Arabic Music...

… is on the rise. It is sufficient that anyone turns on his satellite receiver and start browsing. There are numerous channels from the Rotanas to Melody and MusicPlus, then Strike, and Nujoom, etc… Each has its own style, but the songs (video clips rather) don’t. They have one style only… CRAP
To start with, the female: male singer ratio is like 8:1 and the reason is very obvious: female singers are more seductive and pleasurable to watch (at least from an oriental masculine point of view). There is no more need for last names as there are numerous (known and unknown) female performers who use the first name only such as:
Yara, Dana, Rula, Haifa, Sabine, Rida, Najwa, Elissa, Dominique (unless the last name is included in this one already), Haneen, Gharam and so on. Some names have not been used yet like: Sabha, Fatma, Khadeejeh, and Nazeera…
Anyway, I am not going to talk about music because it varies, some are good and some are not. But to focus a little bit on the lyrics… we will never get anywhere beyond what has been created forty years ago. The same boring topics without any change are still being circulated. It is always about love or its absence. And there is always a problem (cheating, distance, jealousy, and blah-blah-blah). And as one American friend said once, there has to be a “Habibi” in the song. What is annoying is that lyricists call themselves poets!!! What poet would write a song named “Take that out of this: شيل ده من ده” and what is it that need to be taken out of what?? Or what poet would have the line “بص، بص، بص عليّا بص، بص بص بص” in a song???
Let’s talk about our great performers starting with males. The style now is to grow half a beard, and let a long hair and I assume that this will mean “sexy”. There has to be semi naked women in the clip otherwise the music wouldn’t sound good. One performer “Jad Choueiri” apparently thinks he is the Arabic Enrique, and in addition to singing he directs clips. Those by him have revolutionized a new level of degradation.
As far as female performers, voice is not a quality unless she is older than being able to produce one cup a minute of drooling per person. In order to be a successful singer the following is needed: a nose job, a cheek job, a lip job, a boob job (and probably a blow job, once too many, in the process of getting the first jobs). The success of a song (or rather a video clip) is proportional to the amount of skin (or meat) exposed, and to the level of seduction and flirtation. Examples are: mini skirts and tank tops, wet T-shirts, ass-go-round, boob-cleavage, bathtubs, flirting with anything that moves (like horses) or doesn’t (like yogurt ice cream cones, or cars).
The video clips are being made as short movies. Photography and occasionally directing are the best things about a clip usually. All clips are in widescreen format, and at the end something new is being done: they play the full credit of everyone from composers and directors to toilet cleaners (not that there is something wrong with that).
It is hard for me to imagine how low can they go in the future, but they have proved (especially the Lebanese) that they can always top themselves. If anyone has any prediction I will be more than happy to hear it.
PS: talking like this about the music and the clips doesn’t mean that I don’t watch them :o)