Arabic Pop

(Myriam Faris, a Lebanese singer.)

I confess–I’ve got weird taste in music. It’s probably been irreparably influenced by the fact that I’ve moved around so much, and came to admire every “exotic” style of music I encountered. (European-style dance music became my favorite thing after I spent a semester in college
overseas.)

Well, when I was deployed, one of the things I noticed was that in every one of the little shops we’d visit in the International Zone in Baghdad, there’d be a TV going. It was inevitably tuned to music videos, and beautiful women in provocative outfits would be singing and dancing onscreen. (Which seemed a little odd, considering that Muslims tend to be rather strict about such things.) But really, I just liked the music.

(Haifa Wehbe, a Lebanese artist, singing “Haifa Ana”–”I’m Haifa”– on YouTube: Here’s the link.)

I like the rhythms, instrumentation and harmonies that appear in Arabic pop–it’s distinctive and a nice change from the predictability of American pop.

It’s been fun to learn about this genre, now that I finally sat down and looked for it–I’d been meaning to for a while, but I kept searching for “Arabic dance music” and ending up with bellydancing websites, which is NOT what I was looking for.

I knew that this musical genre existed–a teenybopperish store I visited in France was playing it, back in 2005. But I couldn’t find it anywhere, because I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. Not, at least, until I lived in the Middle East for six months.

There are a slew of Arabic pop singers out there, many of whom are apparently known for their looks and sometimes scandalous behavior above and beyond their singing (kind of like our own pop princesses). Among the singers that I explored, I found Myriam Faris, Elissa, Nancy Ajram, and Nawal Alzoghby (most of them have samples available on their websites), and there are many more. I even found a website that specializes in streaming Arabic pop (their slogan in English reads “for the love to Arabic music” which I thought was funny).

(May Kassab, an Egyptian singer, on YouTube: Link.)

Of course, since I don’t speak Arabic, I have no clue what they’re saying. I’m hoping that the CDs I ordered (though Amazon.com still kept trying to offer me bellydancing music) will help me acclimatize to the language so that my study of Arabic comes more easily. Or that, as I study Arabic, I’ll be able to pick out a few more words in the music.

You know, how you do when you hear something in your high school foreign language, and out of a whole sentence, you find yourself proudly saying, “He said ‘three’, and ‘tomorrow’, and ‘work’!” (Sigh. We really are language slackers, here in the United States.)