its artistic production.12 Long considered to be the cultural capital of the Arab world, Egypt has been a source of inspiration for a number of Syrian artists, both in terms of providing subject matter (for instance, themes from ancient Egyptian art) and as a center for study at Egypt’s fine arts academies and conservatories. While Egyptian performance halls and galleries do not regularly feature Syrian artists aside from superstars like vocalist Ṣabāḥ Fakhrī, Egyptian artists both well-known and emerging make the rounds of Syria’s halls, clubs, and galleries. In the old days, as Syrian musicians often told me, Syria was the cultural standard, and the great Egyptian artists—Sayyid Darwīsh, Dāwūd Ḥusnī, Muḥammad
However, for many artists and intellectuals, Egypt symbolizes vulgarity and decadence. Many consider Cairene cinema and television, while still the regional leader in production output, to be coarse, melodramatic, even vulgar (see Abu-Lughod 2000, 2004; Armbrust 1996). In terms of music, the Egyptian star
Yet, a moment’s reflection raises the question: If these songs are so vulgar, why do they remain so popular around the Arab world and in Syria? Critics are quick to point out the general “debasement” (inḥiṭāṭ) of contemporary Arab culture as the context for the production and reception of these “vulgar” songs. The overwhelming popularity of this music among the growing youth population in Syria—as mentioned, upwards of 50 percent of the population is fifteen or under—suggests that criticism of popular culture reflects an Arnoldian bias against “low-brow” culture from the standpoint of “high-brow” culture. As I noticed on many occasions, many critics of these so-called vulgar songs listen privately to what they may excoriate publicly (see Ghuṣūb 1992), indicating that these “vulgar” songs are popular not only with Syria’s youth, but with a broader segment of society—including haughty cultural elites.
Adorno (1976: 69) writes that every genre bears the mark of the contradictions that exist in society as a whole. Contemporary Arab popular music bears clear marks of the many contradictions and ambiguities of contemporary Syrian society: its uncertain search for authenticity, the often banal admixture of old and new, local and foreign. Seen in the light of contemporary cinematic conventions, clothing styles, architecture, drama, and literature, which often borrow heavily from Western conventions even when cast in local idioms, it comes as no surprise that contemporary music too adopts freely from Western models. At the same time, much of the local pop music also manages to retain elements of local conventions, especially folk music and what in general terms is described as sha
Moreover, the notion that the pure Arab musical tradition has been sullied by the incursion of Western music and popular culture, a common sentiment among Syrian intellectuals, does not accurately describe the rise of the modern pop song and the dynamics of the interaction of Arab and Western musical cultures (see Frishkopf 2003). In light of these discourses of decline and corruption, it is instructive to read mid-twentieth-century criticism of artists who by today’s standards are considered exemplars of valued musical aesthetics but who in their own time were criticized widely as vulgar. A prime example is
For example, in a 1954 editorial entitled “The Cheap Songs” [al-aghānī al-rakhīṣa] that hints at
He goes on to excoriate what he terms love songs that have no connection with Arabic literature, especially poetry, and are little more than “unacceptable and unreasonable prattle” (al-Ḥuṣāmī 1965:1).17 Yet, fifty years later, many contemporary listeners consider these songs to represent “authentic” Arab music and “Oriental spirit”—especially when compared to what is heard on the air-waves today. The “prattle” of yesterday has become the cherished “heritage” of today.
Matters of taste aside, the centrality of Cairo (and to a lesser degree Beirut and the Arabian Gulf) for contemporary Syrian arts problematizes the commonly held assumption of the predominant influence of Western European and American culture on the Arab world. Moreover, while many of Syria’s prominent older artists studied at European academies, more-recent generations of Syrian artists, writers, and musicians (not to mention engineers, doctors, and architects) are more likely to be graduates of institutes and universities in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Moscow, Budapest, Sofia, Prague, Kiev, and Dresden have been as important to the younger generation of Syrian artists and intellectuals as Rome and Paris were to an older generation. Of course, few would pass up the opportunity to study in Paris, Rome, Berlin, Florence, and Madrid, and many prominent Syrian and other Arab artists in fact can be found in these cities today. However, these opportunities have been relatively scarce. Connections with Eastern Europe have been stronger because of military and economic cooperation between Syria and these countries since the late 1950s. For this reason, Eastern European conceptions of folklore, nationalism, and authenticity have had important influences on the visions of authentic culture of contemporary Syrian artists who studied at academies in Prague, Budapest, Bucharest, Warsaw, Moscow, and Sofia (see Rice 1993).18 New York and Los Angeles have drawn relatively few Syrian artists and intellectuals (though many doctors and engineers). For postcolonial Syrian artists and intellectuals, then, the international refers to a complex network of political, cultural, and intellectual centers ranging from the Levant and Arab world, to Eastern Europe, and South and East Asia. Western European cities, though they may figure prominently in rhetorics of the international, are for most Syrian artists of secondary importance, while New York and Los Angeles hardly figure at all, except as performance venues for singers.
Performance and the Performance of Authenticity
A commonplace in anthropology and performance studies is that aesthetic concepts and the discourses of society and self that they engage do not exist independent of their particular performative contexts; that is, they arise or emerge in the context of performance (Bauman 1977, 1986, 1992; Bauman and Briggs 1990; Hymes 1975; Kapchan 1995). Moreover, aesthetic concepts and discourses are themselves performative, that is, they participate in the constitution of the contexts and performance situations in which they emerge and do