revamping the popular
In this research I explore how notions of the popular are being mediated through different kinds of live music performance across the Levant. By consciously inverting expectations and meaning of both traditional and contemporary “pop,” the musical acts I consider access and refresh a shared, Arabic musical repertoire. Playing to increasingly wide audiences, they create a familiar but fictional world for Arab consumption that poses new political questions about spectatorship and the histories and affect of live and mediated popular music in the region.
Singers, rappers, and multi-media performers in Ramallah and Beirut riff on urban soundscapes, (re)vamp vocal codas, and sample a vast recorded archive in order to invoke and then move audiences past the domineering political modes of pan-Arabism, nationalism, sentimentalism, and defeat. Drawing on performing repertoires circulating since 2011, I interrogate the construction of a bygone era of Arab politics through what I call sound strategies – styles of singing, radio and television sampling – and explore how a new generation of avant-garde musicians and sound artists use aural invocations to this era and its powerful political affects to suspend and transpose political meaning. Sampling, vamping, and riffing on an aural repertoire with a widely-held political memory, an emergent, aural avant-garde renders accessible new political ideas through inversions of familiar sounds.
Considered artists include sound-installation collective Tashweesh, the bands The Great Departed and Mashrou' Leila, Metro al-Madina's Hishik Bishik Show, and the solo performances of Yasmine Fayed and Sandy Chamoun, among others. As political performances, these acts point to important ways in which artists and audiences are remaking connections with shared past and divergent futures.
timeS and dates
August 30, 2018 - "Revamping the Popular: Nostalgia in Beirut's Musical Cabarets," Department of Religious Studies, University of Pennsylvania
November 2, 2017 - "Revamping Gender: Nostalgia and Affect in Beirut's Musical Cabarets," Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC), Annenberg School of Communication, University of Pennsylvania
December 1, 2017 - "Shaabi-Kitsch: Multi Media Visions of the Popular in Beirut," American Anthropological Association (AAA), "Implicated Digital Transitions in the MENA Region," Washington D.C.