Tag: music

Heavy Metal Umm Kulthoum

Via AvantCaire via Fustat.

Pretty impressive heavy metal rendition of the classic Umm Kulthoum song “Enta Omri” considering this is an amateur recording of a live gig. The studio version could be quite polished, and the song lends itself quite well to melodic metal. They would have to shorten considerable to the ultimate original version, which lasts about an hour (but it’s an hour extraordinarily well-spent.)

Umm Kulthoum’s Enta Omri [61.2MB]

Homeland Hip-Hop

Had the great pleasure of seeing the Palestinian hip-hop group DAM live in Brooklyn last night (alongside the fantastic Rebel Diaz and many other talented artists). The show was a fund-raiser to send a delegation of Native American and Chicano youth activists to Palestine this summer; it was very interesting to me to hear the way in which US rappers from different ethnic backgrounds related their struggle against racism and oppression to that of the Palestinians.

What was even more interesting was just to hear the music. Listening to DAM was humbling of course–I understood about 1 word out of 50–but their website offers a great feature where you can listen to the songs in Arabic and read the lyrics in English. One show-stopper they did was to rap the Arabic alphabet–each letter got a few lines using only words that started with that letter– forwards and back. And they were just great performers–funny, gutsy, charismatic. They’re featured prominently on the documentary Sling Shot Hip-Hop, which everyone I talk to says is fantastic, and which has just been released on DVD (but I think its availability is still limited). I will be watching this film soon, hopefully, as several friends picked up copies at the show.

Jajouka

The National has an article about the Master Musicians of Jajouka, a village of Moroccan musicians who have been playing for hundreds of years and were “discovered” in the 1960s by Western musicians and beatniks (Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones kicked it all off when he recorded a CD of their music). The article does a very good job of discussing the way this Western interest has expressed itself and affected the group, and the way their music has been treated by Western producers–although I wish there had been more focus on the kind of music they play, its history and form (they say they were the “house band” of the royal house of Morocco for centuries). 

I heard the Master Musicians of Jajouka at a Moroccan music festival several summers ago, and then visited Jajouka to do a radio piece about them. Rather than try to describe their really entrancing music, I’ll just direct you to their website.

Continue reading Jajouka

Props

The Review is the cultural supplement of the Abu Dhabi daily The National. They’re only about two months old (maybe three, time flies) and I’ve been writing for them this summer. I still haven’t formed an opinion on the daily paper; I simply haven’t been reading it often enough. But I read The Review online yesterday and was impressed–I feel like it’s really coming together.

Youssef Rakha, formerly of Al Ahram Weekly, reviews Sonallah Ibrahim’s new novel. Rakha emphasizes the importance and originality of Ibrahim’s debut autobiographical novel تلك الرائحة (translated as “The Smell of It”) and gives what strikes me as perhaps too short shrift to later works such as “Zaat” and “Sharaf,” but he has his arguments, and he’s very enthusiastic about Ibrahim’s latest, a historical novel set during the French invasion of Egypt and entitled “The Turban and the Hat.” 

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, who used to write for the Daily Star and whose work I’ve been impressed with for years, writes about Palestinian conceptual artist Emily Jacir, whose latest work re-constructs and explores the assassination of Palestinian intellectual Wael Zuaiter in Rome in 1972; the work opens a discussion about the assassinations of many Palestinian artists, writers and intellectuals in that period. Wilson-Goldie also discusses previous works by Jacir, all of which show how relevant and thoughtful conceptual art can be.

Finally there’s a very nicely written piece by Suleiman Din about the homesick musical gatherings of Pakistani construction workers in Abu Dhabi.