tarab in contemporary arabic rap concerts

My argument in this talk is that tarab can be built and does emerge in contemporary Arabic rap. In making this case, I suggest new musical applications for tarab - an Arabic ethnomusicological and religious phenomenon whose study is usually confined to classic Arabic music of the mid-twentieth century and to religious recitation.

I propose tarab as a way of approaching audience dynamics in rap concerts and as a way to re-center the processes of listening to rap as significant.  Paying attention to affective exchanges does not mean looking for specific feelings like anger, sadness, or excitement. Rather it means tracking processes of what ethnomusicologist Ali Jihad Racy calls “transformative blending” generated by various sonic, musical, and performatic elements.[1] These evoke what the eighteenth-century scholar Murtada al-Zabidi called “the stirring of both joy and sorrow in the listener.”[2] Al-Zabidi called this tarab – a term that has since been applied to Arab musical performance, religious recitation, and spiritual contexts. Tarab may seem alien to the technological “modernity” of hip hop and rap musical production, or the “post-modern” hybridization that rap in Arabic seems to embody. But theorizing affective engagements like the experiences of tarab as political processes unsettles dominant models of locating “politics” in cultural production. Doing so pushes discussions of political agency in cultural production as well as theorizations of the transmission of affect in live performance in new directions. What can the felicitousness of rapper-listener exchanges tell us about political processes of deliberation on questions of identity, solidarity, and engagement? How might centering a discussion of the political on the fleeting exchange between the performer and her audiences recalibrate notions of agency and political activity? Suggesting that tarab may exist in some Arabic rap concerts, exploring what it sounds and feels like, and analyzing the conditions of its emergence structures an alternative ethnographic method for tracing the political in live performance.

I argue that felicitous (when tarab is induced) and infelicitous (when it isn’t) audience-performer exchanges in rap concerts reveal a range of affective textures in Arabic rap that say as much about the spectrum of aesthetic experimentation in the genre as they do about emergent politics some rappers tap into. Tracking the emergence of tarab becomes a way to trace the not-yet-formed, what literary scholar Raymond Williams called the “emergent” and the “pre-emergent” that he famously theorized as structures of feeling. That is, tracing the emergence of powerful feelings of release manifest across a range of emotive temperaments as tarab is a way to document the situation of listeners vis-à-vis different sonic and musical experimentation and to notice the positioning of listeners to different articulations of politics, history, and identity. 

Video assembled for submission to a special video section of the journal of Global Performance Studies.

Notes.

[1] Racy writes, “standard Arabic dictionaries use specific emotional, as well as other experiential, conditions when explaining what tarab is. However, as a rule, these various conditions are intended to work collectively so as to produce new and highly suggestive representations of the tarab state. Thus, the definitions utilize, what […] I call transformative blending, the creation of new blends that are no longer identifiable in terms of their inner, mostly emotional, ingredients, or no longer emotional in the familiar sense.” (Ali Jihad Racy, Making Music in the Arab World: the Culture and Artistry of Tarab [New York: Cambridge UP, 2003], 203.)

[2] Qtd. in Lois Ibsen al Faruqi, An Annotated Glossary of Arabic Musical Terms (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981), 350.