Play list
NA Mansour explores how musicians play with and around artistic traditions. Illustration by Ot Pascoe.
I feel like the world wants me to have an identity crisis.
I watch Arab films, often made for the western gaze and not my own – me, with eyes and brain that came into being in the Arab world, speaking Arabic – and I cringe. I read music reviews looking for something to enjoy, and the reviews stare back at me with the proud assertion that this new hip-hop artist or rock band isn’t derivative of older forms of Arabic music: this is capital-N New, that is derivative of anything but Arabic music. This is more to my taste, right?
I was raised in a multi-cultural household and as such, was weaned on classic rock like The Beatles and The Who as much as Arabic genres like tarab. And I was educated in English, with a British and American education. Surely, I want the rock and hip-hop set to Arabic, with lyrics that really could be in any language. This brings together my fractured soul, surely? But then, when my one of my closest friends and I hung out one afternoon in secondary school, we listed our favorite voices to one another. I think back to that conversation and how there was no tension in it: we listed Abdul Haleem Hafez, the nightingale of Arabic 60s and 70s song, along with Freddie Mercury and Edith Piaf. We probably also included Fairuz, the Lebanese chanteuse who blended music of the eastern Mediterranean countryside with funk and jazz. I can’t remember if we included The Beatles.
I still listen to Abdul Haleem and Fairouz, but the years I was at university coincided with the expansion of Spotify and then the years after university, I lived back home, on the side of the world I grew up in: in Amman, Beirut, Cairo, and Istanbul. I went to gigs to see old favorites and try out new things, as much as I spent hours on YouTube, following algorithms. It took a while, wading through bad jazz that said nothing – but I slowly found a group of musicians who clearly weren’t having identity crises. They had the confidence of Fairouz and they saw their own worlds as a complete whole, not as several fragments, joined together with glue. They could move within their space and confidently reach back into our musical past and play those same genres we had always played, before the specter of globalization threatened to flatten us. I began to build a playlist I called ‘Play.’ Listening to them felt like I had found the sort of people I reached for in everyday life as friends and colleagues.
I go for different songs on the Play list depending on my day. I often begin with ‘Jamal al-Wujud’, the collaboration of an Egyptian rock group, Sharmoofers, and an Egyptian devotional music group, al-Hadra, who frequently perform at religious events but also to sell-out crowds in Cairo’s biggest venues. The song is an adaptation of an 18th century poem by a Muslim scholar from Damascus praising God and the prophet Muhammad. Muslim devotional music in Arabic is often joyful. It’s music you’re supposed to move to, about who God is and what God is – versus what one must do in order to please God. The little rock touches Sharmoofers give the song, while al-Hadra roots the piece in its genre as devotional music, are not an assertion about how religion, history and culture is important. It already makes that assumption in existing; it does not need to reassert it as a matter of fact. ‘Jamal al-Wujud’ instead is about, as the title dictates, how wonderful it can be to be alive: ‘The Beauty of Being’. I like it when, sometimes, ‘Jamal al-Wujud’ plays back to back with other Sharmoofers songs on the Play list, such as ‘Single’, which is about being, well, single. It’s three minutes of pure social commentary on relationships, with little audio cues to Egyptian music in horns and muted guitar. It’s not a rejection of culture as a whole, just a well-couched plea to, for God’s sakes, change.
In some ways, the Play list is a celebration of Arabic rock. It’s got Cairokee songs on it, an Egyptian band that ties together both rock and sha’abi, a genre which, like many forms of Arabic music came from the countryside and took over the city’s radiowaves sometime in the 20th century. Sha’abi has a tendency to cast two lines, one into a pool of fast beats and another into dark social commentary. Cairokee’s ‘El Sekka el Shammal’ is my favorite: loosely translated as ‘A Left Turn’, the song plays but it understands that play isn’t always joyful. Beyond its lyrics, which cover how precarious Egypt has become in the last decade, the song is about trying something new and being willing to fail. Play, then, is perhaps sometimes a synonym for confidence: Cairokee’s confidence both understands the music we grew up with and our context both. It pulls them together to produce another link in the chain. I see that same understanding in how in secondary, my friend and I were listing our favorite ‘voices’, we’d reached for both Arabic and European-language classics. To us, it was a single world. I like to think we were confident in our choices. As hard as being a teenager can be, I like to think we weren’t having identity crises in secondary school.
Were we making that voices list today, Cairokee would be on the list for sure. So would al-Hadra. But I would also put Lina Makoul on the list. It’s not just that she has a great voice, but that she also has that ability to treat our weird world as a playground, as one coherent whole. Her ‘3 Sneen, Three Years’, is a personal favorite because it starts out with a genre I used to turn my nose up to: the Arabic ballad, all the rage in the 1980s and early 1990s. Music I once thought cheesy, but that’s still a part of my cultural vocabulary. Music I know the words to, music that makes me miss the place I grew up in. But then Makoul breaks into debke, another rural-city implant of sorts, although it also has the very Palestinian tinge of being resistance music. It’s always a hugely popular genre with all ages and I can see why Makoul feels an equal part of both of these traditions.
She’s mounting her own kind of confident resistance here, in a song that is, at least superficially a triumphant break-up song, the ‘I’m better without you’ genre: the ‘you’ve forced me into boxes’ sort of lines that hint at gaslighting, at trying to fit something into a shape, into an identity that does not fit. For all the things she is better without, I have more than a creeping suspicion, it’s not the music. She loves the music.
