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الأحد, نوفمبر 25, 2007 // 0 التعليقات // Arabic Digest // Category: Elissa , Haifa Wahbi , Haifa Wehbe , Nancy Ajram , Nawal Al Zoghbi //Can an army of Arabic pop stars and their canny boss, Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, stem the tide of Islamic extremism?
By Joseph Braude
"The first missile had barely been launched on South Lebanon," fumed music critic Iman Ibrahim in the online Arabic-language daily Elaph, "before most of the artists of Lebanon had packed their suitcases. They didn't forget to bring along their personal effects and jewelry when passing ... through Syria to whichever world capital they preferred, where they've gotten used to enjoying their private luxuries far away from the eyes of the camera." Among the first to skip town, wrote Ibrahim, was curvaceous Beirut beauty Haifa Wehbe, dubbed "the sexiest woman in the Middle East" by People magazine last spring—herself a native of the Shiite-dominated Lebanese south where Hezbollah enjoys the most support.
Behind the pundits' outrage lies the story of a revolution in Arab pop culture that started in Lebanon and has turned seductive young vocalists and dancing divas into influential public figures. In most Arab capitals recently, street protesters hoisted banners cheering Hezbollah and demanded that Arab elites adopt a similar stance. But Wehbe and other top-selling Arab pop stars don't answer to the Arab street. If they take orders from anyone, it's Al-Waleed bin Talal, the wily Saudi prince whose entertainment empire dominates Middle Eastern music and satellite television. A nephew of Saudi King Abdullah, the tall, wiry, mustachioed prince (whom Forbes called the fifth-richest man in the world) earned his fortune in the Saudi construction industry and once partnered with Michael Jackson to promote family values. He is also a major shareholder in Planet Hollywood and Euro Disney and made headlines last fall when his massive investment in News Corp stock protected Rupert Murdoch from a hostile takeover. Though surely buoyed throughout his career by family wealth, Al-Waleed is generally touted for having surpassed most Saudi princes in business acumen and creative energy. "Royals, in general, they earn their living by being royal," Saleh Al-Ghoul, an executive director for the prince's flagship Kingdom Holding Company, noted in Al-Waleed's authorized biography. "What made him different is that he earned his way."
Back in the mid-'90s, Prince Al-Waleed noticed that millions of Arabs were installing rooftop satellite dishes and tuning into American MTV, French soft porn, and the then-fledgling Al-Jazeera. If a homegrown, alternative news network like Al-Jazeera could take off, he reasoned, a similar venture might well succeed in pop culture. "There was a gap, there was an opening," the prince recalled in an interview with biographer Riz Khan. "Whenever I see an opening, I like to fill it."
It's one thing to sneak a satellite dish onto your roof, however, and quite another to ask a conservative Saudi girl to dance half-naked for the camera—even if you're a prince. So Al-Waleed took his idea and his checkbook to Lebanon, where a more risqué entertainment industry had been thriving for decades.
The music empire he built, Rotana Audio Visual Company, is like MTV, Atlantic Records, and Ticketmaster merged into one entity. It manages the careers of about 120 leading Arab vocalists, owns the rights to their songs, and produces their American-style music videos—known as "video clips" in Middle Eastern parlance. Prince Al-Waleed and Co. "looked at the video clips and the songs in the United States and the West," explains Rotana managing director Hazem Abdul Al, "and did the same with the Arab songs. They shoot it as a story. It has become a new thing here in the Middle East, and the people love to watch." The company operates the five biggest satellite channels on which Arabic music is broadcast, reportedly drawing tens of millions of viewers per day, and it also rules the major concert venues where singers perform, from the big summer festival in the Jordanian town of Jerash to the ancient Roman amphitheater in the Tunisian city of Carthage.
"His highness, he takes care of every small detail," Abdul Al says. "He watches everything. He writes reports about the things he likes, the things he dislikes.... Sometimes he watches a video clip and says, 'The name doesn't match the song. Who chose the name?'"
Video clips produced by Rotana have become more than just a lucrative business venture. In addition to offering viewers a taste of Western-style pop culture, they are a vehicle for self-expression of a sort that is truly revolutionary. While Haifa Wehbe sings and dances a slow flamenco in the rain wearing a slinky red dress, a steady stream of Arabic text—messages that viewers have paid to transmit via their mobile phones—crawls underneath the image like the stock exchange ticker tape on CNBC. Subscribers to the service can express their personal desires in a way that was unimaginable even five years ago. "People are sending in messages, saying, 'Hi, I'm 23, looking for a hot girl in Cairo,'" says Patricia Kubala, a Cairo-based graduate student from the University of California at Santa Barbara.
In a society in which sex and flirtation have long been relegated to the bedroom, Rotana and other music networks have given young people a risk-free outlet for self-expression. "That's a major component of the 'video clip' phenomenon that bothers and perplexes a lot of people," Kubala says. For the prince, who claims credit for innovating the concept, it's also good business. "My channel pays for itself with just these messages and advertising," he told his biographer. Tens of thousands of text messages scroll across the screen each week, according to a source at Rotana, in response to which a leading reactionary social critic in Egypt slammed the so-called "culture of the video clip" for broadcasting "a bias toward individuality—as if individual pleasure is the only purpose of life."
Supporters of Hezbollah and Hamas have alleged a conspiracy to corrupt Arab youth. "[Music television producers] want us to dance over the wounds of our people in Palestine and Iraq," another leading Islamist has been quoted as saying. In the Iraqi holy city of Karbala last year, a thousand people demonstrated against an alleged affront by Lebanese idol Nancy Ajram. A few months later, a right-wing music critic in Egypt reportedly threw juice in her face.
Despite these vigorous attacks, pop idols rival mosque preachers and politicians for the attention of Arab masses. Their fans, mostly in their teens and 20s, comprise one of the largest baby booms in human history. And what may be most disturbing to Arab hardliners is that Prince Al-Waleed's most popular vocalists, having won the hearts of Arab youth, have also begun to vocalize a progressive political agenda.
When millions of Lebanese gathered peacefully in downtown Beirut a year ago to demand that Syrian troops withdraw from Lebanon, Haifa's "Let Me Live" was played on the PA system. She told Arabic women's magazine Laha she had recorded the song deliberately to send a message, "because it discusses ... freedom, considered to be among the most basic of human rights." Lebanese diva Elissa allegedly pushed the matter further by calling on Syrian troops to withdraw. Her outspokenness provoked repeated attacks in the state-run Syrian press. After Al Qaeda bombers killed scores of Egyptians and Westerners in the Sinai resort town of Sharm el Sheikh in July 2005, Ajram announced her plan to hold a two-day charity concert on behalf of the victims. She called the move "a step against terror," decrying some people's apathy at the carnage. "We can't just sit in our homes," she lamented. The benefit concert never materialized—but over the ensuing months, Ajram toured hospitals in which bombing victims were being treated and reportedly donated proceeds from her concerts to their medical fees.
All these liberal pronouncements by Rotana artists in turn seem to affirm the tradition of progressive Arab politics Prince Al-Waleed grew up with. As a young man, his father, Prince Talal bin Abdul Aziz, called unsuccessfully for sweeping political reforms, declaring himself a socialist in the early '60s and briefly broadcasting anti-monarchist radio propaganda from his exile in Cairo. The elder prince eventually reconciled with Saudi leadership and returned to the kingdom, on condition that he refrain from all political activity. By way of Rotana, the young Prince Al-Waleed appears to have found an indirect way to channel his father's values through dozens of sexy singers.
Enter Hezbollah and its recent war with Israel. Over 2,000 bombs were dropped by Israeli warplanes on the Islamist-controlled Lebanese south as well as select targets throughout the country. Yet Rotana's extensive Beirut studio facilities in the mostly Christian neighborhood of Ashrafiya remained unscathed. "We have no problems whatsoever," general manager Abdul Al told Radar when reached in Cairo during the conflict. "Our Lebanese installation was always prepared for these things to happen at any moment. We have taken the necessary precautions."
There's no evidence that the Israelis see Rotana as especially friendly to their cause, but the fact is, most Rotana artists declined to profess support for Hezbollah fighters—and their silence spoke volumes.
Compare Prince Al-Waleed's 120-odd prime time starlets with other, less well-known Arab artists who haven't joined his lineup, and the contrast is striking. Independent Cairo performer Salah al-Sa'adni voiced praise for Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah at a rally in August: "Press on, O Hassan Nasrallah, press on!" Firdos Abd al-Hamid, another non-Rotana performer, hurled insults at Condoleezza Rice during her diplomatic visit to the Middle East. "Go have children in your own country, if you can even get married!" he cried.
By contrast, Rotana music queen Wehbe raised money for Lebanese families while in Egypt, where she had fled—but studiously refrained from praising the Hezbollah "resistance" during the three-week war. Iraqi heartthrob Kazem al-Saher, another client of the prince, kicked in $18,000 out of his own pocket in emergency relief for the country—but likewise declined to take a stand on the propriety of Hezbollah's actions. And despite Arab tabloid reports of sexy Lebanese singers' mass exodus from Lebanon, several of the most prominent Rotana faces remained in Beirut, in solidarity with their fellow Lebanese. They just didn't incite young men to join the battle. Witness sultry starlet Nawal al-Zoghbi, who, by visiting classrooms on daily goodwill missions, has focused her efforts on keeping kids in school despite the violence.
With the Hezbollah-Israeli war now in remission, Prince Al-Waleed's major performance venues have been hosting a series of fund-raising concerts to support the reconstruction of Lebanon. Among the lyrics sung at those concerts is a popular refrain by al-Zoghby:
"I do not want you to burn my life," she sings. "I want to live. I want to live."
In the context of rising Islamic extremism, which promotes an eagerness to die for a sacred cause, that's a pretty radical idea. As the late Al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi put it, "We have men who love death as you love life." It's nice to know they also have at least one prominent woman, with flowing auburn hair and sultry eyes, who's willing to lend her powerful voice to the opposite sentiment.
http://radaronline.com/features/2006/10/the_prince_of_pop.php
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