Line Mounzer takes obviously, how to say, an insider perspective, as she’s writing from Beirut. She describes the concert, the attempts of a group of syrian workers trying to attend it, and a serie of personal episodes happened later that night. Apart from the romanticized and extremely overall vocabulary, at first blush the article should stand as a critique on Sublime Frequencies practices – and this isn’t anything new – but at the end, the perspective is subverted, or better, it takes in consideration the reaction from an ‘arab’ point of view; I’ll quote only one of the latest paragraph, inviting to read the entire contribution:
“It’s not that Souleyman’s music isn’t catchy and danceable, because it is. And it’s not that he doesn’t have any charisma and stage presence required for a performer, because he does. It was more troubling that we’d [referred to lebanese audience] waited for him to be bought, and packaged, and resold to us by someone from outside before we bothered to notice him, to celebrate him”.
I am quietly astonished because just today I bought my copy of Omar Souleyman’s Highway to Hassake (Folk and Pop Sounds of Syria), I had the album on mp3 since its publication, but I wanted the real copy, maybe even prompted by last night dancing at a friend’s birthday, when everything seemed decreasing, everybody got crazy on Omar’s beats and lyrics.
The party was at an ethiopian bar in Milan, not such a crazy postcolonial city, but it’s interesting to see how the local community of this place got fun hearing arab words and music played by italian guests, “Oh! This is arab” said an eritrean guy… and we all shared the dancefloor.
Well, maybe this post may need more space, and even more thoughts, but for the moment I just wanted to take this opportunity to report about same experiences from different angles and positions of contemporary panorama.
