peter Gabriel from sessions recorded between 1991 and 1995 at Real World Studies, with the participation of lots of world music artists. Neil Sparkes appears on this track, as does the ubiquitous Hossam Ramzy. I especially like the violin playing that you hear in the opening. Check it out.

Lebanese rap from the Christian Science Monitor

In the days before the CSM went all-digital. Drat. On RGB, Yayess Bek (the godfather of lubnani rap), Malikah, and Katibe 5 (from Palestinian refugee camp Burj al-Barajneh). (A shorter excerpt of this article appeared earlier on hawgblawg.)

"Rapping Injustice in Arabic," by Eamon Kircher-Allen, CSM, Feb. 27, 2009, pp. 13, 16.

...unlike much of Beirut's music scene that draws heavily on foreign influences, rappers like RGB are fiercely Lebanese in everything they do. They talk about personal experiences in which they see the same kinds of injustice, violence, and lack of forums for addressing social problems that were the impetus for early African-American rap groups with a political message, such as Public Enemy...

"Most of the artists here are from the streets, they live in a very unfair system," music producer Zeid Hamdan says by phone... "[Lebanon] is a good ground for hip hop. The 'bling bling' hasn't arrived yet. The bling-bling scene is in the pop music"...

there are strong connections between hip-hop lyricism and Arabic's heritage of poetry. For centuries, writers who mastered the art of self-expression in Arabic have been folk heroes. According to Joe Namy, a Lebanese-American music producer and a fine-arts graduate student at New York University, that heritage has converged with the current social dimensions in Lebanon.

"Hip hop is becoming more popular now because there's a lot more frustration," he said. "The music lends itself to this need to express yourself. It's a very visual form of expression."

Lebanese hip hop reaches across the sectarian divide as well...RGB is Christian, Hamdan is Druze, and there are others in the hip hop collective 961 Underground – named after Lebanon's country code – who are Muslim.A group that epitomizes that diversity is Katibe 5 (pronounced ka-TEE-bé KHAM-sé), whose members hail from Burj al-Barajneh, a rundown Palestinian refugee camp on the south side of Beirut...

"For sure, that's why the Palestinians choose rap, because they feel they are like the black Americans," OS Loop [of Katibe 5] says. "They feel like the oppressed."

The group's first album, "Ahlan fikun bil Mukhayamat," ("Welcome to the Camps") was released last year. It tackles social issues head on – and aggressively...

OS Loop follows the American rap scene closely. His favorite artists are KRS-One, Wu Tang, and Paris...

OS Loop recalls a concert American superstar 50 Cent put on in Beirut in 2006, before the Israeli bombardment of Lebanon that killed more than 1,200 Lebanese. A native of Queens, New York, 50 Cent often raps about how he survived being shot nine times. But OS Loop isn't overly impressed with that – or the commercial turn that 50 Cent's music has taken.

"Now Snoop is coming, and Akon is coming [to Lebanon], but for me they are all commercial," he says. "I wish 50 Cent stayed in Lebanon for the war," he adds with a laugh. "I wanted to tell him what's the true meaning of gangsta."

Ahmad Zahir, the Afghan Elvis

"The Afghan Elvis 'Lives' 24 Years After His Death," by Amy Waldman, New York Times, March 20, 2003.



...like the real Elvis, to whom, with his black hair, sideburns and wide-collared shirts, he bore passing resemblance, his popularity has endured, his legend magnified...

the singer set great Persian poets like Rumi, Hafiz, Maulana Jami; the Afghan poet Khalilullah Khalili; and traditional folkloric songs, to music. He sang of love, pain and God. Never formally trained as a musician, he played the accordion, the piano, the organ, and the guitar and he absorbed the Western music spilling from radios in the 1960's and 70's. Some songs sound, instrumentally at least, vaguely like the Beatles or surf music.

He recalls a freer prewar Afghanistan when girls could rush the stage to grab his half-drunk soda, when women named a popular dress fabric ''Hair of Ahmad Zahir.''

He also reflects an Afghanistan that was far less ethnically polarized than it is today. An ethnic Pashtun who sang mostly in Dari, he won fans in all ethnic groups...

Mr. Zahir died in 1979 on his 33rd birthday. He was ostensibly killed in a car accident, but no one here believes there was anything accidental about it. Some say he was murdered by the family of his first wife [the NYT subsequently ran a correction, the rumor was about wife #2] in revenge for her death; after an unhappy marriage, he had been accused of her murder and briefly jailed.

Others say he refused to sing at the wedding of the Afghan Communist prime minister's daughter and paid with his life. Mr. Muhammad subscribed to this version but added the perhaps crucial detail that Mr. Zahir had chosen a song that displeased the Communists by suggesting that Afghanistan was living in slavery.

Zahira Zahir [Ahmad's sister] said the truth was simple and sordid. He was too independent for the Communists. They lured him out of Kabul, then shot him in the head.

I can't find anything on youtube that even vaguely suggests a stylistic connection to Elvis. I guess it's mainly the sideburns. And maybe the fact that Zahir died not too long after Elvis? However, Zahir put out 22 albums, so maybe someday I'll find those songs that sound vaguely like the Beatles or surf music.

Rai 'n' B

I found this vid through this article from The Fader. (Some of the youtube vids have been taken down, and none of the vids are official except the one I've reproduced above, but the music is great.)

Jace Clayton describes the song as follows:

One of the collection’s [Urban Rai 2008] most popular tracks is an omni-genre stormer called Un Gaou a Oran (A Fool in Oran), a collaboration between the Parisian rap crew 113, the Ivory Coast supergroup Magic System and the Algerian crooner Mohammed Lamine. It’s a fantastic, effortless collision of Euro-African styles. A West African guitar melody circles what sounds like a sped-up reggaeton beat, and the song ends up striking a perfect balance between coupé décalé (the popular Ivorian genre pioneered by African expats in Paris) and French club music. That’s “French” as in couscous and post-riot Parisian suburbs – not Serge Gainsbourg or quiche.

Un Gaou a Oran’s YouTube clip boasts over two million views. It’s a joyful pastiche that nods to Mahmoud Zemmouri’s French Muslim slapstick musical film 100% Arabica (whose leads, Cheb Mami and Khaled, each have a few tunes here) as well as the colour-saturated magical whimsy of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie. Whereas the latter’s version of Paris had no black people, the Un Gaou a Oran video is literally crowded with them – as is the song itself, which houses no fewer than four languages.

Listening to this song, a remix of a remix, provides the giddy experience of hearing discrete musical cultures accelerate together to a blur. The exuberant dance groove and torrent of styles are not about complete understanding (the quadrilingual music market ain’t what it used to be). Instead, it’s about creating a space of real, untranslatable difference – and finding shared comfort there. (Of course, it’s also about silly lyrics and physical humour.)

This is the same sort of space referred to by the title’s use of the word “urban”: a cosmopolitan space where foregrounded otherness doesn’t lead to exclusion. 113, Magic System, Lamine and their countless fans are moving beyond France’s cherished fraternité into al-ikhaa’ and badeya. True multiculturalism isn’t about fusion — that World Music buzzword of the Nineties. It’s about transforming cultural and sonic friction into useful heat.

This is from Clayton's review of two recent rai compilations, which sound essential, and which you must get hold of. I plan to.

Amira Kheir: Jazz Sudani Style

I really know nothing about Amira Kheir. I was turned onto her by Omar, and I really like what she does. It's Sudanese music with a jazz inflection. Very tasteful.

Here's what Amira says about herself and her music on her myspace page:

I am Sudanese – Italian and I have lived in 3 continents through out my life – hence my music is a direct reflection of this multicultural legacy. The North of Sudan, being at the crossroads of Middle Eastern and East/Central African culture has a very particular and ancient musical tradition finding its roots in the Nubian civilisation of my ancestors.

Please give her a listen. Three songs are up as of today, on her myspace page.

Iraqi Jewish musicians, the al-Kuwaiti Brothers

From the BBC, this wonderful story by Tim Franks, reporting from Jerusalem. South Tel Aviv has a new street, Rechov Ha'achim al-Kuvaiti, or al-Kuwaiti Brothers Street, named after Saleh and Daoud al-Kuwaiti. They were big stars in Iraq before emigrating to Israel. In Israel, they were basically unknown, confined to the Arab-Jewish cultural ghetto. In Iraq, according to Shlomo, Saleh's son, the Kuwaiti brothers music remained massively popular, but without credit being given to them. Today, Daoud's grandson Dudu is reviving and recording his grandfather's and great-uncles music in Israel.

Here is more on the al-Kuwaiti Brothers, from Ha'aretz. In fact, it's a better article than Franks', with more detailed information. We learn that the al-Kuwaitis are today getting much more recognition, in post-Saddam Iraq (Saddam worked hard to have them purged from Iraqi cultural history), in Kuwait, and in Israel. Saleh wrote a song specifically for Umm Kalthoum, "Your Heart is a Rock," and also collaborated with Muhammad 'Abd al-Wahhab.

Daoud & Saleh Al-Kuwaity's album, Their Star Shall Never Fade, produced by Shlomo al-Kuwaiti, is available emusic and iTunes. It's highly recommended. And don't forget the recent release Give Me Love: Songs Of The Brokenhearted - Baghdad, 1925-1929, almost entirely composed of tunes from Iraqi Jewish musicians. Courtesy Damon Albarn's label Honest Jon's.Go here for a useful overview of modern Iraqi music, which includes the al-Kuwaiti brothers in the story.

Hamza El Din video

This video will serve, for the moment, as a kind of placeholder. In future, hopefully, I'll put up more here about the great Nubian singer and 'ud player, Hamza El Din.