Sonic Affinities: The Middle East in the American Popular Music Imaginary, 1955-2014

by Meghan Drury

B.A. in Anthropology, May 2004, Scripps College

M.A. in Ethnomusicology, June 2006, UC Riverside

A dissertation submitted to

The Faculty of
The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences
of The George Washington University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

May 15, 2016

Melani McAlister
Associate Professor of American Studies and International Affairs

Gayle Wald
Professor of English and American Studies
The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University

certifies that Meghan Elizabeth Drury has passed the Final Examination for the degree

of Doctor of Philosophy as of March 7, 2016. This is the final and approved form of

the dissertation.

Sonic Affinities: The Middle East in the American Popular Music Imaginary, 1955-2014

Meghan Drury

Dissertation Research Committee:

Melani McAlister, Associate Professor of American Studies and International

Affairs, Dissertation Co-Director

Gayle Wald, Professor of English and American Studies, Dissertation Co-Director

Josh Kun, Professor of Communication and American Studies and Ethnicity,

University of Southern California, Committee Member

Antonio López, Associate Professor of English, Committee Member

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© Copyright 2016 by Meghan Drury.
All rights reserved

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This dissertation is dedicated to my mom, my Nana, and Auntie Pussy –

intelligent, resourceful women and enduring role models.

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 Acknowledgments

This dissertation is the product of a decade-long graduate school journey, which

began in the music department at UC Riverside. I owe a debt of gratitude to Deborah

Wong, René T.A. Lysloff, Jonathan Ritter, Leonora Saavedra, Byron Adams, and Griff

Rollefson for their support and encouragement of my work as a master’s student. I was

also fortunate enough to take a class at UCLA with Ali Jihad Racy, who taught me about

the intricacies of Arabic music with great warmth and patience. I am grateful to maestro

Nabil Azzam and MESTO for providing a community and extended family for me in Los

Angeles. This project was inspired in part by their mutual support. Nabil has been an

enthusiastic teacher and mentor over the past ten years, and he single-handedly facilitated

trips to Egypt, Oman, and Jordan. Special thanks to Mandy Fey Carota for being such a

generous friend and opening her home to me in LA. At UC Riverside, I benefited from

the camaraderie of Liz Macy, Marshall Howland, Genie Yoo, Colin Pearson, Donovan

Jones, Jacky Avila, Ryan Randall, Sharon Tohline, Helen Lovejoy, Erika Montenegro,

Mary Song, and most of all, Melissa Garcia. I owe a special thanks to Josh Kun for

keeping his promise to someday serve on my dissertation committee, and for his

relentless work ethic and Spotify playlists. The seeds of this project were kindled by two

incredible artists and human beings, Omar Chakaki (aka Omar Offendum) and Yassin

Alsalman (aka Narcy), and I want to thank them for their creative vitality and humor.

At George Washington, I was lucky enough to be introduced to Gayle Wald

through a seminar on Lorraine Hansberry, which she taught despite only having two

students registered. Gayle and Melani McAlister have both been incredible role models

as professors and advisors. They have showed me how to be firm yet genuine as a teacher

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and to intellectually engage with the world at large. Their brilliantly interdisciplinary

scholarship has been instrumental to my own work and their mentorship is invaluable. I

am grateful to have received guidance from James A Miller before his death in June

2015. Jim’s warmth, quick wit, and inexhaustible spirit made a lasting impression. Kip

Kosek, Phyllis Palmer, and Libby Anker were all generous and compelling instructors,

and were a pleasure to TA for. I owe thanks to Dina Khoury in the history department

and to Kavita Daiya in English for their instructive seminars. Additionally, the courses I

took with Andrew Zimmerman were exciting and intellectually demanding, and I

appreciate his ability to distill and interpret dense material. Also, sincere thanks to my

generous committee member Antonio López and outside reader William Youmans.

Many thanks to the wonderful community of scholars I met through the Journal

of Popular Music Studies and the EMP Pop Conference, including but not limited to: Eric

Weisbard, Ann Powers, Oliver Wang, Sarah Dougher, Jack Hamilton, Carl Wilson, Jody

Rosen, Gustavus Stadler, Barry Shank, Ali Colleen Neff, David Suisman, Patty Ahn,

Jason King, Jennifer Stoever, Regina N. Bradley, Kyra Gaunt, Emily Lordi, Alexandra

Apolloni, Karen Tongson, Daphne Brooks, José Muñoz, Jack Halberstam, Karl Hagstrom

Miller, Scott Poulson-Bryant, Charles Hughes, Elliott Powell, Aimee Meredith Cox,

Jessica Feldman, Paula Mejia, Zandria Robinson, Devon Maloney, Mike D’Errico, Roshy

Kheshti, K.T. Ewing, Christine Bacareza Balance, Shanté Paradigm Smalls, Miles Grier,

Kevin Fellezs, Ken Wissoker, and especially Charles McGovern, who has been a steady

source of encouragement and wisdom throughout this process. Also thanks to Alex

Corey, Brian T. Edwards, Eric Lott, and the other scholars I was lucky enough to meet at

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the Dartmouth Futures Institute, and to the radiant Naazneen Diwan, Arabic teacher and

scholar extraordinaire.

To my friends and colleagues in American Studies and English, I couldn’t have

done this without you. Elizabeth Pittman, Eid Mohamed, Amber Wiley, Matt Kohlstedt,

Clara Lewis, Joan Fragazy Troyano, David Kieran, Laura Cook Kenna, Kevin Strait,

Charity Fox, Emily Dufton, Thomas Dolan, Chelsey Faloona, Katie Kein, Sam Yates,

Carol Lautier-Woodley, Kim Pendleton, Mara Caelin, Pat Nugent, Maia Gil’Adi, and

Scott Larsen were all great sources of sanity, friendship, and laughter. Ramzi Fawaz and

Michael Horka pushed me to be a better person and scholar, and made life much more

fun in the process. Dora Danylevich was there for every fraught step of the revisions and

the job market, and I owe her for keeping me grounded and motivated with many emojis.

To my meat cohort, particularly hot dog Bess Matassa and kielbasa Katie Schank, thanks

for being yourselves and keeping it real.

My trusty writing group members Katie Schank and Shannon Davies Mancus

provided ceaseless moral support and read infinite drafts, and I honestly could not have

finished this project without our Google hangouts. I want to recognize Asuka

Madenokoji, Jawziya Zaman, and Chita Middleton for their loyal friendship over the past

fifteen years, and awesome Scrippsies Andrea Gutierrez, Emi Saito, Amy Tsurumi, Tenly

Chira, Katja Hildebrandt, Emily Jaksa, Lydia Paar, and Stefani Crabtree. Thank you,

Adam Chefitz, for helping me learn how to listen. Twitter friends were a lifeline at

various points in this process and I want to acknowledge the lovely people I met there,

especially Liana Silva, Lili Loofbourow, and Aaron Bady. The virtual company of others

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in Phinished.org’s Mojoville and the IRL support of Portland VPhD members were other

unexpected gifts at the end of the process.

My family has provided vital support. I owe thanks to my dad for talking through

ideas, to my sister for all of her love and encouragement over the years, and to my mom,

who saw me through the many ups and downs of the PhD process and showed

unconditional support. I couldn’t have done it without her or without Emma, my sweet

canine sister who lived long enough to see me finish the first draft. At 102, my Great

Auntie Pussy never ceases to astonish me with her intelligence and wit. I want to thank

the extended Drury family: my Uncles Noel and Mark for bestowing their music learnin’

on me, Aunt Patty, Aunt Helen, and Aunt Donna, and my awesome Drury cousins –

Jason, Amy, Aaron, Dorothy, Tom, Joe, Colin, and Eileen, and Michael, Danielle, and

Sophie. Finally, I owe thanks to Ian, who had faith in me from the very beginning of this

project, and to Christopher, who taught me to trust myself above all. Lastly, to Joshua

Colwell, who not only kept me going with invigorating discussions, Empire breaks, and a

steady stream of 1990s rap lyrics, but also pushed me to question my assumptions and

think about life in new ways. His love and partnership made the finishing process more

bearable and helped breathe new life into my intellectual and creative interests.

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 Abstract of Dissertation

Sonic Affinities: The Middle East in the American Popular Music Imaginary, 1955-2014

This dissertation considers the possibility of a transnational mode of listening based on

musical relationships between the U.S. and the Middle East. Through a set of four case

studies, the project argues that music has been a key site of cultural encounter between

the U.S. and Arab culture. The first chapter undertakes a study of postwar exotica music,

arguing for a nuanced understanding of music involving early Arab American

performers. The second chapter investigates the iconic jazz musician Sun Ra’s sonic

engagement with ancient Egypt, arguing that Ra’s music embodies an Afro-Orientalist

aesthetic. The third chapter analyzes the role of world music from the Middle East and

the politics of affiliation in the 1990s, and the final chapter performs a study of Arab

American hip hop as a counter-Orientalist form. This research contributes to a better

understanding of the complexities of U.S.-Middle East relationships by suggesting that

the categories of “Arab” and “American” are linked via a flexible sonic imaginary that

incorporates the two cultures. Secondly, it highlights the interplay between musical

production and ethnic and national identities, and finally, it rethinks critical examination

based on visual analysis, instead emphasizing sonic perception.

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 Table of Contents

Dedication ……………………………………………………………………………….iv

Acknowledgments …………………………………………………………………….....v

Abstract of Dissertation……………………………………………………………….....ix

List of Figures…………………………………………………………………………....xi

Introduction: Sonic Affinities …………………………………………………………....1

Chapter 1: Ethnic Exotica and Mock Orientalism in the American Sonic Imaginary…..26

Chapter 2: Sun Ra’s Egyptomania: Afro-Orientalism and Symbolic Sampling………...64

Chapter 3: Affiliatory Desires: Consuming the Middle East in World Music …….…....95

Chapter 4: Counter-orienting the War on Terror: Arab Hip Hop and Global Black
Consciousness…………………………………………………………………………..131

Conclusion: Music, Violence, and Social Transformation …………………………….174

References..……………………………………………………………………….…….179

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 List of Figures

Figure 1…………………………………………………………………………..............16

Figure 2…………………………………………………………………….…………… 50

Figure 2…………………………………………………………………………………. 59

Figure 3…………………………………………………………………………………. 64

Figure 4………………………………………………………………………………... 123

Figure 5…………………………………………………………………………………131

Figure 6………………………………………………………………………………....162

Figure 7………………………………………………………………………………... 166

Figure 8…………………………………………………………………………………168

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Introduction: Sonic Affinities

In 2010, the polarizing American pop singer Kesha (formerly Ke$ha) released the

song “Take it off,” sampling a melody often called the “Snake Charmer Song” or

“There’s a Place in France.” This tune is one of the most widely recognized melodies in

the U.S., chanted on school playgrounds and used in beginning piano books. As the

“snake charmer” title suggests, the tonality of the scale evokes a vaudevillian orientalist

fantasy one might see in a cartoon or a carnival sideshow. Kesha’s version appeared as

part of her debut album, Animal, which some critics disparaged for its heavy use of auto-

tune. The song narrates an escapist fantasy in the form of an all-night rave, “a place

downtown/ where the freaks all come around.” The “Snake Charmer” sample adds a

sexualized exotic component to the song. This well-known melody actually originated in

1895 with “The Streets of Cairo or the Little Country Maid,” inspired by the Little Cairo

section of the Chicago World’s Fair. This 1895 popular song was likely one of the first

attempts to “hear” the Middle East in American popular music, and the melody’s

appearance in a 2010 pop song signals the long scope of cultural memory. Though few of

Kesha’s listeners were likely aware its origins, the melody still bears deeply entrenched

orientalist associations.

This example encapsulates the importance of sound in bringing to light the

complexities of American engagements with Arab culture over the past century.

Additionally, it points to the importance of a collective social imaginary in catalyzing

these sonic encounters. It is through embedded associations that sounds become

meaningful. Scholars in a variety of fields, including history, politics, and literature, have

addressed the topics of American engagement with the Arab world and U.S. global

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power, but few have argued for the relevance of both sound and music in narrating

American relationships with Arabness. My own intervention is to argue that sound, and

music specifically, has provided an embodied and dynamic means of mapping and

engaging with Arab culture and identity.

Not only have portrayals of the Middle East provided inspiration for musical

production, but they have allowed people of multiple backgrounds to locate and reinvent

themselves geographically and politically. As Barry Shank astutely contends, “…music is

one of the central cultural processes through which the abstract concept of the polis

comes into bodily experience...the political force of music derives from its capacity to

combine relations of difference into experiences of beauty.”1 In other words, musical

aesthetics can have a real political effect in the sense that what makes music beautiful is

the way that its interlocking pieces fit together, not unlike a social or political

community. As Shank suggests, sonic and musical occurrences facilitate distinctly

tangible encounters with difference.

This dissertation argues that sound is a vehicle for social imaginaries and

affiliations, and it has been one of the critical ways that concepts of “Arabness,” or

interpretations of Arab culture and identity, have been mapped in American culture.2 The

sounds that have come to symbolize Arabness have origins both inside and outside Arab

communities, and they form what I call “sonic Arabness,” revealing that Americans have

been continually invested in a project of reimagining what Arab culture looks and sounds

1
Barry Shank, The Political Force of Musical Beauty, Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2014, p. 16.
2
While I primarily focus on musical performances, I am committed to thinking about
music as part of the wider category of sound, which opens up new approaches. In the
particular context of Arab culture, it is worthwhile to note the significance of the call to
prayer in the Muslim world.

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like, and how the Middle East as a whole should be understood in relationship to the U.S.

As Shank writes, “The affective power of musico-cultural figures can change the

relationship of the ethos to the demos, shifting the relations of those who are legitimately

included inside the political community.”3 Therefore, music helps determine the capacity

of the political sphere and who is recognized in it.

The four case studies I address demonstrate the role of music in negotiating

representations of Arabness and Arab American ethnic identity in the 20th and 21st

centuries, and in offering a map to navigate the terrain of difference and identification.

The cases I examine challenge traditional European orientalism while introducing four

new sonic and cultural configurations: mock orientalism, Afro-orientalism, affiliatory

desires, and global black consciousness. Each of the examples I analyze reveals a

recurring theme of sonic affiliation, worth careful examination because they illustrate

ways that the categories “Arab” and “American” have consistently overlapped and

exceeded ethnic and national boundaries. In light of the “clash of civilizations” narrative

regarding Arab/American encounters, instances of sonic affiliation are especially

important.4 Moreover, sound rarely operates independently, and these sonic texts

frequently work in conjunction with visual media. Just as visual art and advertisements

have made orientalist representations of Arab culture discernible in material ways, music

and sound make these interpretations sonically present.

3
Shank, The Political Force of Musical Beauty, p. 16
4
Samuel Huntington theorized in 1993 that cultural and religious differences would
cause a “Clash of Civilizations” in the post-Cold War global climate. Bernard Lewis had
previously used the phrase in a 1990 Atlantic Monthly article entitled “The Roots of
Muslim Rage.”

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 Since the traumatic events of September 11, 2001, there has been a heightened

focus on the Arab world as a source of extremism and violence. Media accounts, as well

as political discourse, have raised concerns about terrorism being a problem endemic to

the Middle East and influencing the ideology of Americans susceptible to violent

rhetoric. Anxiety about the possibility of another attack in the U.S. fueled the “War on

Terror” and generated an atmosphere of surveillance whereby Muslims and Arabs, both

domestically and internationally, were considered a perpetual threat.5 The American

popular obsession with the Arab world, and more particularly the danger associated with

Islamist extremism, emphasizes a version of history with 9/11 as the origin point. In fact,

the story of US encounters with the Middle East is highly complex and reaches back

much further.

My motivating inquiry for this dissertation is to ask what the recent history of

Arab-American relationships sounds like, and how those sounds can shed light on the

variety of ways the US has related to the Arab world over the past sixty years. As

Alexandra Vazquez has suggested, listening offers insight into otherwise indecipherable

realms: “Listening in detail is a mode of engaging things that are bigger than ourselves. It

offers alternative approaches to the too-muchness of events.”6 Thus, rather than

chronicling the full history of these sonic encounters, I seek to examine cases that typify

cultural and political moments and to emphasize unexpected ways that Americans have

sought identification with a real or imagined Middle East.

While Edward Said’s formative theory of orientalism remains important to

5
Evelyn Alsultany, “Selling American Diversity and Muslim American Identity through
Nonprofit Advertising Post 9/11,” American Quarterly, Vol 59 (3): 2007: 593-622.
6 Alexandra Vazquez, Listening in Detail: Performances of Cuban Music, Durham, NC:

Duke University Press, 2013, p. 27.

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understanding any Western engagement with Arab culture, for the purposes of this

project, I argue that American sonic engagements must also be understood via Josh Kun’s

notion of the “audio racial imagination,” which Kun defines as “…the extent to which

meanings and ideas about race, racial identity, and racialization within the U.S. have been

generated, developed, and experienced at the level of sound and music.”7 Orientalism

implies a specific formulation based on European colonialism, which offers a foundation

for thinking about the power structures enacted in Western representations of a generic

Orient. The audio racial imagination, however, refers to sound-based material and

provides a broader framework for analyzing sound and representation. Moreover, the

audio racial imagination is key to the Arab/American sonic imaginary since race and

racial identity have always informed the way white Americans have listened to sounds

associated with Arab culture. As in Kesha’s song “Take it Off,” sonic Arabness has been

consistently associated with the performance of female sexuality. For Arab Americans,

sounds have been an important part of the ongoing project of community building and the

development of ethnic identity.

Though strands of my methodology are drawn from the disciplines of musicology

and ethnomusicology, I locate my project in the relatively new field of sound studies

because of its commitment to thinking about sound in interdisciplinary ways. By

broadening the scope of study beyond music alone, sound studies brings fresh

perspectives to the consideration of sound in all of its forms. Thinking about sound as

vibration and movement widens the horizon of what is possible both for approaches and

objects of study. More specifically, this allows me to ask how sounds have become

7
Josh Kun, Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America, Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2005, p. 16.

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associated with “Arabness” in the U.S. and what meanings have resulted. As Jonathan

Sterne writes, “Sound studies’ challenge is to think across sounds, to consider sonic

phenomena in relationship to one another—as types of sonic phenomena rather than

things-in-themselves—whether they be music, voices, listening, media, buildings,

performances or another path into sonic life.”8 Rather than limiting the study of music to

the analysis of the music itself or viewing it as akin to literary texts, sound studies allows

for a multi-pronged approach. While the main sources I examine are musical, I maintain

an interest in thinking about music as one sonic expression among many.

One of the major contributions of sound studies is the prioritizing of sound and

music as both social and embodied practices. Sound’s power is located in the social or

sonic imaginary, but also in the body of the performer and listener. As Gayle Wald

contends, the notion of “vibrations” is one way of mapping sound’s affective potential,

especially in the instance of African American music. Music as vibration provides a

theorization of the way that it impacts those who experience it, and for the connection

that it can create between artists and audiences in public spaces.9 Wald has theorized the

“affective compact,” a relationship between the performer and listener or viewer that

creates a sense of community. Specifically, she contends that during the 1970s, the TV

show Soul produced an inclusive affective compact with its mostly African American

8
Jonathan Sterne, ed. The Sound Studies Reader, New York: Routledge, 2012, p. 3.
9
Gayle Wald, “Soul Vibrations: Black Music and Black Freedom in Sound and Space,”
in Josh Kun and Kara Keeling, eds. Sound Clash: Listening to American Studies,
Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012.

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viewers informed by the black radical politics of the moment.10 The examples I examine

in the proceeding chapters all revolve around a guiding impulse toward affiliation.

My work also draws on recent scholarship in sound studies and popular music

studies by Jennifer Stoever, who developed a theory of the “sonic color line,” or what she

calls the “Mutually constitutive relationship between sound, listening, and race.”11

According to Stoever, sound is a discourse that is culturally constructed and historically

contingent. She argues, “The sonic color line forms a dominant sonic protocol that

attempts to contain the sound of ‘Others’ and silence alternative listening practices as

aberrant and dangerous, even inhuman.” Stoever refers to the way that sounds linked to

African American and Puerto Rican bodies in urban spaces are heard and categorized as

“noise” and interpreted as polluting public space, and I look to this theory of sound and

race to consider ways that ideas about Arabness have been negotiated through sonic

representations.

Part of what makes sound uniquely important to the study of American

perspectives on Arabness is its affective power. Tracing the affective reverberations of

musical performances allows for unanticipated identifications. Any investigation of

popular music assumes a generalized audience, but my sources have largely gone

unexamined by scholars of music and identity. Although one could write an account of

dominant musical employments of Arab sounds, in this project I am most interested in

peripheral instances that bring to light what I call “sonic affinities.” This means that

while some of the primary sources I examine were relatively successful among specific

10
Gayle Wald, It’s Been Beautiful: Soul! and Black Power Television, Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2015.
11
Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman, “Splicing the Sonic Color Line: Tony Schwartz Remixes
Postwar Nueva York,” Social Text, Spring 2010 (28): 59-85.

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audiences, few of them reached wide mainstream appeal. It is the associations embedded

in sonic imaginaries and the performative implications that are my main focus. These

sonic imaginaries and performances are perpetually bound up with political forces,

however, and these are the intricacies that I seek to untangle. In a series of diverse

contexts, I demonstrate that sonic identifications often produce counter-hegemonic

tendencies.

My project entails locating the Middle East in the American sonic imaginary, the

realm in which meanings become attached to sounds. The sonic imaginary is linked to

what Charles Taylor has called the “social imaginary,” a framework that undergirds all

societal institutions and makes particular practices possible. As Taylor defines it, the

social imaginary is “the ways that people imagine their social existence, how they fit

together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations

that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these

expectations.”12 Therefore, the social imaginary does not simply exist at the level of

theory, but it facilitates real life behaviors. Taylor lays out the economy, the public

sphere, and self-governance as the three main categories of the modern Western social

imaginary. Adding the sonic realm to the social imaginary would mean thinking of sound

as allowing for political and social practices.

The complexities of US-Middle East encounters have been thoroughly mapped in

Melani McAlister’s book Epic Encounters, which charts the cultural history of American

engagement with the Middle East as a region and as a concept. McAlister identifies four

main categories that explain U.S. concern with the region since World War II: military

12
Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2003, p. 23.

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and strategic interests, religious attachment, support for Israel, and oil. She argues that

cultural products such as biblical epics and the King Tut show both reflected and

influenced public opinion on U.S. foreign policy. As she claims, “The ‘domestic’ politics

of race and gender have been central to U.S. representations of the Middle East, and

representations of the Middle East have been fully implicated in the nationalized

formations of racial and gender identities.”13 McAlister’s study proposes several major

critiques of Edward Said’s project and ways that post-World War II American

representations of the Middle East worked differently than in Said’s formulation. These

differences lead to her claim that post-World War II American representations are post-

orientalist, meaning that they no longer adhere to Said’s precise definition of them as

feminine, binary, and citational.

Orientalism, as Said originally theorized it, divided “East” from “West” and

“them” vs. “us” in a simplistic and binary manner. The “Orient” was used to refer to a

wide range of geographical locations, from East Asia to the Middle East. For Said,

orientalism also relied on gendered associations that characterized the East as feminine

and West as masculine. Orientalist cultural products, including literature and visual art,

reproduced ideological views that maintained European colonialism. These objects were

citational in the sense that they were inspired by previous representations and were rarely

concerned with authenticity. McAlister contends that American post-1945 representations

of the Middle East often don't line up exactly with these markers, firstly because the

unified “us” breaks down with the American emphasis on multiculturalism and the

complexity of domestic race relations, and secondly because the logic of gender doesn’t

13
Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle
East Since 1945, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001, p. 271.

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necessarily align. The sources I examine fit into the category of “post-orientalism,” and I

argue that they build on this concept through engagements with sonic performance.

While orientalism in popular music is largely an unexplored topic, there is a

relatively large body of literature about exoticism in Western Art Music. Much of this

scholarship has applied Edward Said’s concept of orientalism to European classical

music from the 17th century to the 20th centuries, covering both opera and instrumental

music. Ralph P. Locke, for example, catalogued cases of exoticism in hundreds of

compositions in his book Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections. Locke argues that

rather than focusing solely on the sonic elements of musical exoticism, scholars should

also take into account the extra-musical features of the composition. 14 Said himself

analyzed Verdi’s Aida as an example of orientalist opera in his 1993 book Culture and

Imperialism, and he criticized the field of musicology as a whole in Musical Elaborations

for failing to take seriously the importance of sociopolitical context. Perhaps somewhat in

response to this critique, Timothy D. Taylor structured his book Beyond Exoticism:

Western Music and the World around the sub-categories of colonialism, imperialism and

globalization. As a scholar who traverses the fields of musicology and ethnomusicology,

Taylor takes a broader perspective on exoticism than traditional musicologists.15

The most useful information to come out of research on orientalism in European

Art Music in connection to my own project is the long precedent for musically

identifying an Arab exotic. Hearing the Middle East is not a new phenomenon, and in

14
When Richard Strauss’s opera Salomé premiered in New York in 1907, it caused a
scandal. Though the production was shut down shortly after it opened, it produced a
cultural fascination. The story includes a “dance of the seven veils” and a scene where
Salome kisses the lips of the beheaded John the Baptist.
15
For example, Taylor covers enlightenment-era opera as well as world music in the 20th
century.

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fact there have been certain sounds associated with Arabness in the West for centuries.

The concept of “aural orientalism” has been described in detail as it connects to the genre

of European art music. There are fundamental differences in the exoticism displayed in

Western Art Music, by and large a product of elite European culture, and American

popular music, which is consumed much more broadly. As performances, sounds carry

complex meanings that rely on past references for their significance to be conveyed to the

audience. Performance theorists such as Daphne Brooks, Joseph Roach and Diana Taylor

contend that performances leave lasting residue. It is in the careful consideration of

performances, or what Alexandra Vazquez has termed “listening in detail,” that the

haunting or residue emerges. Sounds, like theater performances, are fleeting, but they

leave behind traces of themselves, whether in recorded form or in collective memory.

I begin my study in the 1950s because this was when Arab Americans began to

play a significant role in musical representations of Arabness. Not only did Arab

Americans begin to play in nightclubs during this era, but they were featured on

recordings that were marketed to the public at large rather than to specific ethnic

communities. In the early decades of the 20th century there were many small record labels

releasing material that was meant for immigrant audiences eager to hear music from

home.16 A number of Tin Pan alley-inspired songs took up Middle East-related themes

and humorously engaged with the American fascination with the “Near East” or the

“Orient” inherited from 19th century European orientalism. Thus, prior to the 1950s,

recordings and performances by Arab Americans were created largely for an Arabic-

speaking audience, while orientalist popular songs were geared toward the white

16
Ethnic Recordings in America: A Neglected Heritage, American Folklife Center,
Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1982.

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mainstream. These two strands of musical development came together beginning in the

1950s with exotica records, and it is the “inside” and “outside” perspectives of sonic

Arabness that I am interested in throughout this dissertation. I argue that the complexity

of these interrelated musical forms points to a series of affinities or identifications with

Arab culture. Furthermore, the four cases I undertake in this project permit examinations

of several distinct political and historical moments, including post-war ethnic

assimilation, Black Nationalism, multiculturalism, and post-9/11 xenophobia.

It is also worth noting that after World War II, the U.S. began to take an active

economic and military interest in the Middle East and the region became part of broader

Cold War power struggles. In the 1950s U.S. leaders saw the Arab world, and specifically

Egypt, as a potential vehicle for Cold War containment. Gamal Abdel Nasser sought to

mobilize Arab nationalism and to minimize Western influence and British imperial

power, while Eisenhower hoped to assert American influence. This relationship reached a

breaking point over the nationalization of the Suez Canal in 1956, which set the stage for

increasingly antagonistic diplomatic relations over the second half of the 20th century.

Although my main focus is not on international politics and diplomatic history, it is worth

noting that American engagement coincides with my own investigations.

Sonic Sensibilities: The Middle East in American Popular Culture

To understand the sonic genealogy of the Middle East in American popular

music, it is worthwhile to return to the Chicago World’s Fair and Columbian Exposition

of 1893. While dancers from the Arab world were present at the 1876 Centennial

Exposition in Philadelphia, it wasn’t until 1893 that the style known as “belly dance”

12
became widely recognized.17 Reactions to these early performances suggest that both the

dance and the accompanying music were widely judged to be strange and indecent,

setting the foundation for subsequent interpretations of sonic Arabness. Additionally, the

1893 World’s Fair marks the first known instance when Arab musical performance was

recorded in the U.S. The Columbian Exposition introduced the American public to

numerous foreign cultures in the form of performances and exhibitions, situating them as

sites of amusement and consumption on the Midway Plaisance. As scholars have noted,

the architecture of the “white city” was designed to promote the sense that the Western

world was the pinnacle of civilization. Visitors were encouraged to view the midway, in

contrast, as a set of carnivalesque novelties. One observer called the midway a “sliding

scale of humanity,” meaning that cultural and racial groups were imagined to inhabit a

hierarchy.18 This framework strengthened the belief common to colonial powers at the

time that non-Western cultures were both primitive and inferior.

The controversial and wildly popular performances in the Algerian Village, Cairo

Street, Turkish Village, and Persian Palace drew on an existing 19th century orientalist

fascination with the “Near East,” broadly conceived as a place of sheikhs, harems, and

oases. Sol Bloom, the creator and manager of the Algerian Village, coined the term

“belly dance,” which he translated from the French term for the dance, danse du ventre.

Bloom initiated the plan for the production after visiting the French Exposition

17
Charles A. Kennedy, “When Cairo Met Main Street: Little Egypt, Salome Dancers, and
the World’s Fairs of 1893 and 1904,” In Michael Saffle, ed. Music and Culture in
America: 1861-1918, New York: Routledge, 1998. p. 271.
18
Donna Carlton, Searching for Little Egypt, Bloomington, IN: Int’l Dance Discovery,
1995.

13
Universelle in 1889 where there was a replication of an Algerian Village.19 The French

occupation of North Africa apparently sparked an interest in producing a simulated

cultural experience for French subjects. French orientalism, as Said argued, served to

reinforce the colonial enterprise through a discourse of representation.

At the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, French colonial preoccupations were

translated to an American context when entrepreneur Sol Bloom obtained the rights to

bring the performers from the Exposition Universelle. Not only did the French version

inspire the American show in Chicago, but Bloom found a way to reproduce it nearly

identically by bringing the same dancers to the U.S. Though Americans were not directly

connected to the colonial project in North Africa, the constellation of orientalist symbols

they witnessed had already become associated with Arab culture through a European

lens. Since these symbols were a step removed from their original context, they took on

new meanings. For Americans, the sights and sounds of the Columbian World’s Fair

“Near East” performances were doubly exotic, linked to both France and North Africa.20

Belly dance was policed according to the laws of Victorian morality. Detractors

were outspoken about its indecency, and the practice was later outlawed in several cities.

Critics positioned belly dance outside the bounds of white normative femininity,

regarding dancers with both curiosity and distaste. Similarly, reactions to the

accompanying music tended to describe it as unsettling and incoherent. As Amira

Jarmakani has claimed, much of the concern stemmed from anxiety about the excesses of

female sexuality: “[the belly dancer] represented both a notion of the female body as

19
Erik Larsen, Devil in the White City, New York: Vintage Books, 2004, p. 133.
20
See Brian T. Edwards, Morocco Bound: Disorienting America’s Maghreb, from
Casablanca to the Marrakech Express, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.

14
dangerous, tempting, lascivious power, and a notion of the female body as a symbol for

the creative power of life and human origins.”21 The association of belly dance

performance with exotic femininity made it both incendiary and potentially profitable. 22

As Bloom explained in his autobiography, “When the public learned that the literal

translation was ‘belly dance,’ they delightedly concluded that it must be salacious and

immoral. The crowds poured in. I had a gold mine.”23

Bloom illustrated the link between belly dance and its sonic accompaniment at

one of the early performances. As the story goes, while introducing the dancers at a

private Chicago Press Club show, he discovered that the pianist hired for the event did

not know any suitable music. Bloom himself sat down at the piano and improvised the

melody that would become known as the “snake charmer dance.” Whether or not this is

accurate, it has become the popular mythology of the tune.24 As Bloom did not copyright

the melody, it was available for interpretation by future composers and songwriters. The

son of Jewish immigrants from Poland, Bloom later went on to become a member of the

House of Representatives in New York. Though his career path led him away from the

arts, Bloom’s entrepreneurial interest in Oriental dance helped create a long-lasting belly

dance craze, as well as a melody that would come to signify Arabness for many decades

21
Amira Jarmakani, Imagining Arab Womanhood: The Cultural Mythology of Veils,
Harems, and Belly Dancers in the U.S., London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, p. 126
22
Along with the name “belly dance” the style introduced at the 1893 World’s Fair also
became called the “hootchy coochy,” which carried sexual connotations and also was a
term used in minstrel shows.
23
Sol Bloom, The Autobiography of Sol Bloom, New York: G.P. Putnam & Sons, 1948,
p. 135.
24
Some have speculated that Bloom actually appropriated the tune from an Algerian
melody called “Kradoutja” that had been popular in France since the 1600s.

15
to come. He was also the first of many Jewish Americans who nurtured Arab cultural

expression.25

In 1895, songwriter James Thornton published the “snake charmer melody” in a

song titled “The Streets of Cairo or the Poor Little Country Maid.” His wife then helped

popularize the tune: “When Thornton’s wife, Bonnie Thornton, sang the song in

Figure 1: Bonnie Thornton, “The Streets of Cairo or the Poor Little Country Maid”

vaudeville, presumably in the ‘rube’ costume in which she is pictured on the sheet music

cover (fig. 1), she probably enlivened her performance with a parody of cooch dancing,

25
Lacking firsthand accounts about the significance of Jewish involvement, it is difficult
to speculate about the reasons for this overlap between Arab artists and Jewish managers.
The Sephardic background of some Jewish Americans likely provided them with a
familiarity with Middle Eastern culture.

16
her inappropriate costume adding to the humor.”26 The tongue-in-cheek lyrics recount a

young girl’s lost innocence as she arrives in the big city and eventually resorts to posing

“in abbreviated clothes.” Her initial virtue is described in the chorus: “She never saw the

streets of Cairo/ On the Midway she had never strayed/ She never saw the kutchy kutchy/

Poor little country maid.” Despite never “straying” on the Midway, she is corrupted by

the nightlife and the bawdy lyrics suggest that she infects the “dudes who were in a

flurry” with a sexually transmitted disease.

Though humorous, “The Streets of Cairo” unites an exotic-sounding melody with

female promiscuity, while indicating that the young country maid’s sexuality is both an

embarrassment and a potential threat. Though her ethnicity is never named, the melody

and the chorus’s reference to the “kutchy kutchy” dance links her to the racialized and

corrupting performance of belly dance. The ultimate message is that men should beware

of seemingly innocent young maids, lest they fall victim to their dangerous sexual habits.

After the belly dance craze caught on, “The Streets of Cairo” became the first in a series

of popular songs depicting the Oriental East. These songs, mostly written in the Tin Pan

Alley style with love-related lyrics, included titles such as “Desert Dreams,” “Oriental

Moon,” and “Lady of the Nile,” and their popularity lasted into the 1930s.27

Likewise, the 1921 Rudolph Valentino film The Sheik inspired a wave of musical

responses, including the song “The Sheik of Araby,” which was a Tin Pan Alley hit and

subsequently became a jazz standard covered by a wide range of artists including Duke

Ellington, Django Reinhardt, and The Beatles. Critics speculate that the song became so

26
Larry Hamberlin, Tin Pan Opera: Operatic Novelty Songs in the Ragtime Era, Oxford,
UK: Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 110.
27
Other popular song titles include “Eastern Dreams,” “Sinbad,” and “Turkish Delight.”

17
popular among southern jazz artists because of a local connection to the Louisiana town

of Arabi, a suburb of New Orleans known for legal gambling. “The Sheik of Araby”

helped lengthen the cultural memory of the Valentino film and at the same time

formulated new meanings. Locating “the sheik” in Louisiana brought a story about a

distant place much closer to home, and its performance by African American artists

complicated the racial formulation of the sheik in the film.28

An excerpt from “The Sheik of Araby” also appears in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925

novel The Great Gatsby, when the narrator overhears a group of girls in Central Park

singing the song:

“I’m the Sheik of Araby

Your love belongs to me.
At night when you are asleep
Into your tent I will creep”29

In the novel, the lyrics allude to Gatsby’s concealed love for Daisy, but it also illustrates

the massive popularity of both the song and the film in the 1920s. Moreover, the Beatles’

cover in the 1960s demonstrates the song’s remarkable staying power. “The Sheik of

Araby” is a quintessential example of an Americanized sonic representation. Its particular

appeal in Louisiana and status as a jazz standard are indicative of music’s ability to shift

and adapt to new circumstances.

Beyond the category of Tin Pan Alley songs featuring Oriental themes, in the first

decades of the 20th century there was also a booming ethnic recording industry, which

28 The Sheik depicts the story of Diana, a British noblewoman who travels alone to North
Africa and is kidnapped by a handsome sheikh. Though she initially resists his advances,
she eventually succumbs and falls in love. The question of cross-racial romance is
answered when Diana discovers that the sheik is actually of British and Spanish ancestry.
The North African tribe adopted him after his parents died during an excursion in the
desert.
29
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, New York: Scribner, 1925.

18
included Arab and Arab American recordings. These albums were produced by small

record labels both in the U.S. and abroad, and distributed by Arab-owned companies such

as Rashid Music Co. in Brooklyn. These labels included Al Chark, Baidaphon, and

Arabphon. Ethnic-based recording niches were widespread in the 1920s and 1930s,

marketed largely to immigrants from Eastern Europe and Latin America. For Arabs

living in diaspora, the records created a cultural link to the homeland in the form of

sound. Unlike Tin Pan Alley songs about the Oriental East, the Arab music distributed by

ethnic labels was created by and for Arabs and Arab Americans. The marketing niches of

these two genres point to the relative cultural separation between Arab Americans and the

wider American public during the early-20th century.30

Some belly dance performances, including those at the Midway, featured live

musical accompaniment. Observers often described them as strange and non-musical.

One writer recounted a performance in New York with the following description: “Four

alleged musicians came on the rickety stage of the dingy little theatre, and for fifteen

minutes gave what was intended for music, because each of the players had a musical

instrument.”31 This critic’s dismissive tone reveals a high degree of skepticism about the

sounds being performed and goes so far to suggest that they did not resemble music.

Another journalist, Kate Jordan, described a danse du ventre performance as “queer” and

“ugly” in an account of a show in Brooklyn before the dance was officially banned in

New York City.

30
One of the major disconnects was linguistic, as most Arab labels produced all-Arabic
albums. This extended to a generational divide, as not all second-generation Arab
Americans learned Arabic from their parents.
31
Police and Law Defied: The Midway Dance Stopped, but Only for a While.” New York
Times, December 5, 1893.

19
 Jordan writes that the performance gives the viewer a glimpse into “something

unusual—something belonging to the turquoise sky of Egypt and Algeria—something

quite out of touch with the cable cars, the telephone and the commercial atmosphere of

New York.”32 The reference to the “turquoise sky of Egypt and Algeria” invites readers

to imagine that belly dance is a virtual means of experiencing North Africa. Though

denouncing the practice as “ugly,” her provocative account is also designed to elicit

curiosity: “The dancer commences to sway her body in a dreamy way, while a turbaned

Turk in the background strikes a throbbing, whirring monotone from a one stringed

instrument.”33 Jordan’s description of the sound as “a throbbing and whirring monotone”

is both embodied and eroticized; her choice of adjectives links the sonic and sensory

aspects of the performance. The music provides another layer of stimulation, heightening

the illicitness of the experience and effectively combining the allure of the “exotic” and

“erotic.”

The eroticism that was eventually associated with both the sonic and visual

aspects of belly dance was deemed unfit for polite society. Bertha Palmer, a prominent

member of Chicago society and the head of the Board of Lady Managers for the World’s

Fair took offense to a New York Times column identifying her as an audience member at

a Coney Island performance. A subsequent column corrected this information, explaining

that Palmer had not in fact attended the performances as was previously reported, thereby

defending her moral standing. As such accounts indicate, some early American responses

to belly dance reinforced the European orientalist model by exoticizing nonwhite

32
Kate Jordan, “The Danse du Ventre,” Yenowine’s Illustrated News, Milwaukee, WI:
Dec 30, 1893, p. 4
33
Ibid

20
femininity, and they also suggested that the accompanying sounds and music could be a

source of moral contamination.

Among the major recorded documents from the 1893 World’s Fair is a collection

of sound recordings made by Benjamin Ives Gilman, which are believed to be some of

the first ethnographic recordings ever made. Most scholarly examinations of the

performances have focused on the dance itself rather than the significance of music.

Benjamin Ives Gilman’s recordings are a unique window into what the accompanying

music actually sounded like. The majority of recordings are of Javanese, Samoan, and

Native American music. Among the nine “Turkish” recordings are three Arabic-language

songs from Ottoman Syria, as well as several instrumental tracks.34 Gilman identified the

instruments as an “oriental lute,” “oriental harp,” “small drum,” and “tambourine.”35 The

recordings themselves are somewhat hard to hear due to surface noise, and the

instruments are more audible than the vocalists. However, it is clear that several of the

songs are in Arabic and the others are in Turkish, reflecting the easy conflation of regions

in the Ottoman Empire at this particular moment. The tracks are in multiple scales with

various degrees of semi-tone employment, signaling that the musicians were well versed

in Arabic music.

Not only are Gilman’s recordings a document of the World’s Fair, but they offer

insight into early sound recording. Like many of his contemporaries, including John

Lomax, Gilman took on sound recording as a duty to humanity, fearing that indigenous

musics would transform and become extinct with increasing cross-cultural contact.

34
Benjamin Ives Gilman Recordings, Library of Congress, No. 75-83.
35
American Folklife Center, The Federal Cylinder Project: A Guide to Field Cylinder
Collections in Federal Agencies, Vol 8, Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1984.

21
Though trained as a psychiatrist rather than an anthropologist, Gilman promoted the

relativist view that all music should be taken seriously and regarded as artistic

production:

It is our own ears that are oftenest at fault when we hear in exotic music only a
strident monotony or a dismal uproar to be avoided and forgotten. To most non-
Europeans their music is as passionate and sacred as ours to us and among many
it is an equally elaborate and all-pervading art.36

Gilman also professed fears about European influence and the fact that “exotic music is

already dying on the ears of its discoverers.”37 There were several opposing views on

“exotic” music at this late-19th century moment. The popular view suggested that the

sounds were both intriguing and abrasive, while the “scientific” view took a relativist

approach and sought to educate the public about the validity and of music from non-

Western cultures. These two views were present for much of the 20th century. With the

rise of the field of ethnomusicology, the scientific recording and categorizing of sounds

became a major priority, but it wasn’t until the rise of “world music” in the 1980s that

this genre became commercially profitable.

Not only did the belly dance performance at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair

intrigue audiences and allow them to believe that they had experienced a genuine taste of

Arab culture, but they established ongoing performance archetypes. The “Streets of

Cairo” exhibit was reproduced at Coney Island in New York City in 1896 after the

success of the performances at the World’s Fair, and the figure of “Little Egypt” came to

play a major role in the popular imagination of the time. While the precise identity of the

original Little Egypt remains unclear, it is likely that she was a dancer billed as the star of

36
Benjamin Ives Gilman, “The Science of Exotic Music,” Science, Vol 30 No 772 (Oct
1909): p. 535.
37
Ibid

22
the “Cairo Street” portion of the world’s fair. Numerous future performers took on the

name, and a “Little Egypt” dancer became legendary when she was caught performing at

an elite party in New York City after the police commissioner had banned the dance

style. The Little Egypt phenomenon demonstrates the widespread attraction of the

oriental dance craze, which inspired a great deal of concern and controversy.

The performances at the 1893 World’s Fair are important for their role in

popularizing the form that came to be known as belly dance and directing public

perceptions the music that went with it. The popular songs inspired by the World’s Fair

were based on appealing stereotypes that constituted a popular American orientalism,

which was inspired by European versions but also took on its own uniquely sensationalist

qualities. Early musical examples such as “The Streets of Cairo” and “The Sheik of

Araby” both illustrate the 19th and early-20th century American popular association

between Arab culture and female promiscuity. More broadly, treatment of gender forms a

significant component of American engagements with sonic Arabness. While women

were heavily sexualized in 19th century orientalism, the cultural politics of female agency

are more complex in the 20th century examples I examine.

This dissertation is organized into four case studies that shed light on the

Arab/American sonic imaginary at particular moments in time. Each of the four sonic and

social configurations I introduce, mock orientalism, Afro-orientalism, affiliatory desires,

and global black consciousness, offers a paradigm through which to explore the cultural

politics of a particular musical genre and historical moment. My first chapter examines

the exotica craze of the 1950s and 60s in light of two Arab American performers, Eddie

“the Sheik” Kochak and Muhammad Al Bakkar. I argue that these two figures performed

23
an exaggerated form of orientalism that I call “mock orientalism,” which works to

deconstruct the category altogether, and performances were important at a moment when

Arab American identity was first coming into fruition. Mock orientalism describes sonic

developments in mid-20th century exotica that unsettle colonial orientalism through

performances of excess. Their music made these two groupings both audible

simultaneously and helped make a new Arab American diasporic configuration clearly

audible.

The second chapter moves to Sun Ra’s eccentric performances and his longtime

fascination with ancient Egypt as an instance of Afro-Orientalism, an artistic practice that

works against the grain of Western representations. Afro-Orientalism, based on the

theory employed by Bill Mullen to describe Afro-Asian alliances, illuminates the radical

potential of Arab-African relationships during the height of Black Nationalism. A

pioneering Afro-Futurist and legendary jazz artist, Sun Ra harnessed Afro-Orientalism to

invent new sonic pathways linking ancient and modern Egypt. I suggest that Sun Ra

deployed his interest in Egypt to ground his music and reinvent his performance persona.

Through an examination of recordings that emerged out of his Egypt-centric identity, I

argue that Ra helped build a unique Afro-Arab affiliation that was unique during its

cultural moment.

The third chapter moves forward to the and 1990s and early 2000’s to undertake

an exploration of Arab world music in the U.S. “Affiliatory desires” describes a

configuration in which, beginning in the 1980s and intensifying after 9/11, liberal

American audiences sought to affiliate with the Arab world via their musical preferences.

Focusing on the Putumayo Arabic Groove compilation and performances by Cheb Mami,

24
Ofra Haza, and Natacha Atlas, the chapter makes the case that identifications with these

artists helped Americans feel politically “liberal” at a time when Arabs and Arab

Americans were particularly vilified after 9/11.

Finally, the fourth chapter looks at Arab American musical responses to the post-

9/11 political landscape, which have mostly come in the form of hip hop. Global black

consciousness emerges out of the resistant genre of Arab hip hop, which seeks to

formulate a transnational solidarity based on the political tradition of black radicalism.

The chapter argues that the vehicle of hip hop has provided young Arabs and Arab

Americans with a powerful counter-narrative to the War on Terror by tapping into what I

call a “global black consciousness.” As I contend, not only do Arab and Arab America

hip hop artists challenge the context of Islamophobia and Arabophobia, but they are

entirely restructuring the “clash of civilizations” narrative by encouraging and reinforcing

cross-ethnic and diasporic alliances. These kinds of alliances offer concrete possibilities

for resisting Manichean narratives of good and evil that have arisen in response to

violence in Iraq, Syria, and throughout the Middle East.

25
Chapter 1: Ethnic Exotica and Mock Orientalism in the American Sonic Imaginary

The opening chorus of a 1959 novelty song finds Syrian American singer and

percussionist Eddie “the Sheik” Kochak addressing his listeners with Arabic terms of

endearment, telling them to “rock, ya habibi/ roll, ya ayuni” and proclaiming: “Dig that

crazy mob/ they’re waiting for the shish kabob.” The song, “Shish-Ka-bob Rock,” from

Kochak’s versatile early repertoire, is likely the first and only bilingual English and

Arabic rock and roll song. The campy lyrics are an ode to the recognizable meat dish, and

the rock and roll beat and Arabic percussion lend a uniquely American blend. Kochak’s

Brooklyn accent surfaces in his pronunciation of the phrase “it’s a real terrific treat,”

contrasting with his rolling of the “r” in “very” in the previous line. His Syrian American

and Brooklyn backgrounds are both audible, though his rolled “r” is likely more of an

ethnic exaggeration than an authentic expression. He ends with an Arabic flourish: an

improvised passage that slides downward as it lightly rests on semi-tones.

“Shish-Ka-bob Rock” was released in 1959, the year after Ritchie Valens

recorded his hit “La Bamba,” and in the midst of a newfound interest in “ethnic” musics.

The song was never a hit as Kochak likely hoped, but it is instructive nonetheless for its

overlapping sonic imaginaries. “Shish Kebob Rock” gives listeners no choice but to hear

an Arab American presence in this distinctively Arab take on rock and roll. The song was

released as a single along with the calypso number, “No, No You’re Not For Me.”

Kochak’s early work proves an eclectic mix, incorporating sounds derived from jazz,

Calypso, Tin Pan Alley, Latin music, and early rock and roll. Kochak’s performance

exceeds the boundaries of genre, as a Billboard review affirms, labeling it “offbeat.”38

38
Eddie Kochak, Amer-Abic Caravan of Music, Billboard, December 14, 1959.

26
 Such performances by Eddie Kochak and other Arab Americans, including

Lebanese American singer Muhammad Al Bakkar, provide a counterpoint to “exotica,” a

postwar genre named after the 1957 Martin Denny album by the same name. Denny

described exotica as, “a combination of the South Pacific and the Orient…what a lot of

people imagined the islands to be like…it’s pure fantasy.”39 Known for its dual sonic and

visual primitivism, exotica had reached broad commercial appeal by the late-1950s.

Though often packaged and sold as exotica, “Shish Ke-bob Rock” and similar songs help

define a category I term “ethnic exotica,” to be distinguished from the “lounge” exotica

made famous by Martin Denny and Les Baxter. With titles such as Forbidden Island,

Primitiva, and Hypnotique, lounge exotica evoked an imagined Orient both through the

music itself and the accompanying album covers. By presenting music “inspired” by

foreign locations that actually sounded like orchestral jazz, lounge exotica pushed aside

and effectively silenced sounds associated with the cultures it was representing.

Alternatively, Ethnic exotica extended into the live performance realm with the

proliferation of Middle East-themed nightclubs across the East Coast during the 1950s

and 60s. In these spaces, performers were able to produce the campy aesthetic of the

albums in the flesh.

In this chapter, I focus on instances of “ethnic exotica” featuring Eddie Kochak

and Muhammad Al Bakkar to investigate how sound and music helped negotiate what

“Arab-ness” meant in the postwar United States. Alongside other cultural products that

imagined the foreign in relation to the domestic, exotica is a rich site for the excavation

of ideas about race and gender in postwar America. As Stuart Hall famously argued,

39
Philip Hayward, Widening the Horizon: Exoticism in Post-War Popular Music,
Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 1999, p. 75

27
popular culture often works as a staging ground for larger social power struggles. Music

in particular is a site where subjecthood and fantasy coalesce, and are negotiated through

embodied listening.40 I suggest that the ethnic exaggeration of Kochak and Al Bakkars’

performances interrupts sonic and visual tropes of exotic primitivism. Additionally, these

two artists inhabited an aesthetic I call mock-orientalist camp, a performance practice that

celebrates the extravagant pleasures of orientalism while also revealing it to be an

illusory construct.

No longer background “mood” music for the cocktail parties of Middle Class

white Americans, ethnic exotica demands listeners’ attention and challenges them to re-

evaluate orientalist binaries. Much like Shane Vogel’s notion of “mock

transnationalism,” ethnic exotica constructs a purposely-inauthentic vision of Arabness in

order to build a new diasporic formulation, one that made Arab American identity audible

and legible in new ways. In his discussion of the 1957 Broadway musical Jamaica, Vogel

contends that what made the play important was its lack of interest in developing an

authentic narrative. Instead, Jamaica formulates a “performance of diasporic imagination

that shaped relations between the multiplicity of black ethnicities within the United States

and beyond its shores.”41 Rather than faithfully adhering to its subject matter, Jamaica

“staged an errant Jamaica: one wayward and in error, but also one that wanders, in the

sense that Édouard Glissant proposes, unmoored from its point of origin.” Similarly,

ethnic exotica looked to orientalist tropes as a means of both citing and decentering

marginalizing discourse.

40
Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing the Popular,” in People’s History and Socialist
Theory, London: Routledge, 1981.
41
Shane Vogel, “Jamaica On Broadway: The Caribbean and Mock Transnational
Performance,” Theatre Journal, Vol 62 (1): March 2010, p. 7

28
 The highly conspicuous visual fixation with exotic female sexuality on lounge

exotica album covers was a major part of their appeal, and these images provided a visual

accompaniment to the sonic fantasy. In this way, exotica demonstrates that sound cannot

be theorized as a singular category or somehow separate from other sensory experiences.

Instead, the sonic and visual can work together in important ways.42 The visual

component of exotica is linked to the rise of magazines like Playboy and the consumer

category of the “bachelor” in the 1950s. Furthermore, ownership of colorful and kitschy

exotica albums became a marker of “taste” for middlebrow audiences and the soundtrack

to a new version of conspicuous consumption. Arab-themed music was simply one of

many subgenres of lounge exotica, inspired by various exotic locales and endeavoring to

take listeners on a fantastical sonic journey via the hi-fi stereo. Albums with titles like

“Polynesian Fantasy,” “Forbidden Island,” “Ritual of the Savage,” and “10 Nights in a

Harem” sold a brand of kitschy and semi-pornographic orientalism.

While visual interest in female sexuality saturates both Arab ethnic exotica covers

and live performance spaces with the omnipresent figure of the female belly dancer, the

dancer’s showy burlesque performs a critique of the eroticized female “native” that

circulated in the realm of lounge exotica. The campy costumes shed light on the

construction of the dancer as a figure to be looked at and consumed for visual and sexual

pleasure, uncovering the underlying artifice of orientalism. As Susan Sontag writes about

camp, “…the camp sensibility is one that is alive to a double sense in which some things

can be taken. But this is not the familiar split-level construction of a literal meaning, on

one hand, and a symbolic meaning, on the other. It is the difference, rather, between the

42
See Josh Kun, “Basquat’s Ear, Rahsaan’s Eye” in Audiotopa: Music, Race and
America, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005.

29
thing as meaning something, anything, and the thing as pure artifice.”43 Mock-

orientalism, therefore, makes evident the effort and performance involved with all

orientalist presentation and representation.

Musically, lounge exotica consisted of jazz-based instrumental compositions with

additions such as birdcalls to help complete the exotic soundscape. A highly cinematic

genre, exotica encouraged listeners to develop a visual narrative to accompany the sounds

they heard. By presenting music “inspired” by foreign locations that actually sounded

like innocuous symphonic jazz, lounge exotica pushed aside and effectively silenced

sounds associated with the “Third World.” Les Baxter’s track “A Night With Cleopatra,”

for example, encapsulates the instrumental jazz characteristic of the genre. From the 1962

album The Primitive and the Passionate, the piece works as a tone poem split into several

sections. The first lingers on a slow, wordless vocal melody in a minor key with bells and

occasional tambourine beats. It then moves into a faster dance segment led by the oboe

and xylophone evoking a lively village scene, and it ends with a slow and dramatic return

to the original melody. Not only does the album cover feature a beautiful dark-haired

woman, but the title “A Night With Cleopatra” itself is an invitation to hear the piece as

an elaborately-staged seduction. The overall effect is to sexualize and primitivize the

sounds as well as the culture associated with them.

Ethnic exotica, on the other hand, self-conciously performs its campy

orientalism, and for that reason, I suggest that ethnic exotica operates as a post-orientalist

cultural product. Eddie “the Sheik” Kochak and Muhammad Al Bakkar both achieved

relative success with their bilingual English and Arabic albums. These two artists

43
Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” Partisan Review, Fall 1964.

30
participated in the exotica craze while also exceeding and unsettling it by bringing Arab

sounds to bear on its formation. With a campy mock-orientalist aesthetic, these two mid-

century performers introduced Arab American identity into the American ethnic canon.

The sounds they produced helped bring the imaginary transnational space of the Middle

East into dance clubs and the homes of Americans by way of living room hi-fi players. In

their production of a transnational “Amer-Abic” sound, Kochak and Al Bakkar mapped a

new geography that both recognizes and disrupts tired orientalist binaries.

Origins of Exotica: America in the 1950s

One of the best-known components of exotica is the Polynesian “Tiki craze” of

the 1950s, which became widespread and emerged out of a fantasy of a South Pacific

playground for Westerners. Likely generated in part by nostalgia from World War II

veterans who had served in the Pacific, the Tiki craze was responsible for the rapid

growth of tourism in this area. Tiki culture was built on an imagined sexualized vision of

Polynesia in which the sexual mores of the 1950s did not apply. Adinolfi contends that

Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa became popular during the late-1950s because

audiences were fascinated by the idea that monogamy was not a cultural norm in Samoan

society, and many assumed that this was the case across the board in non-Western

cultures.44

As exotica became increasingly popular, it sprouted restaurants, hotels, furniture,

music, and literature. According to Christina Klein, James Michener’s 1959 novel Hawaii

was a “middlebrow” cultural product that captivated Middle Class audiences in the

postwar era, and the Tiki craze and exotica albums were both part of this matrix. Klein

44
Francesco Adinolfi, Mondo Exotica: Sounds, Visions, Obsessions of the Cocktail
Generation, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.

31
argues that in the context of the Cold War, a wide range of cultural texts including the

musicals South Pacific (1949), The King and I (1951), and Flower Drum Song (1958)

helped Americans imagine themselves as international citizens forging connections based

on mutual exchange.45 Similarly, exotica music contributed to an American sense that the

foreign could be appreciated and also consumed through sound. Middle class musical

consumption during this period was, like cultural consumption in general, often tied both

to ideals of leisure and an imagined exotic.

One of the appealing features of exotica was its ability to facilitate armchair travel

through sound: “hi-fi promised the cinematic authenticity of being there, in imaginary

and acoustic space. The exotica composers shared an obsession with space.”46 This

fixation on travel was purely hypothetical, as Les Baxter, for example, hadn’t traveled

much outside the U.S. And as Toop points out, the technology allowed for a unique

combination of refuge and expansion. Listeners could enter a surreal soundscape without

having to experience the risks of actual travel. Similarly, exotica provided a refuge from

Cold War fears of nuclear annihilation. As Tim Taylor has argued, a sense of

ambivalence about technology comes across in the music itself, especially in exotica

focused on space travel. Ambivalence about the future and technology’s role in it likely

added to the appeal of exotica as a whole, providing an escape from present concerns.

The phenomenon of collecting exotica as a symbol of cosmopolitanism and

sophistication relates to a longer history of consumption and domesticity. In the 19th

century domestic sphere, global goods and fashion became widely appealing as symbols

45
Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
2003, p. 13.
46
David Toop, Exotica: Fabricated Soundscapes in a Real World, London, UK:
Serpent’s Tail, 1999, p. 43.

32
of cosmopolitanism, especially for women. Buying and consuming foreign decorative

items, clothes, and food reminded consumers of their own whiteness and superiority.

According to Hoganson, “By throwing foreign entertainments, white, middle-class

American women could display their privileged positions in the global scheme of

things.”47 Eating global foods and enjoying other items served to reinforce difference

rather than to erase it, proving consumers’ Americanness through an ability to enjoy and

appreciate a variety of non-American customs. A woman could exhibit her worldliness

through an ability to cook a foreign cuisine. As with to the tradition of the World’s Fair,

the consumption of global goods in the 19th century was an ultimately imperial project

dependent on assumptions of Western and white American superiority.

Exotica albums were known in part for the sexualized images of women that

appeared on album covers, reminiscent of so-called “cheesecake” covers of the same era.

In lounge exotica, these women often appeared in submissive poses, reifying the imperial

gaze.48 For example, the cover of the 1960 lounge exotica album East of Suez shows a

dark-haired woman with a scarf covering her face from the eyes down. Her hair is

uncovered, and she wears a jeweled tiara on her forehead. The most prominent feature are

her dark-lined “cat eyes” that look off to the side, avoiding the viewer’s direct gaze.

Beyond presenting her as a passive subject, this image evokes the Muslim practice of

veiling, inviting the viewer to imagine what the woman looks like under the scarf.

47
Kristen Hoganson, Consumers’ Imperium: The Global Production of American
Domesticity, 1865-1920, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007, p.
149.
48
See Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial
Contest, New York: Routledge, 1995.

33
 Gender formations in the 1950s and visual pleasure are important elements of the

exotica genre, and were linked to wider social trends. Formulations of “the good life,”

though largely associated with suburban homeownership and domestic bliss, were also

associated with the glamorous persona of the urban bachelor.49 Playboy, founded in 1953,

popularized the model of male consumption that had emerged in Esquire starting in the

1930s. While during the 19th century and beyond, the domestic realm was largely viewed

as a female space, this shifted with the introduction of the “bachelor pad.” In their focus

on bachelorhood, these magazines suggested an alternative to the ideal of the family man

and masculine breadwinner. Playboy successfully commodified masculine domesticity by

describing the space of the bachelor pad as the extension of a man’s virility.50 Elizbeth

Fraterrigo writes, “Playboy appropriated modern design as a masculine idiom, avoiding

elements with feminine or familial associations. Devoid of artifice and frivolous

decoration, masculine design was, by implication, superior.”51

One of the items that became a fixture in the bachelor pad was the “hi-fi” stereo.

Through the development of hi-fi sound equipment, home audio also became an

49
As Lizbeth Cohen discussed extensively in A Consumers’ Republic, the ideal of “the
good life” became a key aspect of American culture following World War II. The 1950s
and early 1960s were marked by significant economic and demographic changes.
Suburbanization was a key shift during the postwar era, leading to the rapid growth of
residential areas outside of metropolitan centers, precipitated in part by the expansion of
the middle class, along with the rise of mass consumption. Citizens were exposed to a
range of goods and expected to purchase on a much larger scale than before. And
whereas the 1940s consumer was expected to tailer their purchases to the overall needs of
a country at war, the postwar consumer bought goods mostly out of a personal desire to
own them, and the act of buying itself was viewed as a civic duty.
50
In addition to pornographic content, the magazine encouraged the acquisition of a wide
range of items associated with the bachelor lifestyle, including gourmet food, sports cars,
well-stocked liquor cabinets, high-end stereo equipment, and fashionable clothing.
51
Elizabeth Fraterrigo, “The Answer to Suburbia: Playboy’s Urban Lifestyle,” Journal of
Urban History, April 2008, p. 758

34
important feature of the middle class home. Hi-fi technology grew in conjunction with

the invention of the LP or “long playing record” by Columbia Records in the late-1940s

and referred to the sound quality, or the ability of both recordings and equipment to

accurately and authentically reproduce sounds. Hi-fi became popular as a hobby

marketed to men, and by the mid-1950s the term was synonymous with home audio

systems in general. In the recording industry, advertisers and producers described LPs as

high fidelity, meaning that they would allow the listener an “immersion” experience that

closely mimicked live performance. Keir Keightley suggests that culturally, the hi-fi

phenomenon was accompanied by a gendered logic that associated technological

advancement with masculinity and encouraged men to see audio equipment as one way

for them to participate in consumerism.52

The new bachelor archetype fostered the belief that musical taste was important

element of a sophisticated lifestyle. Hugh Hefner hosted a syndicated television program

called Playboy’s Penthouse in a flat in downtown Chicago, which included a musical

introduction by white jazz pianist Cy Coleman. As Hefner wrote in the first issue of

Playboy, “We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little

mood music on the phonograph and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet

discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex…If we are able to give the American male a

few extra laughs and a little diversion from the anxieties of the Atomic Age, we’ll feel

we’ve justified our existence.”53 The ideal bachelor was expected to own a collection of

jazz and easy listening records, which contributed to his persona. According to this new

52
Keir Keightley, “‘Turn it Down!’ she Shrieked: Gender, Domestic Space, and High
Fidelity, 1948-59,” Popular Music, Vol 1 No 2 (May 1996): 149-177.
53
Hugh Hefner, “Editorial: Volume 1, No 1” Playboy, December 1953:151-152.

35
imagined ideal, the bachelor was free from familial responsibility and could spend his

time outside of work enjoying a range of sensory pleasures such as hosting cocktail

parties and flirting with available women. Given the emphasis on consumption and a new

focus on stereo technology as a sign of masculine cosmopolitanism, the relationship

between the rise of bachelor culture and the popularity of exotica albums in the 1950s

and 60s becomes evident.

Exotica albums appealed to a similar demographic as Playboy: white middle class

heterosexual men. In addition to the sex appeal of the cover images, the albums served as

a marker of worldly knowledge. For bachelors, exotica of all types could provide

background music for gatherings that would signal both sexual sophistication and

cosmopolitan knowledge. And for American women who may have stumbled onto them,

belly dance could potentially have offered a new means of envisioning femininity vis-a-

vis an exotic other. The visual accentuation of exotic female sexuality made exotica

music highly marketable in the postwar era, and it was through the marketable vehicle of

eroticized images that exotica created a venue for ethnic exotica performers to introduce

sounds of Arabness and help negotiate mid-century Arab American identity.

Eddie “The Sheik”: Pioneering Amerabic Performance

Like the biographies of many legendary performance figures, it is sometimes hard

to distinguish myth from reality in Eddie “the Sheik” Kochak’s life story. Ultimately, the

accounts themselves are more instructive than their accuracy, and I find the multiple

origin stories surrounding Kochak’s nickname particularly illuminating. In one version,

his World War II Army Sergeant called him “the Sheik” when he couldn’t pronounce his

birth name, Kochakji. The second version highlights Kochak’s brush with fame when he

36
performed in the musical Zorba the Greek with Anthony Quinn in the early 1980s. In this

narrative, which he told me in an interview, Quinn called him Eddie “the Sheik” because

it rhymed with Zorba the Greek. The Army Sergeant version points to Kochak’s ethnic

status in the 1940s, when his name, “Kochakji” was a marker of difference and a

potential liability for a performer. It also stresses the prevalence of the “Sheik” figure as

an ongoing trope in American popular culture. Anthony Quinn’s celebrity status lends

legitimacy to the second version of the story, but more broadly, it calls for a recognition

of the “wider Mediterranean” performance culture in New York City that Kochak

participated in. I begin here with Kochak’s life story as an entry point for the examination

of Arab American culture in mid-century Brooklyn, moving on to an analysis of his early

recordings, to argue that Kochak was central to the development of the Arab American

performance genre he called “Amerabic” music.

Kochak was born Eddie Soubhi Ibn Farjallah Kochakji in Brooklyn in 1922.

Kochak’s parents emigrated from Aleppo around the turn of the century. In our interview

Kochak described banging on pots and pans as a child until his parents realized that he

might want to be a percussionist and gave him a doumbek. His father owned a

coffeehouse on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, where Arab musicians would gather to sing

and play, and this setting provided a rich environment for his musical development.

Kochak’s mother and sister often danced, providing him with early lessons in

accompanying live performers. He learned Arabic at home, but never traveled to his

parents’ homeland of Syria. Instead, he established himself in the performance scene in

Brooklyn, often playing at restaurants and parties known as haflat. As a first generation

Arab American, Eddie Kochak served in the World War II army special forces between

37
1942 and 1946. During this time he played for troops abroad and traveled to Egypt,

where he said there was a “very different way of life.”

Kochak performed widely in Middle Eastern-themed restaurants and events

throughout the 1940s and 50s: “I entertained, sang, played drums, danced, emceed, did

comedy, all of that. I always had my own American band, and we entertained at many

parties where people wanted a combination of Arabic and American, Greek and

American or Turkish and American music.”54 From the beginning, Kochak saw that he

could reach immigrant audiences and also provide what he viewed as an American twist

with his own band. He sought to bring Arabic music into the wider public consciousness

via the belly dance craze that came into public view through Muhammad Al Bakkar’s

music in the late-1950s, as well as lounge exotica albums such as Sonny Lester’s “Middle

East After Hours” and “Belly Dancer” by The Sheik’s Men. With a portmanteau

combining “America” and “Arabic” to signify the merging of the two cultures, Kochak

signaled his unique positioning and ability to speak to multiple audiences.

In the 1960s, community-organized performances by Arab Americans began to

wane alongside the rise of the multi-ethnic nightclub. While Nightclubs operated partly

as an extension of haflat, where Arab communities would come together to eat, dance,

and listen to music, according to Anne Rasmussen, these nightclubs became “the vehicle

through which Americans and other ethnic groups came to know about Arab culture,

including food, music, and a romanticized version of history. ”55 The first, Club Zahra,

54
Elizabeth Artemis Mourat and Christy Guenther, “Eddie Kochak, the Sheik, the Man,”
Gilded Serpent (2001), accessed Jan 15, 2016,
http://www.gildedserpent.com/art43/artieddiek.htm.
55
Anne Rasmussen, “’An Evening in the Orient’: The Middle Eastern Nightclub in
America,” Asian Music, Vol 23 (2): Spring-Summer 1992, p. 67-68.

38
opened in Boston in 1952. The Lebanese American owners opened a second venue, Club

Morocco, shortly thereafter. Rasmussen writes, “The house band included musicians of

Lebanese, Turkish, Armenian, and Greek heritage; sometimes musicians visiting from

overseas entertained at the club…the Middle-Eastern nightclub became an emblem of

polyethnic America.”56

By the 1960s and 1970s, the nightclub was the primary venue for Arab music.

The clientele was partially made up of Arab immigrants as well as “Americans who had

just discovered the charms of Arabic music and dance.”57 According to dance instructor

Ibrahim Farrah, “It was not unusual to go to 8th avenue and see women going into the

nightclubs with big [fur] coats. They find it an exotic evening.”58 Thus, the appeal of

nightclubs was partly in their self-conscious display of orientalism, which was appealing

as a means of escape or armchair travel.59

Rasmussen claims that Arab Americans in nightclubs were presenting a

caricatured version of themselves: “In their effort to explain the East to the West, the

musicans, dancers, and owners of the nightclub adapted and capitalized upon a set of

symbols they had come to know in the Western world.”60 Moreover, the nightclub’s

polyethnic flavor reflected a mixing of cultures and ethnicities in urban centers:

Muhammad al-Bakkar and his musical cohorts exerted far reaching influence on
both musical and social levels. Not only did these men create a unique, fresh

56
Rasmussen, Individuality and Social Change in the Music of Arab-Americans, PhD
Dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1991, p. 136.
57
Rasmussen, Individuality and Social Change, p. 138.
58
Ibid, p. 139
59
There are also comparisons to be made in terms of the appeal of Middle Eastern
nightclubs and the phenomenon of “slumming” in African American clubs discussed by
Chad Heap in Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885-
1940, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
60
Rasmussen, “A Night in the Orient,” p. 81.

39
 sound, they legitimized dance for audience members and professionalized dance
for the multitude of belly dancers who saturated the cities. They also generated a
flurry of recording activity and nourished the highly visible and lucrative
nightclub scene which redefined musical professionalism in Arab-American
musical life.61

Thus, while Middle Eastern nightclubs in American urban centers promoted and relied on

orientalist symbols to attract a mainstream audience, they also created a new musical

fusion style, bringing together musicians of Greek, Armenian, Turkish, and Arab

backgrounds. Where audiences at community-organized haflat were primarily Arab,

these new nightclubs drew white Americans as well. In many ways, the live performance

space of the Middle Eastern nightclub was inextricably linked to the ethnic exotica

recording genre. During this era, nightclubs became Arab American performance meccas

that facilitated significant interethnic mingling among both performers and audience.

These nightclubs, therefore, were also instrumental in developing the mock orientalism

that was prevalent in Kochak and Al Bakkar’s recordings.

Before World War II, Arabs arriving in the United States were generally

Christians originating from the region then under Ottoman rule known as Greater Syria,

and many were unskilled laborers seeking greater economic opportunity.62 After 1899,

the Federal Government classified Arabic-speaking immigrants as Syrians, and this

classification tended to contrast with the way most would have identified themselves,

whether by regional, religious, or familial origin.63 Numerous scholars have discussed the

degree to which Arab Americans have been considered “white” in the American system

61
Rasmussen, Individuality and Social Change, p. 156-157.
62
Michael Suleiman, Arabs in America: Building a New Future, Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1999, p. 4.
63
Nadine Naber, Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism, New York:
NYU Press, 2012, p. 29.

40
of racial classification. In the first decades of the 20th century, questions arose in several

key naturalization cases about whether Syrians should be considered Caucasian or

Asiatic. These cases highlighted anxieties about foreign racial threats to the American

nation, and while the rulings sometimes placed Syrians in the white category, they

continually raised the concern of racial otherness. Syrians were consistently put in the

position of having to argue for their own status as white, and hence their right to belong

to the nation. Part of this condition of whiteness was dependent on a link between

European, Western, and Christian identity, which allowed for a distancing from what

would have been considered “Oriental,” i.e. Muslim or non-Western.

Rather than view this process as a slow progression towards whiteness or

assimilation, as has been discussed with other immigrant groups during this period, it is

more worthwhile to think about Syrians in the early 20th-century as occupying a liminal

space. This unresolved or in-between status allowed for increased scrutiny in later

periods, as Sarah Gualtieri points out: “Syrian encounters with race in the early part of

the twentieth century formed the foundation upon which later Arab immigrants were

marked as different and potentially threatening to the body politic.”64 In the mid-1940s,

the Institute of Arab Affairs was founded in New York City by a group of Arabic-

speaking delegates with the intention of spreading information about Palestine. Though

the institute itself was not long-lived, its members began to rethink immigration in terms

of pan-ethnicity and the terminology began to shift from “Syrian” to “Arab American.”65

64
Sarah Gualtieri, Between Arab and White: Race and Ethnicity in the Early Syrian
American Diaspora, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009, p. 157.
65
Ibid p. 166

41
 The second wave of immigration from the Middle East after World War II was

more diverse than the previous group and also often came as a result of political struggles

in specific countries. For example, the creation of the Israeli state and the Arab-Israeli

War in 1948 led to the widespread displacement of Palestinians, some of whom

immigrated to the U.S. Whereas groups who arrived in the early-20th century most were

from “Greater Syria,” the same geographic area that now makes up Syria and Lebanon,

after World War II Arabs arrived from the Gulf and North Africa, and approximately half

were Muslim.66 Overall, this meant that the Arab population in the U.S. became much

more diverse, and this helped consolidate a pan-ethnic identity based both on common

language and Arab nationalism, which became increasingly prevalent in the postwar

period.

Perceptions of Arab Americans by the mainstream have always been closely

related to the view of the Middle East more broadly. Nadine Naber contends that in the

period from the 1950s to the 1990s, Arabs went from being considered a model minority

to a problem minority, mostly as a result of political and economic relationships between

the U.S. and the Middle East. Drawing on the work of several scholars, she claims, “Anti-

Arab racism after World War II emerged in an interplay of U.S. military, political, and

economic expansion in the Middle East, anti-Arab media representations, and the

institutionalization of government policies that specifically target Arabs and Arab

American in the United States.”67 The 1950s and 60s were thus a point of transition

between the earlier period where Arabs occupied an indefinite racial position, to a time of

heightened racialization and scrutiny. The appearance of ethnic exotica at this juncture

66
Naber, Arab America, p. 33
67
Ibid, p. 31

42
reflects the consolidation of Arab American identity after World War II as well as its

increasing visibility in the mainstream.

Although the post-World War II moment is often described as being a period of

heightened assimilation, it is worth mentioning that mainstream popular culture in the

1950s was at least marginally open to immigrant and “ethnic” participants. For example,

the I Love Lucy show’s Desi Arnaz was a Cuban immigrant who played a fictional

version of himself on TV. As Ricky Ricardo, he led a Latin band and spoke with an

accent. Prior to I Love Lucy, Arnaz appeared in several Hollywood films and was

bandleader for the Desi Arnaz Orchestra. The I Love Lucy show first aired in 1951 and its

widespread popularity suggests that audiences were at least somewhat open to “ethnic”

characters in popular culture. Interestingly though, Arnaz’s Cubanness was rarely

referenced explicitly. The show’s original pilot, which never aired, included a

performance by Ricky Ricardo’s band where he described a song as originating from the

streets of Havana. The pilot that did air on national TV featured a more conventional

domestic plot. Ricardo/Arnaz played his guitar briefly, but did not mention his national or

ethnic origins. Ricky Ricardo’s character served as a foil for Lucy’s antics, and audiences

appreciated his offbeat charm and desire to provide stability for his family.

At the same time, however, as the I Love Lucy example demonstrates, the ethnic

immigrants that became mainstream performers were the ones largely considered safe

and inoffensive. Eddie “the Sheik” Kochak’s musical work and persona offers a

worthwhile parallel to postwar Jewish singer and comedian Mickey Katz, who pushed the

limits of “acceptable” performance. As Josh Kun explains, Katz was a kind of uber-

ethnic performer, constantly reworking and parodying popular songs to make them more

43
Jewish. Kun writes, “the majority of inquiries into Jewish difference have not paid

attention to what Katz forces us to confront: the aurality of Jewish difference, the music

of Jewish alterity.”68 During the mid-20th century, many Jews were going through a

process of whitening through assimilation by changing their last names and moving to

suburban neighborhoods. Katz, instead, was defiantly foregrounding Jewish ethnic

identities. Arabs during the 1950s and 60s had the same opportunity as Jews to move

toward whiteness by minimizing Middle Eastern origins and downplaying connections to

foreign-ness and the exotic. And here, Eddie Kochak puts a spotlight on Arab-ness by

accentuating his own identity.

Many of Kochak’s first recordings from the late-1950s were singles inspired by

various ethnic crazes. For example, the b-side to his 1957 single “Shish Ka-bob Rock”

was the calypso tune “No, No You’re Not For Me.” The song describes a regrettable love

affair with a woman who proves to be an unsuitable wife because she has to rely on a

recipe book in the kitchen: “She tried to serve me corn on the cob/ When she knows I like

my shish kebab/ No no no you’re not for me/ Go away and let me be/.” The calypso beat

immediately identifies the genre, and Kochak begins the first verse in an ambiguous

accent, “I met her back in calypso land/ we were in love so a wedding was planned….”

While the song’s humor relies on a conservative 1950s gender politics to make its point.

Kochak’s accent along with a brief improvisatory section at the end of the song put a

distinctly Arab American spin on the genre.

Similarly, Kochak released “Mambo Araby,” a classic mambo tune sung in with a

bilingual Arabic/English twist with a b-side, “Mafee Gherak (My Only Love),” in the

68
Josh Kun, Audiotopia, p. 50.

44
late-1950s. Mambo Araby is a classic mambo tune with a bilingual Arabic/English twist.

Kochak sings about the beauty of Damascus, “the land of linen and beautiful lace/ lots of

ajwa (dates), lots of ful (fava beans)/ wait until you taste the laham ajeen.”69 Following

the song’s catchy chorus of “mambo Araby,” Kochak launches into a semi-tonal vocal

improvisation accompanied by the flute and Latin percussion. The album’s b-side,

“Mafee Gherak,” an instantly appealing bilingual tune, is a love song performed in a

crooner style. Kochak is backed by a big band complete with horns and rhythm section,

and while the chorus is in Arabic, he translates the verses: “darling you’re my only love/

in the desert, when serenading/ you must whisper to your lady.” This track provides a

contrast with the others in that it doesn’t rely on ethnic humor. Instead, Kochak channels

a smooth Frank Sinatra-style vocal sound and displays considerable skill. Along with the

other tracks from Kochak’s early albums, “Mambo Araby,” and “Mafee Gherak”

effectively illustrate his versatile “Amerabic” aesthetic.

In the early-1960s Kochak began collaborating with Hakki Obadia, an Iraqi

Jewish violinist and concertmaster who immigrated to the U.S. in the late-1940s. One of

their early albums together from 1962 was Ameraba: Music with the New Amer-Abic

Sound. The first track on the album is the Israeli folk song “Hava Nagila,” which reached

widespread popularity in the 1950s and was covered by diverse artists such as Afro-

Cuban mambo performer Machito, surf guitarist Dick Dale, and Harry Belafonte. Its

appearance in “Arab form” on this album serves as an illustration of mixing between

Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jewish cultures as well as Arab-Jewish collaboration. As an Iraqi

Jew, Obadia himself straddled these two categories of identity and it was likely he who

69
Ajwa are dates, ful are fava beans, and laham ajeen is a Levantine lamb dish.

45
chose to include this “Araby” version of the song on the album. The track starts with a

doumbek percussion introduction along with cymbals, and the melody is carried by violin

and ‘oud playing together. Both lead instruments incorporate ornamentation in traditional

Arabic style, and the violin often plays on two strings at once for added effect. Near the

end of the song, there is a virtuosic percussion interlude that demonstrates Kochak’s

drumming prowess. By including “Hava Nagila” on their album, Kochak and Obadia

present an inclusive worldview that complicates the narrative of Arab-Jewish conflict.

As with many lounge exotica albums, many of the tracks on Ameraba incorporate

geographic references, including “Midnight in Baghdad,” “Dance Ankara,” “A Night in

Jordan,” and “Dance of Aleppo.” The song titles introduce an imaginary tour of these

locations, and the music, which is mostly instrumental improvisation, is only loosely

related to the places of reference. With their training in Arabic music, however, Kochak

and Obadia move beyond the symphonic jazz of Les Baxter and Martin Denny. The most

obvious thread running through all of the songs, however, is jazz and this is especially

true of the track “Jazz in Port Said.” The title points to Port Said’s continuing

significance in the American imagination. The Suez Crisis of the late-1950s made it

apparent that Egypt and the Middle East were strategically important to the Cold War,

and signaled increased U.S. involvement in the region. The track “Jazz in Port Said” is

unconventional and stands out among the songs on Ameraba, as it lacks a unifying

melody and instead works by layering disparate sounds. Opening with a brief jazz

percussion intro, the track then introduces double bass, ‘oud, saxophone, and violin lines.

The way the ‘oud is plucked sounds similar to a double bass and the violin melody

mimics the mizmar, which is a double reed instrument with a distinctive sharp tone

46
associated with Said’i culture. There are several brief jazz percussion interludes as well

as saxophone and flute solos that give it a jazzy feeling, and the alternating solos are in

line with the structure of most jazz compositions.

Kochak and Obadia also recorded the song “Miserlou” for this album, a melody

with a long and complex history worth briefly discussing here. Within the span of fifty

years, “Misirlou” went from representing a pan-Mediterranean sensibility, to an Arab

American ethnic identity, to a surf guitar riff on a Middle Eastern theme that became the

aural hook for the 1994 film Pulp Fiction. The multiple iterations of the song illustrate

the fact that sonic associations are malleable and the same melody can transform in

meaning depending on the audience and the context. While questions remain about the

precise origins of the melody, most sources concur that the song is an Eastern

Mediterranean folk tune. “Misirlou,” which means “Egyptian woman” in Turkish and

Greek, was recorded in 1919 by Egyptian singer Sayed Darwish with the Arabic title

“Bint Misr,” leading some to speculate that “Misirlou” was actually a cover of Darwish’s

song.70 If this were the case, the melody traveled from Egypt to the wider Mediterranean.

Whatever its precise origins, “Misirlou” likely spread through the Turkish and

Arabic speaking Ottoman Empire and remained popular in Eastern Mediterranean ethnic

immigrant communities. “Misirlou” has been claimed by Greek Americans as a “Greek-

American national anthem” and was played during the Closing Ceremonies of the Athens

Olympics in 2004.71 The first known recording of the song in the U.S. was by a Greek

artist named Michalis Patrinos circa 1930, and another Greek American artist, Nicholas

70
Arnold Rypens, “Miserlou,” The Originals Update and Info Site, accessed Dec 10,
2015, http://www.originals.be/en/originals.php?id=8080.
71
Rasmussen, Individuality and Social Change, p. 269.

47
Roubanis, copyrighted it as his own in 1941. There are several Yiddish versions of the

song as well, signaling its appeal in Jewish Ottoman communities. Arab American

musician Anton Abdel Ahad recorded a “pan-American” version with a Latin bolero

rhythm and Arabic lyrics in the 1950s, which gained popularity among Arab Americans.

Incidentally, the melody reached a wider audience in the 1960s when surf

guitarist Dick Dale rearranged it as a solo rock instrumental piece in 1962, followed by a

Beach Boys recording on their album “Surfin’ USA” in 1963. Dick Dale was one of the

originators of the surf rock sound, a quintessentially Southern California genre that

emerged in the early-1960s. The genre is typified by rapid electric guitar picking and a

“wave-like” sound created through spring reverb and the vibrato arm, which bends the

notes downward. While Dale grew up in Quincy MA, he was born Richard Mansour, and

his father’s family was from Beirut.72 As a guitarist, Dale drew on his knowledge of

Arabic music that he learned from spending time with his uncles, who played the ‘oud at

family gatherings. He claimed that he arranged “Misirlou” after a young fan requested

that he play an entire song on one string, and he realized that he could speed up the tempo

by playing the percussion part and the melody at the same time. The resulting track is a

rockabilly interpretation of a Mediterranean folk song that melds it into a virtuosic

electric guitar jam. The “sonic arabness” of the hijaz kar scale takes on a breathless

energy with fast guitar riffs over a driving rhythm. With his rock-inflected interpretation,

Dale updated the ethnic folk song to appeal to a young 1960s audience. The Beach Boys’

recording imitates Dale’s, at an even faster speed and with their characteristic surf rock

72
Dale asserted in several interviews that he was born in Lebanon, likely to increase his
reputation as an expert in Middle Eastern music, but according to Colin Larkin in The
Encyclopedia of Popular Music, he was in fact born in Quincy, Massachusetts.

48
twang. With the Beach Boys’ performance, the song immediately increased in visibility

and solidified the association between the Arab/Mediterranean folk melody and the

California surf sound.73

Kochak and Obadia’s second collaborative album, Ya Habibi, released on Decca

in 1964, further expanded on the “amerabic” ethnic style with an album cover and song

titles designed to appeal to the standard exotica consumer. One of the Eddie Kochak’s

only album to be released on a major label, Ya Habibi was subtitled “Exciting new

sounds of the Middle East” and included tracks such as “Village Feast,” “Mediterranean

Fantasy,” “Camel Hop,” and “Red Sea Blues.” The cover image features a brightly

adorned belly dancer wearing finger cymbals in mid-gyration. Behind her, Kochak and

Obadia wear matching tuxedos and red fez hats. They are in the midst of playing their

instruments while also obviously ogling the dancer’s backside.

The obvious enactment of the male gaze in the image works to decenter the gaze

itself. As an instance of mock orientalism, the Ya Habibi cover foregrounds the act of

looking at the dancer, thus mocking the men doing the gazing. The music on the album

also highlights the decentering of expectations and moments of confluence, incorporating

saxophone solos on “Red Sea Blues” and “Village Feast.” Another track, “Dance of the

Happy Bride,” begins and ends with cries of zaghareet, and the performers call out in

celebration throughout the track as the title suggests.74 Their cries can be heard as both

73
Quentin Tarantino placed a clip of Dick Dale’s 1963 recording of “Misirlou” at the
beginning of his 1994 hit film Pulp Fiction. According to Tarantino, the clip “throws
down a gauntlet that the movie now has to live up to.” While the use of the song signals
the film’s nostalgia and setting in Southern California, it also illustrates an example
where the “sonic Arabness” is obscured by other associations.
74
Ululation, known in Arabic as zaghareet, is created by touching the tongue either to the
sides of the mouth or the teeth in rapid succession, and it is characterized by a piercing

49
bringing discernibly “ethnic” elements of Arab culture into the sonic landscape while also

subtly mocking the campy primitivism of the song title itself, “Dance of the Happy

Bride.” As Eddie Kochak’s recordings indicate, mid-century Arab American mock

orientalist performance was conspicuous in its visual and sonic imagery. In recorded

form, the ethnic exotica genre became linked to an audiophile fixation with sonic fidelity,

which is apparent in the work of Muhammad Al Bakkar.

Figure 2: Kochak’s 1964 album Ya Habibi

sound quality enacted in the upper vocal register. Zaghareet’s high pitch, loud volume,
vibrato, and tongue oscillation create a prominent, distinctive sound. Moreover, in
American popular film and television, zaghareet immediately cues an Orientalized Arab
exotic.

50
Mohammed Al Bakkar: Achieving Sonic Fidelity

In 1954, the popular but short-lived musical Fanny began its two-year run on

Broadway. Based on a play by Marcel Pagnol and set in the French city of Marseille, the

musical featured an Oriental bazaar scene with a performance by Turkish actress and

belly dancer Nejla Ates. Her gyrations caused a commotion, and according to co-writer

S.N. Behrman, mounted policemen from Forty Fourth street would walk into the theater

every night to watch Ates perform and would then leave as soon as she was done.75 This

public spectacle revolving around Ates’ exotic sexuality calls to mind the 1893 World’s

Fair, where dancers from Algeria first performed the style to the mixed horror and

fascination of audiences present. Fanny emerged in the years just prior to an explosion of

ethnic exotica albums that featured Arab or Arab American performers alongside over-

the-top cover images complete with palm trees, camels, sultans, and harems similar to

Nejla Atas’ dance scenes.

The Lebanese-born Mohammed Al Bakkar, another important “mock orientalist”

Arab American performer of this period, arrived in the U.S. from Egypt in 1952 and

settled in Brooklyn, where he lived until his death in 1959. Al Bakkar performed for two

years in Fanny alongside Nejla Ates, playing a rug salesman in the Oriental bazaar

scene.76 Al Bakkar’s character performed the song “Shika, Shika,” a curious combination

of classic Broadway showtune-meets traditional Arabic song. The lyrics are in Arabic,

and except for some prominent finger cymbals, the orchestral backing and chorus sound

very similar to other Broadway song accompaniments from this era. This comes as no

75
S.N. Behrman, “My life with ‘Fanny’: Playwright’s adventure in the field of musical
comedy,” New York Times, Oct 30, 1955.
76
“Mohammed El Bakkar: Singer of Middle Eastern Songs is Dead at 46,” New York
Times, Sept 9, 1959.

51
surprise, since Fanny’s score was composed by Harold Rome and directed by Joshua

Logan, who co-wrote South Pacific with Rodgers and Hammerstein.

Al Bakkar first began recording in the U.S. under the Al-Chark label for Albert

Rashid in the period of 1953-1955. Al-Chark was an ethnic label focused on performers

from the Middle East and North Africa. Rashid himself owned an important music store

in Brooklyn that was known as a hub of Arab American culture. In 1957, Al Bakkar

became a hit when he began recording with the Audio Fidelity label owned by Jewish

American businessman Sidney Frey, releasing four albums before his death in 1959. As it

was not a specifically “ethnic” label, the audience was significantly more mainstream

than Al-Chark’s. Under Audio Fidelity, Al Bakkar’s albums were released among a wide

variety of other genres, including other foreign-themed albums such as flamenco,

mariachi, Parisian accordion music, sea shanties, and Argentine tango.

Audio Fidelity was part of a broader set of recording companies that were

dedicated to producing true-to-life albums in high fidelity, and it also was the first

company to feature recordings in stereo sound. Audio Fidelity made Al Bakkar’s albums

part of what the company’s tagline deemed “studies in high fidelity sound.” Middle

Eastern music would have served as a sonic testing ground for audiophiles who wanted to

hear music in the highest possible fidelity in the comfort of their home, or perhaps

bachelor pad. These listeners were looking for an affective and embodied listening

experience that would bring exotic fantasies to life. This approach was a combination of

what might be called “pornophonic” listening with anthropological fieldwork, as

becoming immersed in the sounds permitted listeners, coded white and male, to gain

mastery over their listening subjects. Albums that introduced a wide range of volumes

52
and pitches were deemed most intriguing for observation, and the diversity of instruments

on Al Bakkar’s recordings easily generated this opportunity. In a Billboard review of his

1957 album Port Said, the reviewer remarks,

To listen to this item you’d never know there was trouble in the Middle East. It’s
an Oriental jam session, typified by a strong beat and exotic instrumentation
(Finger cymbals, for example). The tweeter-woofer crowd will dig it the most for
its emphasis on wide-range values. But don’t overlook the possibility of a wider
audience. Disk has already shown signs of breaking big in certain markets and
deejays also seem to be getting the message.77

The author’s reference to the Suez crisis points to global events as part of the widespread

response to the album, and also that hi-fi enthusiasts, labeled the “tweeter-woofer crowd”

would appreciate the range of sounds exhibited. Listening to Middle Eastern music for

the purpose of scientific inquiry implies a rational discourse reminiscent of early

anthropological studies, and being immersed in these sounds also permitted listeners to

explore what it meant to be “sonically Arab.”

When Audio Fidelity created and sold a mass-produced stereo album in 1957, it

was considered more of a “hi-fi curiosity” than a commercially viable product since the

equipment that made it possible to listen to albums “in stereo” was not yet available on

the mass market.78 The first stereo album was labeled a “Compatible Stereophonic

Demonstration Record (for test and laboratory purposes)” and it featured a jazz band

known as the Dukes of Dixieland on side A, and “Railroad Sounds, Steam and Diesel” on

side B. Viewed as cutting edge technology, this album appealed to an audiophile

audience interested in having the most realistic possible listening experience in the

comfort of their own homes. As a Billboard review pronounced, “All the things listeners

77
“Spotlight on Sound: Port Said: Music of the Middle East,” El Bakkar and his Oriental
Ensemble, Audio Fidelity AFLP 1833, Billboard Magazine, Nov 4, 1957.
78
“Mass Produced Stereo Disk is Demonstrated,” Billboard Magazine, Dec 16, 1957.

53
have learned to expect from stereo are here: enhanced presence, heightened reality and, in

the case of the ‘Railroad Sounds,’ a definite sense of movement. The train moves from

left to right, etc….if customers had stereo cartridges, the disk would probably be in great

demand.’”79 Though it wasn’t until the 1960s that stereo technology became widely

available, the company re-released stereo versions of El Bakkar’s first two albums in

1958 and 1959.

Comparing Al Bakkar’s early-1950s work for the Al-Chark label to his Audio

Fidelity recordings makes it clear that the Audio Fidelity producers maximized the

sounds they hoped would be most attractive to American audiences and marketable to a

mainstream public. By self-consciously amplifying the elements of difference, they also

performed a sonic mock orientalism. One of the recordings still available from Al

Bakkar’s Al-Chark sessions is the song “Banat Iskandaria,” which means “the women of

Alexandria,” and warns against the temptations of Alexandrian women. The first line

roughly translates as, “Oh women from Alexandria/ To fall in love with you is a sin.” In

the version released for Al-Chark, the song is slow and subdued, evoking a sense of

longing. The scale is harmonic minor and does not incorporate quartertones, so the

melody only occasionally sounds non-Western. The song opens with an accordion

passage and relies heavily on string accompaniment. There are accordion and ‘oud solos

in the middle of the song, which give it a somewhat improvised feel, despite its repetitive

melodic line.80

79
“Mass Produced Stereo Disk is Demonstrated,” Billboard Magazine, Dec 16, 1957.
80
The ‘oud is a fretless stringed instrument similar to a lute considered an ancestor to the
guitar.

54
 Al Bakkar recorded the same song for the Audio Fidelity label on Port Said in

1957. In this version, the song is approximately three minutes shorter and uses string

accompaniment alone rather than accordion and ‘oud. The violin mirrors Al Bakkar’s

voice and adds ornamentation, which livens up the sound. In addition, the percussion is

much louder in the introduction and more central in the mix, grabbing the listener’s

attention. The effect is snappier and more buoyant. The change in instrumentation itself

is significant, making the sound both less and more “ethnic.” The ‘oud is a classical Arab

instrument that would have been generally unfamiliar to the American public. And while

the sound is similar to the acoustic guitar, it is not particularly loud or showy, which

likely explains why it was not featured in the later version.

Likewise, because of its even tone and association with a variety of non-Arab

ethnic folk musics, the accordion may not have been considered fashionable or vibrant

enough for Audio Fidelity. The violin is ultimately capable of more ornamentation and

has a greater range in terms of volume and timbre, and the violinist in this track

accentuates the virtuosity of the ornamental passages. Therefore, the sounds that are

emphasized in the Audio Fidelity track; percussion, violin, and voice, are not necessarily

the most traditional or classically Arab traditional instruments. These elements manage to

immediately capture the ear, however, and they suggest an emphasis on sonic qualities

that producers thought would have been to be palatable to a mainstream American

audience. While this example shows that ethnic exotica may have Americanized these

sounds in nuanced ways, they still offered Arabic lyrics and performances by musicians

trained in Middle Eastern music. In tracks such as “Banat Iskanderia,” Al Bakkar

performs a campy sonic mock orientalism.

55
 For many Arab American listeners, however, the sounds of Al Bakkar’s albums

provided a sense of shared heritage and nostalgia, as evidenced from internet comments

from his song clips. Since Al Bakkar had already become successful as a film star in

Egypt before immigrating to the U.S., he gained an Arab American following relatively

quickly. Numerous YouTube and iTunes commenters of Arab backgrounds claim music

to be formative aspect of their childhoods. One commenter writes,

“After a vacation to Cape Cod in the 1950s we returned home to NJ and found
that my grandfather had made my mother a Hi-Fi and cabinet and her and my
father's favorite music was playing...you guessed it, “Port Said” by Mohammed el
Bakkar. I was twelve years old and loved the music, which we listened to until
we almost wore out the record, which I still have, by the way. We loved it then,
we love it now.”81

As commenter “contessakitty” writes in the YouTube comments for the song “Port

Said,” My mother had this album when I was a kid and the album cover had belly

dancers...this is the first time I've heard this in forty years….” Another commenter then

responds to this, saying: “As "contessakitty" made reference below, my jiddo & sitto had

this album when I was a child.82 I have it on cassette tape but have not heard it in years. It

brings back great memories of my family and the pride of their heritage.”83 As these

comments indicate, Arab ethnic exotica played an important role in the formation of mid-

century Arab American community identity.

Mohammed Al Bakkar recorded another song, “Yalla Yalla, Hay,” which loosely

translates to “Come On, Let’s Go,” for the Al-Chark label in 1953 and again for the 1958

Audio Fidelity album Sultan of Bagdad. Unlike “Banat Iskandaria,” the melodic scale

81
Mohamed El-Bakkar, Port Said, Hollywood Music, 2008. iTunes comment by
“DiranTook,” https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/mohamed-el-bakkar/id292376819
82
Grandfather and grandmother in Arabic.
83
“Port Said – Mohamed El Bakker,” YouTube video posted by “carranca0009,” Oct 22,
2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7PLWVhJpL8.

56
incorporates numerous quartertones, a key feature of Arabic music. Existing between the

black and white keys on a classical piano, these sounds tend to be perceived as “out of

tune” by the Western ear, and quartertones are one aspect of the sound that quickly marks

the music as Arab.84“Yalla Yalla, Hay” employs a cheerful sounding maqam and the

tempo is significantly faster than “Banat Iskanderia,” giving it a celebratory sound. The

Al-Chark version lasts approximately six minutes and includes a two minute-long ‘oud

and vocal taqsim, or improvisation in the middle of the song. The taqsim allows the

singer and ‘oud player to improvise on the melody and to create a new sonic environment

within the structure of the song. The taqsim is associated with the Arab tradition of tarab,

which refers to a state of ecstasy the listener experiences by focusing on vocal or

instrumental improvisations.85 One of the important elements of tarab is that it can only

be achieved through a specific type of active listening employed by those educated in the

practice. In order to achieve the ecstatic state, one must know how to appreciate the

subtleties of the maqam. The taqsim isn’t included in the Audio Fidelity version,

suggesting that the album’s producers believed mainstream Americans wouldn’t know

how to appreciate it. Without this section, the song is also shorter and more consistent in

tempo and mood.

In both versions, “Yalla Yalla, Hay” begins with a percussion interlude and then a

melodic introduction from the strings. In the Audio Fidelity version, however, finger

cymbals, claps, and female vocal zaghareet are added to this first part of the song. These

elements, along with jovial calls from Al Bakkar at the end of particular phrases, conjure

84
See A.J. Racy, Making Music in the Arab World: The Culture and Artistry of Tarab.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
85
In the classical Arabic system, there are a variety of scales, or maqam, that dictate the
melodic tuning of a particular piece.

57
up a celebratory scene of dancing and rejoicing. The zaghareet, cymbals, and clapping

also work as sonic signals of the exotic. The high-pitched sharpness of the sound itself is

startling, and it is layered on top of the quarter notes of the maqam along with clapping

and frequent vocal calls. All of these features combine to produce a complete

soundscape, shrinking the distance between performer and audience. Listeners could

imagine themselves participating in the festive scene comprised of musicians playing for

Al Bakkar, the singer himself leading the celebration, and ululating and dancing women.

By inviting the listener to interact with the recording, the album facilitates a performative

mock orientalism that breaks down the “us” and “them” binary.

Sidney Frey’s decision to record Mohammed Al Bakkar likely came out of his

hope that a Middle East-themed album would sell copies based on sonic difference as

well as visual exotica. On the cover of Port Said is a campy photograph of dancer Nejla

Ates, posing coyly with one arm above her head and a pink veil flowing behind her (see

image). Ates wears a long skirt that is split open to reveal her thigh, and silver pasties,

which were often worn in American burlesque performance in the early-20th century to

dodge indecent exposure laws.86 In the background, there are cushions on the carpet and a

hookah sitting on a table, made to resemble a harem. While in some ways blatantly

capitalizing on Ates’ sexuality, this image mocks traditional orientalist representations

with a campy semi-pornographic “American harem fantasy” in the form of a belly dancer

dressed in a burlesque costume, and also by self-consciously drawing attention to the uni-

directional quality of the male gaze.

86
Allen, Robert Clyde. Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture, Chapel
Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.

58
 Figure 3: Nejla Ates on the cover of Port Said

By the time Port Said was released in 1957, Nejla Ates was famous for her

performances in the Broadway musical Fanny in the mid-1950s, which was also where

she first met Mohammed Al Bakkar. As a Los Angeles Times critic explained the

decision to include Ates in Fanny: “...director Josh Logan, author Sam Behrman and

composer Harold Rome were on their way to a rehearsal...when Logan suddenly opined,

“There’s a spot in Act One that’s made to order for a good, red-hot, talk-provoking belly

dancer.”87 Her performances were indeed notable, and as one reviewer commented,

“Nejla Ates’ belly dance produces more heat in five minutes than an atomic pile in an

87
Bennett Cerf, “Turkish Delight,” Los Angeles Times, March 13, 1955.

59
hour, and must be hoarded against a possible fuel shortage next winter.”88 According to

co-writer S.N. Behrman, the mounted policemen from Forty Fourth Street would walk in

every night to watch Ates perform and would then leave as soon as she was done.89

The popularity of Ates’ dancing body indicates the campy appeal of the American

burlesque-belly-dancer, but it is impossible to detach these from the sounds that would

have accompanied them. A Billboard review of Al Bakkar’s 1958 album The Magic

Carpet declared, “The authentic flavor of the music of the Middle East is in these

carefully-engineered grooves--with a very arresting set of liner notes to explain it all. If

this is not enough, let it be stated that the cover alone can sell the package, for it’s

colorful, diverting and sexy in the Oriental style that Americans love.”90 So while cover

photos like the one for Port Said were significant for their obsession with exotic

sexuality, I want to suggest that although cover images may have initially attracted

listeners, the sounds were equally important in terms of negotiating impressions of

Arabness in the public realm.

After the success of Port Said, Audio Fidelity released a second album featuring

El Bakkar, Sultan of Bagdad, also in 1957. The image on the cover of this album features

two dancers standing above El Bakkar himself, who is lounging on a cushion with an

‘oud. An overfilling fruit basket sits on the floor in front of him. He wears a circular hat

with feathers sprouting out of the top, and his wide-eyed look of mirth suggests that he is

inviting the viewer to join in his pleasure. The two dancers are wearing bright flowing

skirts and sparkly midriff-baring tops. They are both dark-haired and slender, and they

88
Brooks Atkinson, “‘Fanny’ to Music,” New York Times, November 21, 1954.
89
S.N. Behrman, “My life with ‘Fanny.”
90
“International review: The Magic Carpet: Mohammed El Bakkar & His Oriental
Ensemble,” Audio Fidelity AFLP 1895, Billboard Magazine, Jan 19, 1959.

60
hold finger cymbals in their raised hands. They look down upon Al Bakkar with demure

expressions. Unlike Nejla Ates, they look away from the camera and draw the viewer’s

eye down to Al Bakkar, who one can assume is supposed to be the sultan of Bagdad. This

image is a visual representation of the sonic tableau in “Yalla-Yalla” as the dancers hold

finger cymbals and can be pictured as part of a scenario in which other women would be

ululating and clapping along to Al Bakkar’s vocalizations.

The album descriptions on all four of Al Bakkar’s Audio Fidelity albums also

helped connect visual and sonic imaginaries of the Middle East. Listeners reading the

back cover would have heard the sounds in direct relationship to the albums’ descriptions

as well as the cover images. As a reviewer asserts, “The music effectively calls up visions

of near-Eastern dancing girls much like those on the stunning full-color cover.”91 One

passage from the album notes for the Sultan of Bagdad album proclaims: “Here, fabulous

antiquities, modern oil pipelines, donkeys, camels and Cadillacs form a backdrop for high

living, wild parties, romance and eerie adventure the casual Western traveler hears little

about.92” This excerpt demonstrates an emphasis on the imagined ancient past of Iraq

combined with present oil wealth and eroticism; there is also an emphasis on the Sultan

himself as a patriarchal figure with access to female sexuality. In the imaginary world of

this album, the Sultan presides over his court, listening to music and being entertained by

his array of performers, many of whom are beautiful women. The album notes are

explicit about the Sultan’s power: “Behold the Sultan, supreme ruler of his realm, with

91
“Spotlight on sound: Sultan of Bagdad” (Music of the Middle East Vol. 2),
Mohammed El-Bakkar and Oriental Ensemble, Audio Fidelity AFLP 1834, Billboard
Magazine, Oct 14, 1957.
92
Mohammed El Bakkar, Sultan of Bagdad: Music of the Middle East Vol. 2, Audio
Fidelity AFLP 1834, 1957.

61
his harem, musicians, jugglers, dancing girls, magicians, sword swallowers, and acrobats.

See how the faces of the entourage reflect the orgies of memorable nights and the

excesses of pleasure that have tempted venal men for centuries.93” Read in conjunction

with the cover image and the song above, the words appear theatrical and campy, going

so far as to refer to the “orgies” of pleasure men experienced in Bagdad.

Mohammed Al Bakkar’s final two Audio Fidelity albums, The Magic Carpet and

Music of the African Arab were first released in 1958, and their receptions echo the sonic

and visual responses to Port Said and The Sultan of Bagdad. Music of the African Arab is

perhaps the most visually shocking, as it features a topless woman standing on a platform

above a crowd of men. The Billboard review for the album does not mention the cover,

however, asserting, “Here’s a new set that will delight hi-fi and sound bugs.” The

reviewer goes on to describe the album as “...exotic, rhythmically exciting and with the

rising and falling pitch typical of this type of music. It is performed excellently and the

sound is outstanding..”94

As Arab Americans both emerging as performers during the postwar period,

Mohammed Al Bakkar and Eddie “the Sheik” Kochak both contributed to a new pan-

Arab identity that was beginning to take root alongside the rise of Arab nationalism

abroad. For some Arab immigrant listeners, these artists kindled feelings of ethnic

solidarity and pride. The two performers introduced new sounds to an American public

that was simultaneously listening to calypso, mambo, and other “foreign” musics that

presented complex sonic and social landscapes of their own. It is undeniable that some

93
Mohammed El Bakkar, Sultan of Bagdad, anonymous liner notes.
94
“Sound albums: Music of the African Arab,” Mohammed El Bakkar and His Oriental
Ensemble, Vol. 3, Audio Fidelity, Billboard Magazine, Nov 3, 1958.

62
elements of ethnic exotica, such as the visual trope of the belly dancer and the scientific

listening practices encouraged by hi-fi contributed to an othering of Arab Americans that

has continued into the present. However, by circulating sounds that originated in the

Middle East, ethnic exotica also disrupted and “mocked” the binaries inherent in the

European orientalist model.

63
Chapter 2: Sun Ra’s Egyptomania: Afro-Orientalism and Symbolic Sampling

“Every song that I write tells a story…a story that humanity needs to know about. In my
music I speak of unknown things, impossible things, ancient things, potential things. No
two songs tell the same story. They say that history repeats itself. But history is only his
story. You haven’t heard my story yet. My story is different from his story. My story is
not part of history because history repeats itself, but my story it endless. It never repeats
itself – why should it? A sun set does not repeat itself. Neither does the sunrise. Nature
never repeats itself, why should I repeat myself?” – Sun Ra95

Figure 4: Sun Ra at the Pyramids96

In December 1971, Sun Ra and his Arkestra of six dancers, two singers, and

twenty-two musicians spent two weeks in Egypt. The circumstances of their journey are

hazy, and many of the details remain unclear. One of the few pieces of documentation is

95
“Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise,” directed by Robert Mugge, (1980; Colorado Springs, CO:
Winstar, 1999), DVD.
96
“Sun Ra in Egypt and Italy,” YouTube video, footage from 1971 posted by “diangle,”
Dec 6, 2007, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5azChH6Z7QA.

64
silent black-and-white video footage the group shot at the pyramids in Giza. In it, Sun Ra

and several Arkestra members wear ancient Egyptian-inspired garb and they dance

joyously around the pyramids. Though the footage is silent, the performers carry their

instruments, and the potential soundtrack emanates from the screen. Wearing a metallic

cape, Sun Ra reaches the top of a hill and stands momentarily in an arch (see figure 3).

His back to the camera, he poses as a pharaoh overseeing his realm. He appears regal and

focused. In a story he told several interviewers, Sun Ra took a tour of the great pyramid

and entered the king’s chamber, and after saying the name “Ra” nine times, the lights

went out. For decades, Sun Ra steeped himself in ancient Egyptian aesthetics and

symbols, blurring science fiction and reality, and ultimately, his prolific body of work is

an important instance of sonic affinity.

Known for his unique brand of free jazz that pushed at the margins of spectacle,

Sun Ra incorporated elaborate costumes and visual displays that contributed to an

Afrofuturist aesthetic. Ra’s fantastical performances employing Egyptian Arabness as a

signifier utilize a performance technique I call symbolic sampling. Through his

experimental performance practices, I argue, Sun Ra participated in Afro-Orientalism, a

tradition Bill Mullen theorizes as constructing new geographic and social configurations

based on Black Nationalist and Marxist ideologies. While Mullen focuses on Afro-Asian

relationships, the concept is equally relevant to Afro-Arab alliances and affinities. It is in

Sun Ra’s fanciful visual and sonic imaginings that his “Afro-Orientalism” emerges. The

sound-based construction of an affiliation between African Americans and Egypt is an

under-theorized element of Afrofuturism, and one that offers rich material for analysis.

65
Tapping into Sun Ra’s spiritual vision and his Afrofuturist imagination to present a new

worldview, his work positions Egypt as the center of an African diasporic past:

Afro-Orientalism is a counter discourse that at times shares with its dominant

namesake certain features but primarily constitutes an independent critical
trajectory of thought on the practice and ideological weight of Orientalism in the
Western world. Afro-Orientalism, in other words, is a signifying discourse on
race, nation, and global politics constituting a sub-tradition in indigenous U.S.
writing on imperialism, colonialism, and the making of capitalist empire.97

While certain aspects of Sun Ra’s performances verge on European orientalism in their

imitative and appropriative impulses, they also chart new sonic and cultural imaginaries.

While perhaps not obvious, there are parallels to be drawn between mainstream

exotica and Sun Ra’s Afrofuturist aesthetic. John Szwed points out that the attempt to

convey a foreign landscape in musical form in Sun Ra’s early work is reminiscent of

lounge exotica.98 Though it is impossible to know whether he was actually influenced by

the genre, there are definite parallels. Like exotica, the impulse behind much of Sun Ra’s

work was to transport listeners to a new place through sound; Ra’s audiences were

encouraged to imagine being transported to another world. The sound and the visual

aspects of the performance were closely joined, mutually reinforcing each other through a

web of connections. Unlike commercial exotica, however, these audiences were primarily

African American, and the worlds they imagined entering formed a Black Nationalist

consciousness.

Rooted in African American jazz, Sun Ra’s Egypt evokes a black aesthetic realm.

His production of a fantastical Egypt relies on a practice I term symbolic sampling, which

97
Bill Mullen, Afro-Orientalism, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2004,
xv.
98
John Szwed, Space is the Place: The Life and Times of Sun Ra, Boston, MA: Da Capo
Press, 1998, p.151

66
resembles analog or digital sampling in its repetition of musical fragments.99 Digital

sampling came after Sun Ra’s time, but his use of sound fragments should be considered

a parallel technique. In Ra’s case, these fragments are used to invoke an Ancient

Egyptian past as part of a larger project of visualizing the future. These elements are

especially apparent in examples such as “The Nile” from When the Sun Comes Out

(1963) and the Sun Ra Arkestra’s 1983 collaboration with Egyptian drummer Salah

Ragab and his Cairo Jazz Band. By using the term symbolic sampling, I seek to re-

conceptualize the practice of sampling from a transnational vantage point, arguing for a

definition that includes the repetition of sounds that cite a source but do not necessarily

directly reproduce them. Sun Ra’s employment of symbolic sampling, along with the

elaborate aesthetics of his performances, combined to make his Afro-Orientalist visions

materially real.

Sun Ra’s Egypt is sonically dense and its reverberations are jarring. It is not an

Egypt of magic carpets and genies to be captured and sold in LP form, but one of

powerful Pharaohs and overwhelming sensory beauty. His vision of the Middle East

contrasts with that of an American public interested in purchasing and listening to exotica

records, demonstrating the existence of parallel imaginaries surrounding the region. Sun

Ra’s Egyptian sonic imaginary works against a commodified orientalist imaginary,

inserting black performative ingredients that twist, disrupt, and even queer it to the point

of being unrecognizable. While he generally refused to be identified as a black radical or

part of any political organization and spoke against the strategies of both Martin Luther

King, Jr. and the Black Panther Party, he was engaged in creating an alternate American

99
Sampling, which first emerged with the birth of the genre of hip-hop, was one of the
major contributions by black artists to music in the late-20th century.

67
universe in which African Americans belonged, and his Afro-Orientalist narrative

expressed a black radical aesthetic. Additionally, Sun Ra’s musical disavowal of tonal

and rhythmic conventions demonstrates his dedication to building new kinds of social

worlds. His music illustrates the presence of counter-imaginaries that worked against

normative sounds and images.

While in Egypt, Sun Ra and the Arkestra played several concerts with the help of

German writer and musician Hartmut Geerken and Salah Ragab, a drummer and jazz

connoisseur and major in the Egyptian Army. During this trip and a subsequent visit in

1983, the Arkestra recorded the tracks that became the album Sun Ra Meets Salah Ragab

in Egypt. The band was supposedly delayed at customs because of the unlikeliness of Sun

Ra’s name, and according to Geerken, Sun Ra was disappointed to discover that the

modern Egyptian people were not black, or Hamitic, as he believed the ancient Egyptians

had been.100 This anecdote illustrates a productive disconnect between Sun Ra’s vision

and the “Arab Egypt” of the 20th century, and this gap was bridged when he brought the

Arkestra to Cairo. Looking toward Egypt to visualize a black past helped Sun Ra develop

a sonic and aesthetic sensibility that engendered radical belonging. The Egypt of his

imagination was a place of philosophical reason and artistic production located on the

African continent.101 In the whimsical theatricality of his performances, Sun Ra initiated

100
Hartmut Geerken and Bernhard Hefele, Omniverse Sun Ra, Waitawhile Press, 1994, p.
121.
101
As Melani McAlister has compellingly argued about the cultural politics of the King
Tut exhibit in the 1970s, there have always been high stakes around the mapping of
Egypt as either part of Africa or the Middle East. The popular museum exhibit served as
an important site of debate between those who sought to claim the King Tut legacy as a
national commodity to be appreciated by the public at large, and those who came to view
it as a product of a black African culture that also marked the foundation of Western
civilization.

68
an Afro-Orientalism built around the dual fantasies of ancient Egypt and outer space.

Based on a common interest in facilitating black self-determination, these fantasies are

unified in his music.

Sun Ra encouraged his listeners to imagine both what it would mean if African

Americans could think about themselves as space travelers of the future, and also to

recognize the possibility that they were descended from an ancient Egyptian past. Sun

Ra’s complex philosophy about the cosmos included a focus on scientific and

technological innovation, which was most evident in his discussion of interplanetary

travel and metaphysics. In his music, Sun Ra was interested in developing entirely new

approaches to sound and the nature of reality. As such, his music speaks across the genres

of big band jazz, free jazz, and exotica. Furthermore, Sun Ra’s performances are

quintessentially “eccentric,” a term Francesca Royster describes after Daphne Brooks’

use of the term102 as “not only out of the ordinary or unconventional performances but

also those that are ambiguous, uncanny, or difficult to read.”103 His musical and

philosophical identity in many ways defies categorization, and his particular style of

Afrofuturism is reminiscent of what Mullen calls “trickster jazz,” subverting numerous

expectations about black nationalism, jazz, and gender performance.104

102
Brooks follows Carla Peterson’s discussion of the black female body’s eccentricity in
Doers of the Word: African-American Women Speakers and Writers in the North (1830-
1880) (Rutgers University Press, 1998) and “Eccentric Bodies” in Recovering the Black
Female Body: Self-Representations by African-American Women, ed. Michael Bennett
and Vanessa D. Dickerson (Rutgers University Press, 2001).
103
Francesca Royster, Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the
Post-Soul Era, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012, p. 8.
104
Mullen, Afro Orientalism, p. xliv; 185. Mullen describes trickster jazz in relation to
performer Fred Ho: “It summons up linguistic, musical, and political touchstones of
subversion and liberation from Afro-Asian culture and deploys them in the service of a

69
 Ra’s costumes often involved long, flowing robes in bright colors and inventive

headwear that did not fit into normative models of black masculinity. In one clip from the

documentary film Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise, Ra wears purple makeup on his face to match

his robe. Though not openly gay, his sumptuously-costumed performances can be viewed

as exhibiting a queer aesthetic. Perhaps not surprisingly, rumors have long circulated

about Sun Ra’s sexuality, with some claiming that he was “asexual” since he never

married and professed that sex was an unnecessary distraction from his music. Whether

or not he was actually gay or asexual is less relevant than the fact that his performance

aesthetic queers the heteronormative strain of black nationalism. As Royster contends,

“Sun Ra’s campy, outlandish, and often gender-bending stage aesthetic, combing

futurism, Egyptology, and Afroglam (pharaonic headpieces, glittery turbans, scarves,

jewels, and African bubas and wraps), as well as his relationship to space and time could

be read as queer....”105 Additionally, the model of group housing in which members of the

Arkestra lived together and shared meals points to a non-heteronormative paradigm that

challenged 1960s and 70s gender norms, indicating yet another level on which Ra

resisted dominant expectations.

Sun’s Ra’s musical career was concurrent with several major sociopolitical shifts

including the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement, and global decolonization. As Ingrid

Monson contends, jazz musicians of the mid-20th century responded to these new social

landscapes. Along with these changes came a black politics of the diaspora that sought

alliances with African and Asian “non-aligned” nations. The rise of the Nation of Islam

revolutionary vanguardism beyond the boundaries of mainstream taste and consumer

culture” (xliv).
105
Royster, Sounding Like A No-No, p. 170.

70
added another perspective on the importance of a global diaspora in thinking about

African American identity, linking “black, brown, red, and yellow people” around the

world through a common religious identity. Muslim musicians played a significant role in

the reconfiguring of ideas about black music, seeking an “alternative to Western

modernism’s vision of universality....”106 The key goal for many African Americans, and

for African American artists in particular, was a similar one of searching for alternatives

to white and European cultural dominance.

The end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War marked a transition

into U.S. global power that eroded the strength of black transnational labor alliances that

had united around anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism, and brought increased focus on

domestic rights.107 The presence of these anti-imperialist alliances during much of the

1940s, however, demonstrates that transnational concerns were very much part of the

African American political consciousness during this time. The Bandung conference in

1955 was an important moment for the Non-Aligned movement, but Von Eschen argues

that by the mid-1950s the strong ties between African Americans and labor groups

abroad had waned for the most part. However, the influence of a transnational solidarity

movement did persist into the 1950s and 60s in the form of jazz concerts dedicated to

African and Asian themes. The handbill for one such concert in Harlem in 1963

advertised an “African Bag,” featuring “the beginning of a new creative force in jazz.” If

an evening of jazz wasn’t enough to draw audiences, the flyer promised free Egyptian

106
Ingrid Monson, Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa, Oxford,
UK: Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 147.
107
See Penny Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism,
1937-1957, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997.

71
perfume for the ladies.108 While not explicitly political, these concerts did signal interest

on the part of those in the diaspora in exploring connections to Africa.

In addition to tackling the issue of decolonization abroad, jazz musicians were

vital in the process of funding and broadcasting the message of Civil Rights domestically.

As Monson asserts, from the 1950s to the mid-1960s there was a gradual transformation

in the way that many within the jazz community thought about themselves and their

work, from a stance of “colorblindness” to an increasingly black nationalist worldview.

This coincided with a discourse linking jazz with integration, as a move toward

increasing racial equality within the music industry itself, which up until the 1960s was

highly segregated. Integration in jazz was by no means an uncomplicated or

uncontroversial issue, however, and at times the question of race within the jazz world

became highly contentious. The questions that came up in these debates revolved around

who was entitled to speak about jazz and black experience, biological and cultural

explanations for racial difference, and the existence of reverse discrimination against

white jazz musicians.109 For example, in 1962, Downbeat magazine published a

roundtable conversation between white critic Ira Gitler and jazz musicians Abbey

Lincoln and Max Roach. The magazine organized this discussion after Gitler wrote a

negative review of Lincoln’s album Straight Ahead in which he criticized her for

expressing black nationalist sentiments and “mistaking propaganda for art.”110

Amiri Baraka was another major player in this conversation about music and

racial identity, and he was also responsible for making certain artists known in the social

108
Monson, Freedom Sounds, p. 145
109
Ibid, p. 240
110
Ibid, p. 239

72
milieu he participated in. As a critic, Baraka championed jazz artists he believed would

cultivate black social awareness, and he wrote several glowing reviews of Sun Ra’s work,

claiming that it was a music “full of Africa.”111 In an essay called “Jazz and the White

Critic” from his book Black Music, Baraka argues for jazz to be understood in its full

context, something that white critics struggle to accomplish, especially when they

analyze music strictly in musicological terms. As he says, “Negro music is essentially the

expression of an attitude, or a collection of attitudes, about the world, and only

secondarily an attitude about the way music is made.”112 This suggests that jazz, and

black music more generally, is more about a worldview than a specific aesthetic.113

Pioneering the Egyptian Space-Jazz Aesthetic

In the mid-1950s, Sun Ra developed a larger band that he eventually named the

Arkestra, “a name which alluded both to the Egyptian god Ra’s ark, his solar boat, and to

the ark--literally a box--which held the covenant.”114 Also, the word happened to be “‘the

way black people say ‘orchestra.’”115 He rehearsed intensely with the Arkestra, telling his

musicians that they needed to be “tone scientists” who could match metaphorical ideas

111
LeRoi Jones, Black Music, New York, NY: Akashic Books, 2010, p. 148
112
Ibid, p. 17
113
During his time in Chicago during the 1950s, Sun Ra associated with various people
with a wide range of views and beliefs, including black Muslims, Communists, and
Garveyites. A central figure in this discussion group was Alton Abraham, a fourteen-
year-old student who later became Sun Ra’s band manager and was a longtime friend and
supporter of his music. Though there were similarities between Sun Ra’s philosophical
ideas and those of Elijah Mohammad, the founder of the Nation of Islam, there were also
key differences: “Where Elijah favored a controlled, cautious approach to belief, putting
behind him any sense of Christian ecstasy, Sonny reveled in a Dionysian display of joy.
And though Sonny shared Muslim views on avoiding liquor and alcohol and minimizing
the distractions of sex, the Nation’s concern with modest, conservative dress made no
sense to him as a performer.”
114
Szwed, Space is the Place, p. 175
115
Ibid

73
with their sounds. The principles of unity and discipline were crucial, and he told his

musicians, “We’re like space warriors. Music can be used as a weapon, as energy. The

right note or chord can transport you into space using music and energy flow. And the

listeners can travel along with you.”116 In 1958, he began collecting and designing

theatrical “space” costumes that often displayed visual symbols associated with ancient

Egypt, and were a direct challenge to the conservative tradition of big band uniforms. He

also became interested in the power of color as a spiritual and therapeutic tool.

In New York City, the Arkestra played a regular gig at Slug’s Saloon from 1966

to 1972. They wore a series of brightly colored costumes and eventually integrated new

instruments, including the Japanese koto, Chinese violin, West African kora, and the Sun

Column, which was a golden metal tube that was struck like a percussion instrument.117

Two first two women to perform with the group, June Tyson and Verta Mae Grovesnor,

also joined the Arkestra as dancer-singers, taking on the role of “space goddesses.”118

Visitors such as James McCoy, Salvador Dali, Hank Dumas, Ishmael Reed, Amiri

Baraka, and Amus Mor came to watch or participate. Jazz critic Michael Zwerin

described one performance in 1967:

The beat kept on, building intensity. Everyone in the band was playing a
percussion instrument of some kind. One of them started to chant. The volume
grew and spread. It built further. I was being altogether mauled and caressed at
the same time. It was a loving grit, a soft racket. It wrapped itself around me. It
ended...I was wrung-out: Sun Ra’s music is pagan, religious, simple, complex,
and almost everything else at the same time. It is ugly and beautiful and terribly
interesting. It’s new music, yet I’ve been hearing it for years.119

116
Szwed, Space is the Place, p. 94
117
Ibid, p. 194
118
Ibid, p. 251
119
Ibid, p. 224

74
Thus, there was a sense that Sun Ra’s music and aesthetic practices represented the

furthest end of what was cutting edge at the time, and he attracted a group of like-minded

artists who were interested in somehow participating in this eccentric creativity.

Sun Ra’s vast musical catalog resists categorization, and he sought to reach the

widest possible audience with his music in hopes that it would have a broad

transformational effect. In the liner notes to his 1957 debut album, Jazz by Sun Ra, Ra

articulates his goals for how his music should impact the listener. He states, “The real

aim of this music is to co-ordinate the minds of peoples into an intelligent reach for a

better world, and an intelligent approach to the living future.”120 Therefore, Sun Ra’s

symbolic sonic references to Ancient Egypt were central to the creation of an Afro-

Orientalist futurist vision. Ra’s over-thirty-year career resulted in the legacy of the still-

active Sun Ra Arkestra, and includes over a hundred full-length albums, from the

foundational Jazz in Silhouette (1958), to the psychedelic Liquidity (1978) and ancient

Egypt-inspired I, Pharaoh (1979).

Sun Ra famously claimed that he was from Saturn and had no mother or father,

often evading questions about his past and creating a mysterious persona of intergalactic

timelessness. Speaking in proverbs and riddles, he maintained an oppositional sensibility

that defied enlightenment rationalism. His declarations of alienness and inhumanity were

no doubt part of the public image he wished to create, and they were also likely a result

of the sense of marginalization and difference he experienced. There were a series of

experiences in Ra’s early life that led to a sense of alienation and that likely contributed

to his belief that music and art were the only solutions to this deep and ongoing isolation.

120
Szwed, Space is the Place, p. 155

75
Born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1914, Sun Ra was named Herman Poole Blount.

Herman’s mother and great aunt worked at Terminal Station, the largest train station in

the south at the time and a symbol of the rapid urbanization taking hold in Birmingham at

the turn of the 19th century, which earned it the nickname of the “Magic City.” Though

the city of Birmingham was a center of industrialization, the Great Depression and the

Great Migration both significantly dampened economic development.121

Birmingham was the most segregated city in the country during 1920s and 1930s,

and made Herman keenly attuned to the realities of white privilege. During World War II,

he was given a 4-E conscientious objector classification. He hoped to avoid service

entirely, but after failing to appear at the work camp where he’d been assigned, he spent

thirty-nine days at a county jail in Jasper, Alabama. He was then taken to a work camp in

Marienville, Pennsylvania. Camp doctors eventually discharged him, declaring him “‘a

psychopathic personality,’ subject to neurotic depression and sexual perversion.”122 The

work camp was not segregated, and though he said little about it later, Ra likely felt

alienated due to his racial identity: “When [bandmates] asked him to talk about camp, he

said there was nothing to tell. ‘A white man heard me play, and said ‘You don’t belong

here.’”123

Though he attended a Baptist church in Birmingham with his grandmother as a

child, his research later in life led him to question certain elements of the Bible. Sun Ra

121
In first great migration up to 1.6 million African Americans moved out of the rural
south and into northern industrial cities from the 1910s to the 1930s. According to Isabel
Wilkerson in The Warmth of Other Suns: The Story of America’s Great Migration,
between these years the African American population in certain urban centers in the north
grew by up to forty percent.
122
Szwed, Space is the Place, p. 47
123
Ibid

76
undertook a project of uncovering the original roles he believed black people had played

According to Szwed, “as he went deeper into the Bible he began to understand the

meaning of ‘revised’: it had been edited, and some books removed...to make it whole

again would take knowledge of ancient languages and histories as well as of texts that

reached beyond the canonic boundaries established by Protestant churches.”124 He

noticed that Nimrod, Mechizedek, and the sons of Ham and Cush were either minimal

characters or were disrespected.125 He saw his project as one of restoring the hidden truth

of the Bible. Similarly, from this process of discovery he came to believe that scholarship

about ancient Egypt had been manipulated to conceal the fact that the skin color of the

Egyptians was black, a truth that would impact the entire history of his people.126 From

this realization, he discovered that the exercise of narrating history was essentially the

same as creating a mythology. Through espousing a new mythology of the past, Sun Ra

saw the potential to start anew with visions and stories that would restore black people to

their rightful place in the scheme of history. In a mid-1950s pamphlet titled “United

States at the crossroads,” he wrote,

Many insertions have been put in the bible by men who tampered with the
original books, these men were not white. They were Asiatic priests who had
subjugated the keepers of the original wisdom books. The keepers of the wisdom
books were Egyptians. From Egypt came wisdom that enlightened the world. The
ancient Egyptians were considered as being of the race of Ham. The United States

124
Szwed, Space is the Place, p. 64
125
Ibid
126
In 1954, George G.M. James published Stolen Legacy, which was originally titled,
Stolen Legacy: the Greeks Were Not the Authors of Greek Philosophy but the People of
North Africa, Commonly Called the Egyptians. In addition to making the argument that
the legacy of the ancient Greeks was actually stolen from the Egyptians, James contended
that ancient Egyptians were black Africans. This book had an influence on numerous
black intellectuals during the period, as white scholars had generally not acknowledged
the possibility that ancient Egyptians were black. Sun Ra confirmed to Graham Lock that
he had read the book, but he did not say exactly when.

77
 represents the ancient Egyptian race of Ham, and since it does you may as well
call it greater Egypt. You can plainly see that it has connection with Ham, in the
first place, it is called Uncle “Sam” which rimes with Ham...Proof of this is the
eagle, which is also the symbol of Egypt in Africa. There is a kinship between
Africa and America. The Bible is a dangerous book, it is a destructive force
prepared to ensnare those who hate understanding of wisdom. Knowledge of the
meaning of the Bible can make America greater than any country now or ever.127

The parallel Ra drew between Egypt and America and the emphasis on America

as potentially one of the “greatest” countries ever to exist is echoed in further pamphlets

warning against the disastrous results that would ensue from misinterpreting the Bible.

Unlike Marcus Garvey and other black nationalists who promoted a total split from the

U.S. in order to gain self-determination, Sun Ra maintained that it could be possible to

solve the American “negro problem” by accepting the truth that ancient Egypt had

originated as a black society. This would involve a major shift in thinking, as Christianity

had long been embraced as a source of moral and emotional uplift in black communities,

and few were eager to abandon their faith. There were other thinkers at the time however,

such as the growing Nation of Islam, which advocated for a similarly thorough rejection

of Christian theology.

In 1952, Ra legally changed his name to “Le Sony’r Ra.” Szwed writes, “When

someone told him that ‘Re’ was a feminine form of ‘Ra,’ the name of the sun god of

ancient Egypt, a name which would connect with ‘cosmology and planets and stars’ and

was ‘related to immortality and the universe,’ he began calling himself Sonny Ra.”128

Sun Ra was the abbreviated version that became his stage name. By naming himself after

the Egyptian sun god, he legally distanced himself from his family name, Herman Blount,

127
Sun Ra, “United States at the Crossroads,” in Corbett, ed. The Wisdom of Sun Ra,
University of Chicago Press, 2006, p. 112
128
Szwed, Space is the Place, p. 83

78
and explicitly identified himself as a god among men. The name Sun Ra symbolized the

persona he had come to embrace, which was part of the black tradition of naming as a

subversive act that dated back to slavery, working outside and against white social

conventions, and echoed in the name changes of Malcolm X, Amiri Baraka, and many

others. As Graham Lock writes, “Herman Blount, obscure pianist from Alabama, was

reborn as Le Sony’r Ra, ancient African god from outer space, a living myth at ‘the

crossroads whence dimensions meet.’”129

Performing a Black Sonic Avant-Garde

Sun Ra performed Afro-Orientalism through bold, at times bizarre, performances

that claimed Egypt as a black space and at the same time established a link with

Arabness. These performances worked as disruptions or disidentifications that redirected

the discourse of European orientalism, asserting a new Afro-Arab aesthetic in its place.

By taking visual signs such as pyramids, Egyptian headwear, and gold jewelry, and

transforming them into symbols of African American liberation, Sun Ra created his own

brand of Afro-Orientalism. Ra’s performances were visual spectacles as well as sonic

displays, with intricate costumes, lights, and projections to accompany the music. As

Amiri Baraka wrote in 1966, “The band produces an environment, with their music most

of all, but also with their dress (gold cloth of velvet, headbands and hats, shining tunics).

The lights go out on some tunes, and the only lights are flashing off a band on Sun-Ra’s

head...”130 The effect was to materially produce Ra’s conceptualizations for the audience.

Sonically and visually, then, Sun Ra performs a vision of Egypt that reworks and resists

129
Graham Lock, Blutopia: Visions of the Future and Revisions of the Past in the Work
of Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, and Anthony Braxton, Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2000 p. 74.
130
LeRoi Jones, Black Music, p. 148.

79
the global mappings of European colonialism, and building new maps out of sonic

interconnections.

Along with other images he used to encourage black self-determination, the direct

link Sun Ra saw between the civilization of ancient Egypt and African Americans

informed both the sound of his musical compositions and his own stage presence. Sun Ra

even went so far as to imply parallels between himself and the Biblical Pharaoh through

various means including his name, elaborate Egyptian costumes, an emphasis on

discipline over freedom, and even a 1979 album entitled I, Pharaoh. Playing a Pharaonic

role gave him the ability to inhabit a radical Afrofuturist position, one that spanned a

wide expanse of time and space. His inhabiting of the black Pharaoh role also forced

sonic and geographic convergences between Egypt as Arabic-speaking country in the

Middle East and Egypt as situated on the African continent. Sun Ra’s veneration of

ancient Egypt drew upon questions that had emerged among African Americans during

the 19th century, and rather than remain ambivalent about “Pharaoh as tyrant” versus

“Pharaoh as black leader,” he forcefully took up the Pharaoh as a figure of black

empowerment.131 This approach was informed by a realization that blackness had been

131
While some African Americans haunted by the memory of slavery identified with the
Biblical Israelites,, secular African American thinkers, including David Walker, Henry
Highland Garnet, and Pauline Hopkins, had begun to claim ancient Egypt as a
fundamentally black civilization. Therefore, a crucial question arose, as Wilson Jeremiah
Moses points out in Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History: “If
African Americans cherished the myth that their historical situation bore a contemporary
resemblance to that of the Israelites in Egypt, how could they simultaneously nurture the
belief that they bore a special historical relationship to Nile Valley civilization and to
those same pharaohs who had oppressed the biblical Hebrews?” (47). In many ways this
question was answered by looking to Ethiopia: “The contradictory attitudes toward Egypt
were reconciled in the myth of ‘Ethiopianism,’ a teleological view of history with African
people at its center...Ethiopia and Egypt, thus associated, were soon merged in the
consciousness of many black Christians” (51). In the 19th century, Ethiopia became

80
viewed as a source of fear: “Negroes had long been a threatening force, their race a

cipher that needed to be explained away in order to sustain white people’s claims to the

ancient world. It was a competing mythology white people had to at once suppress and

demonize.”132 Though this aspect was only one element of his persona, Sun Ra’s

Pharaonic blackness was central to his image, both as bandleader and public performer.

Beyond simply believing in the fact that Biblical history should be revised to bring

African Americans to the forefront, he actually embodied this philosophy in his persona,

performance practice, and in his music itself. All of these components together enacted

what he saw as his purpose to educate others about the “truth” -- the history and future of

black people, which included the pivotal history of black Egypt. 133

By situating Egypt in the African continent and communicating a fantasy of black

Egypt to anyone who would listen to his music, Sun Ra communicated an alternative to

the sonic imaginary of the Middle East. Though his aural citations were often based on

sounds that may have emerged from ethnic or lounge exotica, Ra’s imaginary

transgressed mainstream commercialized orientalism. While his background as a big

band and nightclub performer in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York made him keenly

entangled in colonialism when Italy attempted to take control beginning in the 1870s.
Ethiopian armies finally defeated Italy in the battle of Adwa in 1896, which demonstrated
the possibility of European defeat, a rare occurrence in the long history of British,
French, Spanish, and Portuguese colonial rule. After this battle, European powers were
momentarily proved to be less indestructible than they previously had seemed, and the
knowledge of this history signaled a glimmer of possibility for African Americans and
those in the Global South engaged in anti-imperialism.
132
Szwed, Space is the Place, p. 73
133
Scott Trafton argues that the figure of Egypt in African American thought is a
“radically heterogeneous discourse,” providing an example of what Lisa Lowe calls “the
nonequivalence of various orientalisms.”

81
aware of the musical trends of the moment, his sonic ideas always pushed the boundaries

of what was expected.134

One important example is “The Nile” from the 1962 album When Sun Comes Out.

While it may not have been intended to be a direct musical rendering of the Nile River,

the title indicates the track’s depiction of an imagined ancient Egypt. This titling practice

resembles the tendency in lounge and ethnic exotica to produce music inspired by

faraway locales with the intention of taking the audience on a journey. Unlike the

creators of lounge exotica, however, Sun Ra was self-conscious about his mythologizing

of the past, and did it for the strategic purpose of building new frameworks for thinking

about African American identity. “The Nile” is an instrumental track, and it features

Marshall Allan on an improvisatory flute part and Ra playing a repeating piano riff. It

begins with the double bass playing a plucked three-note pattern accompanied by the low

trill of the flute. The percussion section then enters with the piano; the piano riff is a

simple syncopated three-note pattern, echoing the double bass. The track’s percussion is

composed of several drums that are played with a loose and somewhat chaotic rhythm.

The flute glides above the other instruments with its own improvisational line, and its

ornamentation mimics the movement of water flowing downstream.

Several elements indicate that Sun Ra is symbolically sampling an imagined

Egypt in this song. Not only does the flute appear to improvise its melodic line, but it also

swoops and slides between tones in the Western scale, landing on quartertones. Aside

from the heavy percussion, these in-between notes are the main components that mark the

134
Many of the early associations with both Egypt and Ethiopia lingered into the 20th
century, and they were taken up in conversations about race among African Americans in
the 1950s and 1960s. These dialogues were particularly consequential for those interested
in generating ideologies of Black Nationalism.

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song as Egyptian or Arab. The improvisatory line of the flute also at times imitates the

sound of the nay, a traditional flute made from reeds traditionally grown on the banks of

the Nile. The flute is not featured in other tracks on this album, and Ra’s choice to use it

in this song may indicate an attempt to imitate the nay. Halfway through “The Nile,”

there is a percussion solo that also identifies the Egyptian influence on the track. The

drums begin tentatively, and then they slowly ramp up to a frenzied pace, stopping

suddenly when the double bass and piano reenter. Put together, these aspects exemplify a

symbolic sampling of an Arab aesthetic and illustrate Sun Ra’s ability to musically

inhabit the ancient Egypt he imagined.135

The sonic imaginary of this track stretches between the spaces of Sun Ra’s Egypt

and African American jazz. Listening to it, one can hear jazz in the syncopated rhythms,

as well as the instrumental combination of double bass, flute, piano, and percussion. Jazz,

a quintessentially African American artistic product, is incorporated here with a turn to a

mythical Egyptian past-become-present. The effect produces an alternative audiotopia to

match Sun Ra’s alter-destiny.136 Jazz becomes a vehicle through which Ra is able to

make this Egyptian past come alive and become tangible, providing an alternate universe

for listeners to reside in. The Egypt he creates occupies an in-betweenness of both time

and space, neither ancient nor modern, and neither here nor there. Just as Sun Ra’s outer

space is at once hyper-technological and surreal, his Egypt is based on Biblical thought

135
It is possible that Sun Ra had heard Muhammad Abdul Wahab’s famous piece “Al
Nahr al Khaled,” or “Eternal River,” which was also dedicated to the Nile and had similar
instrumentation, though there was a violin playing the melody line instead of a flute.
136
Kun uses the term “audiotopia” to refer to “[spaces] within and produced by a musical
element that offers the listener and/or musician new maps for re-imagining the present
social world,” Audiotopia, p. 22-23.

83
and also mythologized for his own purposes. The Egypt he hears includes fragments of a

modern Arab Middle East as well as a jazz-oriented primitivism.

The percussion solo in this track additionally points to several overlapping

expectations in Arab music and jazz. Improvisation is one of the main organizational

components of jazz, and it is included via intermittent instrumental solos that demonstrate

skill. The art of improvisation involves a high degree of musical aptitude and expertise. It

is one of the main ingredients in jazz as well as black performance more broadly, and

scholars have suggested that it is one of the key elements of the black radical aesthetic.

Similarly, improvisation appears as a central theme in traditional Arab music, and skilled

musicians are expected to be able to improvise in any maqam. This improvisatory ethic

makes up part of Sun Ra’s vision of Egypt, and the emphasis on riffing on a theme points

out a correlation between the aesthetics of jazz and the aesthetics of Arab music that Sun

Ra may or may not have been aware of. This connection also indicates the possibility for

cross-cultural identification via musical resemblance.

Sun Ra’s ancient Egyptian sonic imaginary was in many ways informed by his

concerns about scholarly misreadings of the Bible that both overlooked and

misrepresented the significance of black Africans. His interest in the ancient world and

belief in the misreading of the Bible meant that he was was chiefly attuned to ancient

Egypt, but Ethiopia also appeared in this constellation of social and philosophical ideas.

The track “Ancient Aethopia” appeared is from 1959’s Jazz in Silhouette, which came

out the same year as Mohammad Al Bakkar’s Sultan of Bagdad. This track demonstrates

Sun Ra’s dedication to excavating and paying tribute to what he deemed “black” in the

Bible; this Biblical blackness is audible in the strange dissonance of the track. “Ancient

84
Aiethopia” utilizes the full Arkestra, including horns and brass, and it features a flute duet

and a long trumpet solo.

The track begins with a repeating double bass figure accompanied by a piano line.

Soon the rest of the band enters with the main theme, followed by a dissonant flute duet

with sharp and strident notes. A slow, atmospheric trumpet solo then catches the listener

with several chromatic passages that sound dusky and mysterious, and Sun Ra chimes in

with a virtuosic piano solo. The instrumental elements of the piece all contribute to an

uncanny or “primitive” sound that Sun Ra intended to represent Biblical blackness. The

most unusual aspect of “Ancient Aiethopia” is a section where male voices chant in an

unintelligible language, accompanied by drums, cymbals and gongs. The voices sound

distant and strange, depicting their “ancientness.” They chant in broken unison that

sounds vaguely like muddled Gregorian chant, implying a disorientation of traditional

standards of piety that can be read as blackness.

Primitivism was a major artistic movement during the 1910s and 20s, and was

taken up as part of an avant-garde aesthetic. From the turn of the 20th century, jazz had

an uneasy relationship with primitivism, made more problematic by white critics’

tendency to associate African American culture with the primitive, based on racist

assumptions about blackness as barbaric. Some critics viewed jazz as evidence for this

barbarism and warned others about the savagery of jazz rubbing off on those who listened

to it.137 While many African American jazz artists were offended by this sentiment, some

sought to take advantage of the “primitive craze” by incorporating it into the titles of their

songs. And others were attracted to the idea that there was a close relationship between

137
David Chinitz, “Rejuvenation Through Joy: Langston Hughes, Primitivism, and Jazz,”
American Literary History, Vol 9, No 1 (Spring 1997): 60-78.

85
African American culture and Africa: “Primitivism reinforced the importance of the

black American’s African roots, an appealing emphasis for a generation deeply

influenced by Marcus Garvey.”138 This opened an opportunity for jazz artists and

enthusiasts to think about their work as an expression of this link with an African

motherland and to redeem the racist undertones of jazz-as-primitive.

In musical works like “Ancient Aethopia,” Sun Ra found a way to revisit this

concept of primitivism and rework it for his own musical and philosophical purposes: the

“primitive” of Sun Ra’s Ethiopia is unapologetically black. “Ancient Aiethopia”

resembles the sound of “The Nile” in its syncopation and use of a simple melodic theme

running through the entirety of the track. The repeating phrases and melodic dissonance

echo the previous example. Here, Sun Ra references the tradition of primitivist

modernism by using spare instrumentation and simple, repetitive melodies aimed at

representing an ancient past. He taps into and generates a black aesthetic nationalism

defined by an interest in creating sonic beauty. Sun Ra’s habit of pushing at the

boundaries of what was sonically, visually, and culturally expected is, by Fred Moten’s

definition, both avant-garde and radically black.

The considerable duration of Sun Ra’s career meant that he witnessed numerous

shifts in the development of African American music. Jazz went from a “big band”

moment in the 1930s and 40s, to bebop and hard bop in the 1950s, to free jazz and the

“New Thing” of the 1960s and onward. Though he never specifically identified himself

as part of one particular musical trend, and in fact rejected the “avant-garde” label, Sun

Ra was part of an experimental movement that was dedicated to using music as a tool of

138
Chinitz, “Rejuvenation Through Joy,” p. 65.

86
social change. The concept of a black avant-garde is complicated because some critics

have assumed a correlation with European modernism. Thinkers such as Fred Moten,

however, argue that by virtue of undergoing the horror of slavery, African Americans

developed an artistic radicalism that works from within to challenge and transcend the

European avant-garde.

Moten writes in a footnote for In the Break, “...blackness is always a disruptive

surprise moving in the rich nonfullness of every term it modifies.” Moten’s point here is

reminiscent of Paul Gilroy’s argument about the development of black music being a

“counterculture of modernity,” working both within and against the currents of European

modernity. According to Monson, “Baraka, Shepp, Taylor, and other members of this

young jazz intelligentsia used modernism both to defy racially imposed limitations on

what an African American artist could be and to demand the development of a new, more

revolutionary black consciousness.”139 Whether or not he identified as part of a musical

avant-garde, Sun Ra’s work initiated conversations about the relationship between

blackness and an artistic cutting edge. Moten contends that there has been a longstanding

problematic assumption that the avant-garde was necessarily white: “What I’ve been

specifically interested in here is how the idea of a black avant-garde exists, as it were,

oxymoronically--as if black, on the one hand, and avant-garde, on the other, each

depends for its coherence upon the exclusion of the other.140”

While Sun Ra may have been aware of the history of European experimentalism,

his style was consistently in line with an explicitly African American musical aesthetic.

139
Monson, Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa, p. 261
140
Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. p. 33

87
Moreover, he made certain that all areas of his artistic output were conceived and

executed by black people; there were never any white managers or members of the

Arkestra. The idea of a cutting edge in high art may have come from the European Art

Music tradition, but according to Monson, Sun Ra and others like Archie Shepp and Cecil

Taylor demonstrated that “the melding of European ideas of an artistic vanguard and Pan-

African and Pan-Asian religious ideas helped to define a conception of music as a sphere

in which radical redefinitions of the self could take place--redefinitions that helped many

musicians and their devoted audiences to break out of the socially imposed niche that

U.S. society had defined for black music.”141

Amiri Baraka was one of the key critics writing about the experimental trend

known as the “New Thing” in the 1960s, and he took up the term “avant garde” in a black

popular music context. In an a 1961 essay on “The Jazz Avant-Garde,” he made the case

that in this new form, musicians were utilizing certain features of bebop, but also

beginning to move past it in terms of melodic and rhythmic innovation. Two examples

are the “jaggedness” of Ornette Coleman’s rhythms and Archie Shepp’s “refusal to

admit...that there is a melody.”142 For Baraka, this jazz avant-garde was an important step

away from what he viewed as the musical conservatism and predictability of the 1950s.

Baraka first wrote about Sun Ra in 1963, explaining that he hadn’t yet heard him play,

but that “a great many people I respect told me that weird Sun-Ra (whom I had always

thought of as a kind of ‘modernist’ fadist) had gotten a really swinging group

together....”143 He wrote again in 1966, breathlessly exclaiming, “The Heliocentric World

141
Monson, Freedom Sounds, p. 262
142
Amiri Baraka, Black Music, p. 92
143
Ibid, p. 107

88
of Sun-Ra is one of the most beautiful albums I have ever heard. It is a deeply fulfilling

experience. And one realization that this album gave me was the fact that the Sun-Ra-

Myth-Science Arkestra is really the first big band of the New Black Music.”144

In 1983, Sun Ra returned to Egypt to record several tracks with Salah Ragab, the

jazz drummer he had met in Cairo in 1971. This collaboration was unusual; it was one of

the few times Sun Ra recorded with an artist outside the Arkestra, and seven tracks they

recorded together in 1983 and 1984 were eventually released on an album titled Sun Ra

Arkestra Meets Salah Ragab in Egypt. This collaboration marks a shift in Sun Ra’s

thought about Egypt, from focusing solely on the ancient world for its status as a black

civilization, to actively working with a modern Arab jazz artist on a musical project.

Ragab and Ra’s work together is indicative of the fact that Sun Ra was interested in

experimenting with what “Egyptian jazz” might sound like both as a concept and as a

reality. The result is a thoroughly transnational mixture of Arabic-sounding themes and

free-flowing jazz. In their recordings, one can hear Ra’s imagined Egypt as well as

Ragab’s own interpretation of American jazz. Ragab studied with Malik Osman, also

known as Mac X Spears, an African American jazz saxophonist who lived in Cairo in the

1960s.

In 1968, along with several German ex-patriots from the Goethe Institute, Ragab

founded the Cairo Jazz Band, apparently Egypt’s first professional jazz ensemble. Ragab

was obviously inspired by black American politics of the period, and one of the 1971

tracks is titled “Music for Angela Davis.” Thirteen minutes long, this piece is full of fast

moving trumpet lines that constantly intersect and compete for attention, alongside

144
Amiri Baraka, Black Music, p. 149.

89
crashing percussion sounds. While there are moments of calm and relative harmony, the

majority of the track is loud and atonal. Dedicating this song to Angela Davis

demonstrates Ragab’s opposition to her imprisonment along with her radical political

message of black power in the late-1960s and early-1970s. It also represents a complex

transatlantic musical and sociopolitical trajectory. Here, Egyptian Arabs living under the

rule of Gamal Abdel Nasser, and friends and collaborators of Sun Ra, take up an

American political cause by playing an intricate experimental jazz piece dedicated to

Angela Davis. As Sun Ra had long found inspiration in ancient Egyptian culture, Arab

Egyptians in the Cairo Jazz Band also appeared to identify with African American

culture. Moreover, while the cultural politics of jazz didn’t couldn’t be directly translated

into a modern Egyptian context, “Music for Angela Davis” imparts evidence that Ragab

appreciated the sociopolitical disruption that was at the heart of experimental jazz.

Sun Ra’s recorded collaboration with Salah Ragab came late in his career, and the

resulting recordings constitute a complex musical world where several sonic universes

collide. Of the tracks Sun Ra and Saleh Ragab recorded together, Ragab is the composer

of two out of the three, and he plays percussion on the recordings. The Arkestra’s role on

the Ragab-composed tracks, “Dawn,” and “Egypt Strut,” is not only to play the

compositions, but also to add improvisatory harmonies, solos, and embellishments.

Within these solo and embellishment sections, a symbolic sampling component arises as

Sun Ra and the Arkestra chime in with motifs evoking a black Egyptian imaginary. The

track “Egypt Strut” features a recurring melodic minor piano scale with a raised 7th note,

90
a classic “Oriental” scale.145 One can only imagine that Ragab wrote this piece with an

American audience in mind, and sought to mix a sound he assumed would evoke

Egyptian-ness with his own version of jazz. The piece was released on an album all-

Ragab compositions featuring the Cairo Jazz Band, and so therefore one can compare

Ragab’s version with Sun Ra’s interpretation.

The Cairo Jazz Band’s recording of “Egypt Strut” is fast and rhythmically tight,

and the sound falls somewhere between big band and rock ‘n’ roll. The title, “Egypt

Strut,” points to an early-20th century ragtime dance influence, and the piece could in

fact be easily danced to. Beyond the melodic minor scale, the main element identifying

the piece as Egyptian is a brief duet by the mizmar, a high-pitched double reed

instrument. The melody line switches back and forth between the piano and the rest of the

band, and when the trumpet, mizmar, piano, and electric guitar play interludes, they all

adhere to the 4/4 rhythmic structure already established. In the song’s format, the band

pauses for two counts after a three-note descending pattern and the piano picks up the

melody. As a whole, the sound is clean and lyrical and without significant atonality.

While there is both syncopation and “swing” in the rhythm, it stays within the confines of

a big band concept. The incorporation of electric guitar into the instrumental mix at the

end of the song projects an early rock and roll vibe, indicating that Ragab was intrigued

by genres beyond jazz.

145
This same scale was used in the 1895 tune “The Streets of Cairo” written for the
Columbian Exposition in Chicago. It has been recycled numerous times in popular
culture since the late-19th century, perhaps most recently with the lyrics “There’s a place
in France/Where the naked ladies dance,” and has also been known as the snake charmer
song. To an American ear, the melody immediately summons up an Orientalized image
of a foreign place where female sexuality is on public display.

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 Sun Ra’s collaborated version of “Egypt Strut,” by contrast, opens with an

extended synthesizer riff that leads into the full band playing the melody. From the 1960s

on, Sun Ra was known for his interest in employing new technology in unusual ways,

and he often experimented with the electric piano or Moog synthesizer. On “Egypt Strut”

as well as the subsequent track, “Dawn,” he plays an ethereal-sounding improvised line

on the synthesizer that metamorphosizes into a kind of electric space-age Egyptianized

fantasy. The bulk of Ra’s improvisation is made up of a series of five high-register notes

that are consistently repeated and at certain points he repeats a single note, a symbolic

sampling that reworks Ragab’s original version of the song. The tempo is noticeably

slower in the collaboration, and Sun Ra often plays with the structure of the rhythm by

slowing down and speeding up in his solos. He also frequently dips into atonality, and

instead of pausing for each instrumental interlude, when John Gilmore plays a saxophone

solo, Ra creates an eerie accompaniment with his own synthesizer line. Later in the piece,

the Arkestra plays along with Sun Ra’s solo as it takes on a more frenzied and chaotic

energy.

Through his unconventional use of the synthesizer on this track, Sun Ra

effectively deconstructs the orientalist overtones of Ragab’s Egyptian-jazz encounter, a

big band aesthetic meshed with an Oriental-sounding melody. Sun Ra’s model, on the

other hand, brings together the outer space and ancient Egypt elements of his philosophy.

The synthesizer symbolizes his dedication to space age Afrofuturism in the form of new

technology, and there is an unearthly quality to the sound that emphasizes this Egypt-in-

space fantasy. By agreeing to work with Salah Ragab and record two of his compositions,

Sun Ra acknowledged the existence of a modern Egypt that was different from the one he

92
imagined, at the same time paying tribute to the black Egypt of his imagination through

the frenetic improvisation of his solo. The integration of Sun Ra’s two philosophical

themes in this piece reinforces the fact that music was a medium through which he could

actually fulfill his ideological and spiritual goals. The performance of these sounds made

his seemingly wild ideas about the promise of outer space and ancient Egypt tangible and

open for others to experience in an sonic form.

Conclusion

In the 1980 documentary film Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise, there are clips of Sun Ra

performing with the Arkestra juxtaposed with scenes of him waxing poetic about his

philosophies in the Egypt room of the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania. He

stands next to a stone sphinx with hieroglyphic writing on the side and says, “Somehow,

ancient Egypt is thought of as a kingdom of bondage. It would be better to say the

kingdom of discipline. The kingdom of precision. The kingdom of culture, beauty, art.”

He then points to the wall carved with hieroglyphics behind him and continues, “It would

be better to say that because this is the proof of it. The stones are speaking through

vibrations of beauty, vibrations of discipline, vibrations of precision.”146 The

juxtapositions between Ra speaking and long clips of the Arkestra playing on a rooftop

illustrate the continuity of his philosophical vision and the way its mobilization in reality.

Sun Ra sought to reach the widest possible audience with his music in hopes that

it would have a broad transformational effect. In the liner notes for Jazz by Sun Ra, he

articulates his goals for how his music should impact the listener: “The real aim of this

music is to co-ordinate the minds of peoples into an intelligent reach for a better world,

146
Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise, DVD.

93
and an intelligent approach to the living future.”147 Therefore, not only were Sun Ra’s

Afro-Orientalist central to the creation of new visions of Afrocentric futures, but he

believed the sounds themselves could shift the course of human development in the

direction of African American liberation.

147
Szwed, Space is the Place, p. 155.

94
Chapter 3: Affiliatory Desires: Consuming the Middle East in World Music

In September 1999, the British pop artist Sting released “Desert Rose,” a single

from his album Brand New Day. A duet with Algerian rai singer Cheb Mami, the song

became a hit in the U.S. as well as Europe and the U.K., reaching #17 on the Billboard

Hot 100 list, and excerpts from the video appeared in a Jaguar commercial.148 The song

begins with a melismatic passage by Cheb Mami, followed by a solo sung in Arabic.

Sting and Mami take turns singing, Sting in English and Mami in Arabic. This bilingual

hit is representative of a late-1990s moment in thse music industry in which “world

music” began to cross over into the mainstream. Rai, an Algerian urban folk music that

emerged in the 1930s, was already widespread in France but had not been popularized in

the U.S. While American listeners were first been introduced to rai in the late-1980s,

Sting’s “Desert Rose” boosted its profile exponentially when top-40 radio stations around

the country added the song to their regular rotations.149

The music video for “Desert Rose” cuts between Cheb Mami singing in a Las

Vegas club and Sting driving through the Nevada desert to meet him for the

performance.150 Sitting in the back of a hired car, Sting records the scene around him

148
“Desert Rose” reached #4 on the Italian Billboard charts, #7 in Germany, #2 in
Canada, and #6 in France.
149
Sting won two Grammys for Brand New Day, “Best Pop Vocal Album” and “Best
Male Pop Vocal Performance” in 2000 and he and Mami performed “Desert Rose” at the
televised Grammy Awards as well as a 2001 Super Bowl pre-game performance.
150
Produced by A& M Records, the video for “Desert Rose” has 65 million views on
Youtube as of this writing.

95
with a handheld video camera. Meanwhile, Mami sings in the midst of an attractive

young crowd, accompanied by a female violinist in a belly dance costume, a Middle

Eastern percussionist, and two DJs on a turntable. When Sting appears at the club, the

two singers perform side-by-side before a captivated audience. This scene is interspersed

with brief clips of a couple kissing passionately and the writhing bodies of club dancers

[include stills]. Both visually and musically, “Desert Rose” conveys the message that

Algerian rai is hip and glamorous and a music that Sting himself enjoys. The lyrics

describe the “rare perfume” and the “secret promise” of the desert rose, obviously a

reference to an exoticized Arab woman. In the Arabic improvisation section, Mami sings

about longing for his beloved, and while Sting and Mami both share the spotlight in the

video, it is the Arab female body that is the focal point of the song.

“Desert Rose” enjoyed so much success partially because of its appearance after

the decade-long world music craze of the 1990s, which began in the late-1980s, and

initially consisted mostly of music from West and East Africa. As the introductory liner

notes for a 2001 Putumayo World Music album titled Arabic Groove pointed out, “In the

U.S., the Middle Eastern music trend is still simmering under the surface, waiting to burst

through. The participation of rai singer Cheb Mami...[is a] sign that the melodies of

Arabic music are finding the American public’s ear.”151 In Europe, however, and the

colonial metropole of France in particular, North African music had already been widely

popularized.

The world music trend of the previous two decades propelled Cheb Mami to

stardom under Sting’s name, allowing him to reach a level of fame in the U.S. that was

151
Arabic Groove, Putumayo World Music PUT189-2, 2001.

96
previously unattainable for artists from the Arab world. Cheb Mami’s relative success

with “Desert Rose” rasises questions about what it meant for artists from the Middle East

and North Africa to gain prestige in the U.S. under the heading of “world music,” and

what role sounds themselves have played in launching these artists to stardom. Over the

course of the 1990s, as world music became a legitimate genre, the attention that artists

and albums received were dependent both on a fascination with difference, as with the

postwar genre of exotica, and a cultural and political identification with the Global South.

Through discussions of the liner notes, album art, critical commentary, and

reviews of Putumayos’s Arabic Groove, this chapter explores the reception of North

African rai and Middle Eastern “fusion” music in U.S. I argue that American responses to

this album and its featured artists illuminate a pre- and post-9/11 audiopolitics that

promoted identification with Arab culture from a safe distance. Building upon Jayna

Brown’s concept of music as an “oceanic” and timeless force of unity, in this sonic

configuration, the listener/consumer relates to the suffering of the other across cultural

and geographic barriers and in turn gains tolerance and enlightenment.152 Consuming

music from the Arab world presents the presumably white middle class American listener

with the opportunity to perform compassion and what Melani McAlister has called

“presumptive affiliation.”153 Combining ideology and genuine feeling, this world music

listening audience constitutes an intimate public founded on the utopian belief that music

152
Jayna Brown, “Buzz and Rumble: Global Music and Utopian Impulse,” Social Text,
28 (1), 2010, p. 125-146.
153
This phenomenon is reminiscent of what Melani McAlister has called “enchanted
internationalism” in Evangelical Christian rock music, an interest in fostering feelings of
connection to impoverished populations in the Global South. See “What is your heart
for?: Affect and Internationalism in the Evangelical Public Sphere,” American Literary
History, Vol 20 (4), Winter 2008: 870-895.

97
can act as a cultural “bridge builder” that transcends material realities to foster peace and

global understanding.

The logic embedded in this configuration can be linked to the politics of liberal

multiculturalism. Through consumer-based musical preferences, the listener displays

tolerance and moral superiority as s/he might through the consumption of “fair trade”

products or an appreciation of “ethnic” foods. The promotional material for Putumayo’s

Arabic Groove advocates a narrative suggesting that tensions and misunderstandings can

be repaired through music and mutual appreciation can be reached through sympathetic

listening. Moreover, the Western consumer’s appreciation of sounds from the Arab world

is taken as direct evidence for her/his open-mindedness. Echoing David Byrne’s

contention that global musical appreciation leads to affinities that can dismantle

assumptions of superiority inherited from imperial legacies, the audiopolitics of Arabness

in world music have rested on the premise that the white Western listener produces social

change through cultural acceptance and a willingness to engage with the other.154

Record labels’ world music marketing strategies contrast starkly with Sun Ra’s

interest in incorporating in non-Western instruments and his conceptualization of his

work as “universal.” As an artist and owner of his own record label, Sun Ra’s primary

motivation was broad social change, not financial success. Ra’s grassroots approach to

promoting and distributing his music additionally represents a non-industry or anti-

industry approach. While Sun Ra was interested in music as global or galactic, and

constantly introduced sounds he hoped would open the minds of his listeners, his

154
For more on the logic of middle class sympathy and compassion, see Carolyn
Betensky, “Princes as Paupers: Pleasure and the Imagination of Powerlessness” Cultural
Critique, Vol 56, 2003: 129-157.

98
operation outside of the music industry illuminates the impact of commodification on

other cultural products as a whole. Furthermore, while Sun Ra’s use of non-Western

instruments and his symbolic sampling of Arabic music came out of a desire to expand

the scope of African American imagination, the genre of world music was created with

the intention of packaging and selling music from the Global South.

The attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the crash of flight 81 in

Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001 significantly shifted American public discourse on

the “Middle East,” with a melodramatic narrative about good overcoming evil becoming

the primary framework for geopolitics or “moral geography” under George W. Bush’s

war on terror.155 The collective sonic imaginary surrounding the Arab world shifted

during this moment as well, and anti-Arab racism in popular music increased

considerably.156 However, the events of September 11 did not always produce distancing,

as one might expect, and in some cases the politics of affiliation and bridge building were

magnified. Among educated liberal or “cultural creative” audiences, there remained a

desire to better understand and connect with Arab culture.157 For the liberal consumer,

demonstrating compassion or appreciation for Arabness despite perceived danger or

radicalism after 9/11 made her/him that much more ethical or even "edgy."

Arabic Groove, which included tracks from rai artists Cheb Mami and Khaled, as

well as Natacha Atlas, provides a compelling window into American middle class sonic

155
See Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters and Libby Anker, Orgies of Feeling:
Melodrama and the Politics of Feeling, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.
156
Sting had planned a US tour called “Desert Roses and Arabian Rhythms” featuring
musicians from Eygpt, Algeria, and Iran, scheduled to begin on September 14, 2001.
Following 9/11, Sting’s representatives cancelled the tour.
157
According to Jacob Edgar, previous head of music research and VP of product
development, Putumayo deemed its target audience to be the “cultural creative”
demographic.

99
identifications with the Arab both before and after 9/11. The album’s success illustrates

the appeal of world music in general as well as many Americans’ desire to become more

aware and educated about Arab culture in the wake of the deaths of over 3,000 people on

September 11, 2001. Arabic Groove harnessed the previous appreciation of rai and fusion

among world music listeners, amplifying an impulse to identify and generate mutual

understanding during a moment of confusion and conflict. Arabic Groove coincidentally

hit shelves just prior to September 11 2001, and the attacks on the World Trade Center

occurred uncomfortably close to Putumayo’s corporate offices in Midtown Manhattan.

One employee describes it as an “intense and sad time for everyone.”158 The label’s

offices closed for several days, and when the staff returned to work, they largely assumed

that Arabic Groove would be a flop due to the timing of the release.

With public rhetoric swirling around the dangers of fundamentalist Islam and

Arab culture leading up to the war on terror, Putumayo officials believed their album of

catchy pop songs from North Africa and the Middle East would be ignored, if not openly

criticized. Contrary to the Putumayo team’s fears, Arabic Groove became one of the best-

selling records in the label’s history, and is still considered one of its most popular

albums. According to Jacob Edgar, Putumayo’s former head of music research and vice

president of product development, the reason for this is that the American public was

looking for “good news” immediately following the trauma of 9/11 and people sought

opportunities to connect with Arab culture in positive ways. In an effort to boost the

album’s sales, Edgar handed out copies of Arabic Groove in cafes and restaurants in the

158
Jacob Edgar (former head of music research and VP of product development,
Putumayo) in discussion with the author, November 7, 2013.

100
“tastemaking” Manhattan neighborhoods of SOHO and the East Village, and he attributes

this effort, along with its release during the 9/11 moment, to the album’s success.

Putumayo was founded by Dan Storper in 1975 as an imported clothing and crafts

boutique in New York City, and expanded into a record label in 1993. The label quickly

became known for its world music compilations, which were sold in Starbucks Stores in

the late-1990s. Popular Putumayo compilations include Music from the Coffee Lands

(1997), Reggae Around the World (1999), Zydeco (2000), French Cafe (2003), and

Acoustic Africa (2006). The company also offers a series of children’s albums. Through

its tagline, Putumayo proclaims to “Celebrate the World!” and the company’s motto

assures consumers that its products are “guaranteed to make you feel good!” On the

whole, Putumayo prides itself on presenting music from all over the world to American

audiences in unobjectionable ways. Label executives purposely avoid songs with overtly

religious or political lyrics that might offend listeners or lead them to feel the music is

“not for them”; the label’s main goal is to create an approachable listening experience for

consumers from diverse backgrounds who may or may not consider themselves religious

or politically active.

Putumayo’s songs are carefully selected and accompanied by liner notes

providing contextual background, suited to an educated audience seeking to be well

informed. The introductory notes for Arabic Groove emphasize the “modern” sounds that

are creating a transformation in contemporary Arab music:

From the trendy bars of Barbes, the bustling neighborhood of Paris populated by
immigrants from North and West Africa, to the cosmopolitan nightclubs of Cairo,
Arab music is experiencing a transformation. Rooted in centuries-old musical
traditions that are governed by long-established structures and instrumentation,
the popular music of the Arab world has recently found inspiration and influence

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 in the contemporary urban pop music of the West.159

This description informs consumers that they are on the cutting edge of a new

phenomenon, a meeting of ancient and modern traditions. According to Edgar, the 2001

Arabic Groove album represented a dramatic departure from the company’s typical

format of presenting traditional folk music.160 Instead, Putumayo marketed Arabic

Groove as a fun, pop-based album full of dance tracks from the North Africa and the

Middle East. With this release, the label hoped to reach a younger segment of their

“cultural creative” audience, a group Edgar describes as “open-minded people” who are

“globally aware, interested in the world, maybe more educated in that sense, interested in

arts.”161 The middle class status of Putumayo’s target audience is evident from this

euphemistic description, which points to the necessity of marketing strategies that

maximize sales while also remaining “politically correct” during the mid-1990s cultural

moment of the company’s founding.

It is worth mentioning that for U.S. audiences, public associations with the

Middle East in the 1980s and 1990s included the Iran Hostage Crisis and the 1991

Operation Desert Storm, which significantly affected public responses to the region. One

consequence of U.S. military involvement in the Middle East and Iran came in the form

of discrimination against Arab and Muslim Americans. Arab Americans experienced

significant racism from the 1960s onward. Over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, “U.S.

political, military, and economic expansion in the region paralleled a rise in the

institutionalization of government polities and law enforcement that specifically targeted

159
Jacob Edgar, Arabic Groove liner notes, PUTI89-2, Putumayo World Music, 2001.
160
Edgar, discussion.
161
Ibid

102
Arabs and Arab Americans.”162 Several government agencies during this period began

carrying out surveillance of Arab Americans, and the 1987 case of the LA 8 exemplified

the fear surrounding threats of terrorism.163 While the atmosphere of intimidation and

anti-Arab racism during this time period did impact American public views on the

Middle East, these attitudes clashed with liberal multicultural ideals of open-mindedness.

World music listening audiences were already oriented toward this model of tolerance

and appreciation, and thus rather than participating in discrimination, many sought to

learn about Arab culture.

Sounding ‘The World’

From its inception, purveyors of “world music” have struggled to define the genre

as well as its objective audience. It was in a meeting in London on June 29, 1987, that a

group of U.K. record label executives officially decided to create a new musical genre

called world music. The meeting had been called because the labels were frustrated that

music distributors and stores didn’t know where to stock the diverse styles of music they

were putting out, and were therefore less likely to sell their albums.164 The executives

represented companies including Ace Records, Crammed Discs, Oval, Rogue Records,

and Triple Earth, mainly offbeat independent labels hoping to gain a larger following.

Ben Mandelson, founding member of the popular U.K. world music ensemble 3

162
Nadine Naber, “Introduction,” In Naber and Amaney Jamal, eds, Race and Arab
Americans Before and After 9/11, p. 34.
163
The LA 8 were a group of individuals, seven Palestinians and one Kenyan, charged
with distributing literature for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and
threatened with deportation in 1987. The case was dropped in 2007.
164
“Minutes of Meeting Behind the Various ‘World Music’ Record Companies and
Interested Parties, June 29, 1987,” fRoots, accessed 1 December 2015,
http://www.frootsmag.com/content/features/world_music_history/minutes/page03.html.

103
Mustaphas 3, was also present.165 Among the alternatives to “world music” they

discussed were “world beat,” “hot beat,” and “tropical beat.” Compared to these options,

they determined “world music” to be most broad, permitting room for an unlimited range

of musical styles and geographical origins.

Though a relatively recent genre, the concept of world music developed along

with the academic discipline of ethnomusicology starting in the 1950s, as a means of

acknowledging and classifying music existing outside the confines of Western art music.

As an academic discipline, ethnomusicology sought to take non-Western musics

seriously as subjects of inquiry and to educate about the role of music in culture in a

range of settings. The term “world music,” therefore, can be thought of as the vernacular

term for ethnomusicology. World music, as it was conceived as a marketing genre,

predominantly included African and Afro-diasporic artists, but conceptually it includes

all popular musics not under the European classical umbrella. Beginning in the 1960s,

some record labels had created international departments for marketing purposes.166

Taken literally, the title is the most inclusive—and likely the most contentious—

musical categories in existence, incorporating music representative of any ethnicity,

165
Though the group members used Arab names and claimed to be from the Balkans,
they in fact originated from the UK. Their music exhibits Middle Eastern, Mediterranean,
Irish, and Latin American influences.
166
The split in the academy between musicology, which has traditionally been
understood as the academic study of classical or Western Art Music, and
ethnomusicology, the study of non-Western musics, has caused much tension and unease
among scholars. One of the main consequences of this is that ethnomusicologists
perpetually question the place of their discipline in relation to musicology as a whole.
According to Steven Feld, “In those days [the early 60s], nostalgically remembered by
many for their innocence and optimism, the phrase world music had a clear populist ring.
It was a less cumbersome alternative to ethnomusicology, the more strikingly academic
term that emerged in the mid-1950s to refer to the study of non-Western musics and
musics of ethnic minorities.”

104
location, or political background. In reality, as consumers eventually came to understand,

record label executives intended the title “world music” to be code for largely indigenous

music of the Global South. As Steven Feld points out, the genre could just have easily

been called “third world music,” as insiders in the music industry had occasionally called

it before the invention of the new term. The necessity of a meeting to develop new

language indicates that many labels, at least in the U.K., were already distributing music

that would eventually be marketed in the “world” category. As a press release sent to

distributors assured them, “This means that you no longer have to worry about where to

put those new Yemenite pop, Bulgarian choir, Zairean soukous or Gambian kora

records.”167 The “world music” title was therefore conceived for the efficient marketing

of “non-Western” or “ethnic” musics. After settling on a name for the genre, the label

executives developed a world music chart, a compilation promo cassette, and hired a joint

public relations firm to promote their idea.

The strategy of offering a new marketing genre was enormously successful, and

US and UK distributors and retailers quickly adopted the world music grouping. World

music provided an “other” category for albums that would not fit into the major genre

headings, e.g. pop, rock, jazz, R&B, and classical. By 1992, a Grammy Award was

awarded to artists in world music, and a world music Billboard chart had been created,

signaling the genre’s official status in the music industry. A highly mobile and

transnational phenomenon, the genre was initially conceived in the U.K. and eventually

migrated to the U.S. and Europe. It is important to acknowledge the difference between

the reception of world music genres in the U.S. as opposed to other contexts. World

167
“Press Release 01 - World Music,” fRoots, undated, accessed 1 Dec 2015,
http://www.frootsmag.com/content/features/world_music_history/minutes/page04.html.

105
music in Europe and the United Kingdom has always been connected to postcolonial

politics, with indigenous popular musics gaining popularity in colonial metropoles, such

as bhangra and Indian popular music in the U.K. and Algerian rai in France. Whereas in

the U.S., rai has appealed to white audiences for its sonic otherness, in France it appeals

to a large North African immigrant population hailing from a former colony.

By way of world music history in the U.S. and the U.K., it is worthwhile to

briefly discuss the WOMAD (Worlds of Music and Dance) festival of the 1980s and 90s.

A prelude to the official industry adoption of the term “world music,” the festival was

founded in 1980 by Peter Gabriel. In part, the event represented an attempt by Gabriel to

bring unknown “ethnic” artists into public view and as well as to incorporate vendors and

sell tickets to world music fans interested in a “global experience.” The first WOMAD

Festival was held in Shepton Mallet, U.K. in July 1982. According to WOMAD’s

website, “the crowds came in their droves and encountered a feat of extraordinary

musicians and artists, workshops for all. Don Cherry, Simple Minds, Imrat Khan, The

Drummers of Burundi, Echo and the Bunnymen and Peter Gabriel (to name but a few).”

WOMAD first came to the U.S. in the summer of the 1993, in the form of a 10-city tour,

and reviews were less positive. The New York Times’ Jon Pareles commented, “Mr.

Gabriel is a genuine fan of world music who founded both Womad [sic] and Real World

Records. But despite his better impulses, his band subsumes exotic elements into stoic

English rock anthems, suggesting enlightened colonialism.”168

Rolling Stone critic David Herndon called WOMAD “a new world party,” but

bemoaned the focus on Peter Gabriel and special guest Sinead O’Connor, which took

168
Jon Parales, “Review/Pop; World of World Music, US Division,” New York Times,
Sept 8, 1993.

106
away from the lesser-known international artists. He also described the festival as

“strangely sober,” suggesting that WOMAD had failed to live up to audience

expectations of spectacle, at least at this particular event in Saratoga, NY. According to

Herndon, the finale featuring the Drummers of Burundi after Peter Gabriel’s encore was

the only point where WOMAD “delivered on the promise of something truly different

and thrilling.”169 These critics’ reactions were concerned with fact that the festival lacked

“authentic” musicians and commodified a specific brand of liberal politics in an attempt

to pursue an American audience. WOMAD’s failure to succeed in the U.S., despite

significant interest in world music within a certain demographic, indicates Peter Gabriel’s

lack of credibility among U.S. audiences as well as a gap between UK and American

audience expectations regarding authenticity and performance. Though the festival never

became significantly popular in the U.S., WOMAD’s continued presence throughout

Europe and in Australia and New Zealand signals the merging of the festival

phenomenon with the liberal cosmopolitan politics of world music.

The question of authenticity has always haunted both ethnomusicology and world

music, since both categories are based on the assumption that there are ways to discern

the authentic musics of various cultures. Listening to the world’s music in its most

“authentic” form was part of what made the world music genre appealing, and some

critics have denounced the incorporation of familiar Western sounds. On the other hand,

the so-called “fusion” of various sounds and techniques considered “danceable” was part

of what made world music so appealing. As Paul Gilroy argues, “Authenticity enhances

the appeal of selected cultural commodities and has become an important element in the

169
David Herndon, “A New World Party,” Rolling Stone, October 28, 1993, p 24.

107
mechanism of the mode of racialization necessary to making non-European and non-

American musics acceptable items in an expanded pop market.”170 Since the “world

music” label can be attached to any artist deemed unfit for standard industry categories, it

is the branding of ethnic “world-ness” that is used to market the artist.

The term “world music” itself has been the source of persistent controversy

among scholars, musicians, and listeners, with David Byrne famously titling a 1999

essay, “I hate world music.” Despite his own participation in the genre, Byrne argues that

the category of world music alienates listeners from artists by creating a geographic

binary of West and non-West.171 Byrne contends that if listeners would take non-Western

artists seriously and not “ghettoize” them under the world music umbrella, they would

start to genuinely identify with apparently distant cultures. He suggests that the world

music category itself is the main impediment to cross-cultural identification in music.

Without it, privileged audiences might outgrow their ethnocentrism and overcome

systemic power relationships to foster more authentic encounters. While Byrne does not

explicitly criticize the music industry, he ultimately suggests that the packaging of global

artists in world music is what leads to greater distances between listeners and performers.

Those that have criticized world music tend to find a common thread in its

origins, a culture industry where the market acts as a dehumanizing force that divides

consumer from producer. Along the lines of Adorno’s conceptualization of the mass

culture industry, Feld and other scholars have maintained that the world music industry

170
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1995, p. 99.
171
Byrne owns a world music record label, Luaka Bop, founded in 1988, and he recorded
a Latin-themed album, Rei Momo featuring the renowned artists Milton Cardona, Willie
Colón, and Celia Cruz, in 1989.

108
produces a permanent sameness in which the non-Western other is commodified and

listeners are divided from their listening subjects across a constructed chasm of

exoticism. Jocelyne Guilbault asserts that the marketing of world music demonstrates the

“banalizing of difference,” suggesting that commercialized representations of musical

others makes them all sound the same. Feld has argued, moreover that there are dual

associations with the genre: “...today’s world music, like globalization discourse more

generally, is equally routed through the public sphere via tropes of anxiety and

celebration.”172 Questions of cultural preservation and authenticity illustrate anxiety

about reproducing colonial models of cultural consumption, while celebration manifests

in a desire to applaud the diversity of musical sounds and the increased access to these

sounds most people have experienced along with technological innovation and the

invention of the internet.

As Bourdieu argued in The Field of Cultural Production, every site of cultural

production has its own complex set of circumstances that contribute to its development.

World music is dependent on the music industry’s commodification of an indistinct

cultural difference and is also closely tied to expectations surrounding class and taste.

Just as an appreciation of Western art music long served as a signifier of refinement

among middle and upper-class consumers, world music carries an association with

educated worldliness that heightens its appeal. For Americans in the era of the culture

wars of the 1990s, the ability to demonstrate musical knowledge about Africa or Latin

America signaled a dedication to a politics of multiculturalism. Appreciation of

Senegambian kora music, for example, could signal a listener’s educated

172
Steven Feld, “A Sweet Lullaby for World Music,” Public Culture, Vol 12 (1), Winter
2000: p. 151.

109
cosmopolitanism as well as her political commitment to racial equality. Beyond this

though, listeners have always taken pleasure in the sounds themselves, not solely their

potential for increasing cultural capital.

The 1980s and 90s were a heyday for world music, coinciding with a fascination

with globalization and its cultural markers. Thinkers such as Frederic Jameson and

Marshall McLuhan have discussed the intensification of the effects of globalization since

the 1960s, along with postmodernism.173 Jameson contends in Postmodernism or, the

Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism that the postmodern moment is marked by the

fragmentation of the subject and the rise of cultural pastiche. Furthermore, in late

capitalism, cultural forms such as art, music, and architecture are increasingly

commodified and recycled. McLuhan claimed that this configuration would transform

social and political identities due to greater interconnectedness, a concept that resonated

in the era of world music.

Theorists of globalization and its related political economic shifts have traced

several narratives surrounding the concept of the local versus the global. In its

development, world music can be conceptualized of as a case study in the larger process

of globalization.174 According to Guilbault, several of the central elements of this period

include:

173
Media scholar Marshall McLuhan coined the term “global village” in the 1960s to
refer to the instantaneous transfer of information through electronic media.
174
In “On Redefining the ‘Local’ Through World Music,” Jocelyne Guilbault claims that
the decentralization and fragmentation of the music industry in the 1970s and 1980s led
to the fear that dominant genres could lose their pre-eminence: “The tendency to equate
dominant cultures with global culture because they have become the common
denominator in many spheres of activity is being reviewed in light of the fragmentation
of many markets, including that of music.” World music has made ‘local’ cultures more
aware of their position in the global economy, producing fears among some observers

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 …the breakup of the communist bloc; the resurgence of many ethnic groups; the
realignment of various communities and the formation of new alliances;
increasing problems of multiculturality and polyethnicity; the consolidation of the
global media system; and the reconfiguration of the world economic order with a
more fluid international system...175

All of these elements are significant to understanding the context in which world music

emerged. With the “reconfiguration of the world economic order” Guilbault refers to a

global shift that has also been called neoliberalism.176

Due to market dynamics, listeners automatically become consumers of difference,

but this does not mean they are unaware of the power relationships they are participating

in. As Jayna Brown insightfully contends, the utopian impulses of what she terms “world

beat liberalism” tend to overshadow the material realities of these power differences,

about the possibility of cultural “grey-out.” Guilbault views the appropriation of the term
“world music” in 1987 by British industry leaders as an effort to gain control over
markets outside of Anglo-American purview.174 By incorporating “global” elements into
their music, artists in the 1980s and 90s operated both inside and outside of the “center”
vs. “periphery” model, meaning that the system operated based on polylateral markets,
and local musicians gain success horizontally rather than vertically. Here, individual
artists in the world music realm gain success first by getting recognized by members of
their own communities; it is only after they win popularity in local markets that they are
able to move on to larger global audiences. For example, a French Caribbean soukous
singer will need the support of her own community before crossing over to a wider
audience.
175
Guilbault, “Redefining the ‘Local,’” p. 139
176
Harvey contends, one element of the persist economic changes have been “the
universal tendency to increase social inequality and to expose the least fortunate elements
in any society...to the chill winds of austerity and the dull fate of increasing
marginalization.”176 Thus, neoliberalism is a broad and powerful system that has had a
major impact on countries outside the U.S. and Europe by requiring them to follow
certain patterns of development that are not actually economically beneficial to them. For
the world music industry, neoliberalism has meant that the musicians on the ground in the
“developing world” didn’t necessarily reap the greatest benefits from its the music’s
production. Instead, it is most often the record label executives who receive the legal and
financial rights to the sounds they distribute.176 It was power differences between
musicians and label owners that helped make the world music genre financially lucrative.

111
however.177 Putumayo intentionally frames its products as guaranteed to make listeners

“feel good.” The prioritization of “feeling good” reveals the world music focus on

Western consumer pleasure and positivity that is the result of a racialized global

economy. According to Keith Negus, “World music travels an ambiguous route, between

the mythical search for authentic redemption and a quest for purity, and a type of

reflexive post-exotic listening which is aware of the territorializing strategies of the music

industry, media and the way in which the musical identity has been constructed.”178

Negus indicates that world music audiences may be conscious of the territorializing

strategies they are buying into, and this changes the meaning of the transaction. If

audiences are purposefully contributing to the commercial success of world music, this

means they are actually taking pleasure in the construction of the sonic other. In a “post-

exotic” formulation, consumers reflexively identify with the othering process. Negus’

notion of “reflexive post-exotic listening” implies a link to the sonic imaginary, where

listeners are grappling with their sensory perceptions of the sounds they are hearing.

While world music was originally premised on equating the musics of

innumerable cultures to make them equally palatable to Western audiences, there have

always been modes of distinction. For instance, Africa and the Caribbean were originally

the focus of most world music labels, and according critic Robert Christgau, “World

music is a term that is only going to exist in the metropolitan centers, among people who

conceive of themselves as being in the center of the world. Ten years ago, when those

people sat down to make up this category, what they were thinking about for the most

177
Brown, “Buzz and Rumble”
178
Keith Negus, Music Genres and Corporate Cultures, New York: Routledge, 1999, p.
156

112
part was the music of Africa and the African diaspora--the Caribbean especially.”179 In

contrast to the generic Western imaginary regarding Africa and the Caribbean, the

Middle East and North Africa have long been perceived as sites of conflict, and even

before 9/11, music from these regions was interpreted against a backdrop of violence.

One of the few scholars to write about this topic, Ted Swedenburg, argues that

anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiment were the main obstacles to Arab music becoming a

major force in world music before 9/11. Linking this “special antipathy” toward the Arab

world in the U.S. to the broader discourse of orientalism, Swedenburg contends that in

addition to the strength of sympathy for Israel, “generalized public ignorance” tends to

“make it quite difficult for any overtly politicized Arab music to gain acceptance via the

U.S. world music market.”180 Non-Arab music associated with political movements,

including Thomas Mapfumo from Zimbabwe and Fela Kuti from Nigeria, were much

more readily adopted in the U.S., suggesting that the common route by which many

“world music” musicians become successful was not open to Arab artists.

While this is largely true, it does not take into account the demographics of the

world music audience, largely white middle class “cultural creatives,” who are inclined

toward developing identificatory connections via sound and music. This, along with the

history of American 20th century “post-Orientalism,” a discourse built around connection

and affiliation rather than alienation, has meant that many Americans have been more

interested in potential connections with the Middle East than with differences.181

179
Robert Christgau, “What is World Music?” The Village Voice, July 29, 1997.
180
Ted Swedenburg, “The ‘Arab Wave’ in World Music after 9/11,” Anthropoligica, Vol
46 (2): 2004, p. 17
181
McAlister’s concept of post-war “benevolent supremacy,” which she describes in
relation to film, is in many ways applicable to other cultural products, including music.

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Secondly, while it is true that artists who explicitly declare support for Palestinians

largely have not been successful in the world music scene, there are less explicit ways

that Arab music has remained politicized. Even before 9/11, “fusion” artists such as Ofra

Haza and Natacha Atlas opened up American public consideration of peacemaking in the

Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and Algerian rai enabled listeners to evaluate music’s

democratizing capabilities.

Hearing Arabness

The overwhelming popularity of Putumayo’s Arabic Groove, featuring rai and

fusion tracks, demonstrates the affective power of these styles. In the post-9/11

atmosphere of fear and the military action in Iraq and Afghanistan, the album served to

build collective sympathy and solidarity with an imagined Middle East. As with the

continued popularity of Sting’s song “Desert Rose,” listening to these sounds gave an

expanding world music audience a window into a culture they knew little about aside

from what they heard on the news. Edgar’s description of Putumayo’s audience matches

the world music listening audience overall, a politically liberal, middle to upper class,

highly educated demographic. Putumayo executives apparently debated over what to call

the album. Possibilities included “Middle Eastern Groove,” “Arab Groove,” and

“Arabian Groove.”182 “Middle East” and “Arabia” didn’t accurately describe the album’s

geographic placement because most of the tracks originated in North Africa, and the label

ultimately decided on “Arabic Groove,” the term describing the language rather than the

182
The title “Oriental Groove” was ruled out due to its “colonialist terminology,” which
Edgar and other Putumayo executives believed to be too loaded.

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cultural group, since the executives “thought it would resonate better with audiences than

‘Arab Groove.’”183

Edgar contends that as head of research and development for Putumayo, he had

always long been interested in music from North Africa and the Middle East because of

its potential for widespread appeal. Putumayo released their first Arab music compilation,

Cairo to Casablanca, as part of the “Odyssey” series in 1998. The company’s president,

Dan Storper, wrote in the liner notes, “Initially, I found [Arabic music] somewhat

inaccessible both sonically and from an availability standpoint. It wasn’t ‘World Music

101’ but generally required more developed ears. Well, over the past 5 years, I’ve really

come to appreciate great Arabic music.”184 Here Storper signals to American “cultural

creative” audiences that although it may be unfamiliar and even “difficult” due to its

microtonality, Arabic music can and should be part of the world music canon.

Whereas the cover art for Cairo to Casablanca was folklore-based, made up of

images that would depict a map of the region complete with thatched roofs, pyramids,

and camels, the Arabic Groove cover depicts a man and two women dancing under

pointed arches against a backdrop of intricate mosaic tiles. Regarding this cover art,

Edgar says: “Arabic groove is still in a casbah, but it’s these amorphous figures that could

be hipsters dancing in a club...it could be a hip cafe in Cairo as opposed to a rural village

somewhere else. So there’s a modern aesthetic we’re trying to cultivate while remaining

connected to cultural traditions.”185 Moreover, he describes convincing Storper to release

the album on a hunch that listeners would find it interesting. The “modern aesthetic”

183
Edgar, discussion.
184
Dan Storper, Cairo to Casablanca liner notes, Putumayo World Music PUTU 143-2,
1998.
185
Edgar, discussion.

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Putumayo intended to showcase on the album constituted the same Western influences

that led to the appeal of both fusion and rai. An Amazon reviewer called the album

“Arabic Bubblegum Dance Groove,” describing the ideal audience as “the dedicated

listener and the red-blooded world citizen.”186

Rather than attempting to reproduce “traditional” Arabic folk styles as had been

the case on a 1998 album Cairo to Casablanca, Arabic Groove became the first in a

“groove” series pop music records with modern influences. The majority of the tracks on

the album are from Algeria and Morocco, but others include popular singer Amr Diab

from Egypt, Libyan artist Hamid El Shaeri, and Natacha Atlas. In order to choose the

artists he would include on this album, Jacob Edgar spent time in record stores in

immigrant neighborhoods of Paris with large North African populations, and also at

Rachid’s Records in Brooklyn. Paris has long been a major hub of the world music

industry for the Middle East and North Africa and home to the headquarters of EMI

Arabia, which made it unnecessary for Edgar to travel to the countries where the artists

originated to produce the album.

Though rai music dated back to the 1930s, it reached a new level of popularity in

the Algerian capitol of Oran in the 1970s. Rai also gained significant attention in Paris

beginning in the early-1980s. As a former colonial metropole, Paris served as an

important site of encounter between North Africa and Europe.187 As George Lipsitz

importantly argued, music is a compelling form for understanding postcolonial flows of

186
Arabic Groove, “Arabic Bubblegum Dance Groove,” Amazon review of Putumayo
Records, posted by Kevin L Nenstiel “omnivore” (Kearney, Nebraska), August 9, 2002.
187
Postcolonial theorists Robert Young and Arjun Appadurai have pointed to culture, and
more specifically literature and music, as crucial points of departure for exploring power
relationships between Global North and Global South.

116
power and cultural exchange.188 When rai traveled from Western Algeria to Europe to the

U.S., it was interpreted differently based on its context. In France, rai was the music of

the former colony, embraced by North African immigrant populations and others

interested in Algerian culture and music. In the U.S., it was largely viewed as a novel pop

music from a lesser-known North African culture, another step removed from its origins.

Initially in the U.S. rai was marketed as “world beat.” According to a 1998

Washington Post review introducing the first successful rai album in the U.S., Rai

Rebels, “The hot topic in pop music this year is ‘worldbeat music,’ a catchall term for the

indigenous popular music of the non-English-speaking world.”189 As a close relative of

world music, the term “world beat” was likely intended to evoke associations with

Nigerian highlife and other African musics known for their rhythmic basis. Unlike its less

precise relative “world music,” “world beat” constructed a genre around the dance beat,

conjuring images of (largely black and brown) bodies in motion. As Steven Feld aptly

maintains, the assumption that these black and brown bodies will naturally produce and

connect to a dance beat is deeply essentialist.190 Describing record label interest in North

Africa, the Rai Rebels reviewer contends, “After extensively mining southern and central

Africa, the companies have turned their attention to northern Africa, where Islamic music

has handed down a distinctive sound with its own scales, drones, and yodels.”191

Reviewing Rai Rebels, the author hones in on the strangeness of the sound: “As the chabs

and chabas (kids or punks and punkettes) drone and yodel the Arabic lyrics about

188
See Lipsitz, Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism, and the Poetics
of Place, New York: Verso Books, 1994.
189
Geoffrey Himes, “Listening to the Beat of the World,” The Washington Post,
December 28, 1988
190
Steven Feld, “A Sweet Lullaby for World Music”
191
Himes, “Listening to the Beat of the World”

117
youthful lust and infatuation, the rhythm instruments stick to a repeating hypnotic pattern,

while the lead instruments stretch droning notes into quarter tones and then make

squiggly quick descents.”192

The description of rai as a youth-based music fostered the perception that it was

hip and fresh, an association that Sting further promoted with “Desert Rose.” Regarding

the success of the album the reviewer argues, “it’s a fascinating, strange music, but it’s

even less likely than Nigeria’s juju to make inroads on an American audience.”193.

However, rai did gain recognition among a specific listening audience, and Rai Rebels

provided an introduction for many. The fact that Rai Rebels gained media recognition

among critics in major U.S. cities, whether or not it led to widespread interest in North

African music, suggests that there were points of connection that made rai attractive for

American audiences. One Amazon reviewer exclaims, “Knew nothing of rai but this

made me a convert, so much so that probably any other Rai CD will not be able to match

it. Every song is indeed hypnotic.”194 This reviewer’s description speaks to the affective

realm of world music appreciation. To be “hypnotized” by Rai Rebels, one would be both

entranced with the music’s strangeness and intrigued by its origins.

Aside from the perception of rai as a dance-based music, a central feature of its

appeal was the music’s perceived anti-authority message. The choice to title the album

Rai Rebels was strategic, framing the artists as iconoclasts. Don Snowden, reviewing the

album for the Los Angeles Times, compared rai musicians to early blues artists:

“Developed by young singers performing in the red- light districts of port cities like

192
Himes, “Listening to the Beat of the World”
193
Ibid
194
Rai Rebels, Virgin Records, Amazon review, anonymous, March 21, 2000.

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Oran, rai mixes traditional Algerian and Western pop elements and initially drew fire

from religious authorities for secular lyrics dealing with sex, alcohol, and cars--which

makes rai sound like nothin’ but the blues (or Chuck Berry), Algerian division.”195

Drawing a parallel between Chuck Berry and rai artists makes the music accessible to

listeners, as what could be more American than sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll? Connecting

the artists with illicit activity also made the album more intriguing, fueling curiosity

about why it was viewed as provocative by Algerian religious authorities. According to

Rick Kogan, quoting Chris Heim in the Chicago Tribune, “‘In a way [Rai Rebels]

parallels the birth of rock and roll. This group is frowned upon as lowlites and hedonists,

playing music about sex and drugs and…’—the urge to hear it is irresistible.”196

In the 1990s, press surrounding rai continued to concentrate on the music’s

unlawful status. Cheb Khaled’s status as an exile in Paris and the murder of several rai

musicians and producers was a popular topic for discussion in newspaper articles in the

mid-1990s, contributing to rai’s perceived status as “dangerous.” For American

audiences, then, rai was marketed as a highly politicized genre. In a New York Times

profile written in 1995, Cheb Khaled was portrayed as a passionate artist condemned to

death for “the offenses of poetry, music and morality.” Describing the history of the

genre of rai, the author compares Khaled’s use of electric guitar at a festival in 1985 to

Bob Dylan’s 1965 performance at the Newport Folk Festival, and contends, “[Khaled’s]

195
Don Snowden, “Pop With the Sounds of Islam,” Los Angeles Times, December 18,
1988.
196
Rick Kogan, “Playing the rock from hard places,” Chicago Tribune, February 22,
1989.

119
concerts can be so charged that Algerian women, flouting their society’s conservative

mores, sometimes throw their bras onstage as if they were at a Tom Jones concert.”197

Direct comparisons, between formative moments in American rock ‘n’ roll and

rai music familiarized it for newspaper readers, and the image of Algerian women

throwing their bras onstage suggests that the music has a radicalizing, Westernizing

influence. The murders of two major figures in rai, singer Cheb Hasni and producer

Rashid Baba Ahmed, made the news in the U.S. in the mid-1990s. The singer and

producer were both shot and killed by the Algerian regime in a crackdown on artists and

intellectuals. Washington Post author Nora Boustany reported from Oran, which she

deems the “Nashville” of the Algerian music scene. She quotes Cheb Khaled saying,

“What’s happening now is crazy. Young people have to wake up and rebel. Now they

live like rabbits hopping between two fires, the regime and terrorism.”198 In a similarly

alarming quote, a 1997 article about Cheb Khaled claims, “Last year, Khaled sold more

than 300,000 albums...But the 37-year- old Khaled hasn’t been back to North Africa in 10

years. He lives in Paris under heavy guard--the target of death threats from Islamic

fundamentalists, who call rai ‘the devil’s music.’”199 Thus, the mainstream U.S. media

positioned rai as a form that should be discussed in a framework that connected it to

Islamic religious politics. Discussions of death threats and terrorism made Algerian

society appear both intriguing and dangerous, and at the same time, critics and journalists

pointed to the music’s democratizing influences.

197
Neil Strauss, “Singing of a Beloved Homeland, Fearful of Going Home Again,” New
York Times, April 30, 1995.
198
Nora Boustany, “For Rai, There’s No Oasis in Algeria,” The Washington Post, July 2,
1995.
199
“The King of Rai Can’t Go Home,” The Washington Post, September 14, 1997.

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 In terms of the sonic dimension of rai’s appeal, one major element was its

incorporation of instruments associated with the West, for example, the electric guitar

and synthesizer. Critics described this incorporation as a kind of a fusion, mixing West

and Middle East to produce Algerian rock. The lyrics are in Arabic, and therefore

inaccessible for non-Arabic speakers. The first Rai Rebels album features eight tracks by

seven different artists, two of them duets. The tracks by Cheb Khaled, “Ya Loualid” and

“Sidi Boumedienne” provide two examples of the integration of Western pop and Arab

sounds. “Ya Loualid” highlights Khaled’s vocal dexterity against a background of

electric bass and both real and synthesized percussion. The rhythm is syncopated and

danceable, and the mix is percussion-dominant. With a simple and catchy melody,

Khaled and Chaba Zahouania take turns repeating the Arabic lyrics. “Sidi Boumedienne”

the accompaniment is fully synthesized, complete with what reviewer Don Snowden

called “Prince-style synth accents.”

These Western, modern elements were also visible in a genre that could be

envisioned as Middle Eastern fusion. Two female artists, Ofra Haza and Natacha Atlas,

appealed to American listeners because of their multi-ethnic backgrounds, projecting a

liberal multicultural ideal. Haza, who died of AIDS in 2000, was the first Israeli artist to

be nominated for a World Music Grammy in 1993 for her album Kirya. Haza previously

gained recognition in the U.S. after Coldcut sampled her song “Im Nin’alu” on a remix of

Eric B. and Rakim’s “Paid in Full.” Haza was raised in a Yemenite Jewish family in Tel

Aviv, and her Mizrahi status helped her cross over to a wider Levantine audience. A first

generation immigrant, she spoke both Hebrew and Arabic and also recorded songs in

English. After winning second place in the Eurovision song contest in 1983, her album

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Chai became massively popular in Israel and abroad. By 1990, she had begun recording

songs for major Hollywood films, including Colors and Dick Tracy. Haza released her

album Shirei Teiman (Yemenite Songs) in 1984 on the Israeli label Hed Arzi.

The album featured traditional songs Haza had heard in her childhood, sung

mostly in Hebrew, but some are in Arabic or Aramaic. The same album was re-released

in the U.S. in 1988 on the World Music label Shanachie under the title Fifty Gates of

Wisdom. This release pushed Haza into genuine fame, with mainstream American media

reviewing her work. A 1988 Newsweek article proclaimed Haza striking, but placed her

in a category of “odd” world-beat/ethno-pop, and called her the “Sephardic

Streisand...with a big, brassy voice who belts out the devotional songs of her ancestal

homeland in glitzy modern-pop arrangements.”200 The focus on Haza as a novelty act, a

Yemenite Streisand-crossover paints her as unique because of her hybrid identity. Fifty

Gates of Wisdom was also reviewed in USA Today, where the author called it “the year’s

most engaging world-beat oddity.”201

Haza spent her childhood in poverty as the youngest of nine children to parents

who had been airlifted to Tel Aviv from Yemen in 1949 due to persecution for their

Jewish ethnicity. According to USA Today critic Edna Gundersen, “She is a national icon

in Israel, yet a surprising number of Arabs write fan letters declaring their shared desire

for peace in the Middle East.”202 Haza herself expresses the sentiment that she is a

peacemaker:

I have had many letters from Arab countries and from Egypt, Morocco, Kuwait,
Dubai, places I never thought I would receive letters from. They wrote that they

200
Jim Miller, “Pop Takes a Global Spin,” Newsweek, June 13, 1988.
201
Edna Gundersen, “Ofra Haza, an Israeli Sensation,” USA Today, December 6, 1988
202
Ibid

122
 love my music and it’s wonderful that I talk about the Middle East, and they feel
the same thing about my problems. The music is the only thing that nobody can
touch.203

Haza’s image as an intermediary who had overcome great personal adversity made her an

attractive figure for crossover in the world music market. The song “Im Nin ‘Alu” from

this album became one of her biggest hits, with the single selling over a million copies

after it was sampled in Eric B. and Hakim’s 1987 track “Paid in Full.” It includes a

catchy chorus and dance beat, capped off with Haza’s distinctive voice. The lyrics are

Figure 5: Ofra Haza, “Im Nin ‘Alu”

based on a 17th-century Hebrew poem by Shalom Shabazi, and they reflect a religious

message about the gates of heaven. The video features close-ups of Haza, wearing a

crown of gold coins, intermixed with shots of her standing near a castle and in a desert.

An Israeli Mizrahi Jew, Haza represented an intriguing mix of East and West for

American audiences. The fact that she had crossed over to an Arab audience provided
203
Adam Sweeting, “Music: The voice of peace – Israeli singer Ofra Haza is shaking off
her casbah-and-camels image. She tells Adam Sweeting how her new album prays for
harmony at home,” The Guardian, March 22, 1990.

123
additional appeal, since this demonstrated her ability to serve as a cultural ambassador.

Her costumes and album covers for “Fifty Gates of Wisdom” all fostered an image of an

ancient desert princess. Multiple reviewers on Amazon refer to her voice as angelic, and

one bemoans her untimely death in 2000. Other reviewers confirm that it wasn’t

necessary for them to understand the lyrics to appreciate Haza’s music. One declares: “I

do wish there were more the melodic lines of traditional Middle East [sic] tonality, but

one cannot have everything.”204 Not surprisingly, Jon Pareles in the New York Times

expressed dislike for Haza’s work with a more Westernized sound, claiming that she

would eventually be most famous for her Yemenite songs.

Natacha Atlas, singer in the British pop electronica world music collective

Transglobal Underground during the 1990s, was often compared to Ofra Haza because of

what journalists referred to as her mixed Jewish and Arab heritage. This aspect of Atlas’

popularity is a source of controversy, since in recent years she has made attempts to

distance herself from claims of Jewish ancestry, saying it is exceedingly distant and does

not form part of her identity. In a 2003 interview, Atlas said that someone sought to hurt

her reputation by spreading the rumor that her father was Jewish.205 Critics have accused

her of purposely obscuring the specifics of her origins in order to capitalize on having a

mixed Arab/Jewish background.206

204
Ofra Haza, Fifty Gates of Wisdom, Amazon review by “Nancy T Hernandez,” 2000.
205
Rebecca Huval, “Natacha Atlas Brings Politics to the Dance Floor,” Mother Jones,
Oct 6, 2011.
206
In 2011, Atlas came under fire for canceling an Israeli concert in support of the BDS
(boycott, divest, and solidarity) movement. She received criticism from Israeli fans as
well as BDS supporters, who questioned her decision to boycott Israel in 2011 after
performing there numerous times in the past. She responded to the criticism on her
Facebook page, claiming she found fault with the present Israeli government policies as
well as those of previous regimes. See Ali Abuminah, “International Star Natacha Atlas

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 Atlas was born in Brussels to a British mother and father of Moroccan, Palestinian

and Egyptian descent. She considers herself Muslim, at least nominally, and has referred

to herself as a “human Gaza Strip.”207 Atlas grew up in a Moroccan area of Brussels, and

moved to Northampton, England with her mother when her parents separated. After

performing there as a teenager, she returned to Brussels and performed Arabic music in

nightclubs. She eventually gained the attention of the U.K. world music label Nation

Records, and joined the Transglobal Underground in 1993. Atlas’ solo career began with

the 1995 album Diaspora, and she reached greater visibility in the U.S. with the 1998

album Gedida, which critic Robert Christgau called “a probably shallow and definitely

delightful piece of exotica,” and an Amazon reviewer deemed “100% Arab funk.”208

Atlas’ solo albums were less based on electronica than her Transglobal Underground

work, and intended to present Arabic sounds in a more coherent way. She attracted an

audience intrigued by her ability to fuse styles as well as her status as a Middle Eastern

female vocalist. For example, in 1998 Lilith, a Jewish feminist publication, reviewed her

album Gedida, and in 2001 Ms Magazine reviewed her album Ayeshteni alongside Laurie

Anderson and Ani DiFranco.

Atlas appealed to American feminist audiences because of her position as a

European-born woman with Arab roots who owned her own sexuality, and apparently did

not feel beholden to cultural expectations about female decency. An Amazon reviewer

from Minneapolis compared Atlas to Madonna and Enya, suggesting, “If your cup of tea

Announces Israeli Boycott,” Electronic Intifada, Sept 28, 2011,

https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/international-star-natacha-atlas-
announces-israel-boycott.
207
Irin Carmon, “The Human Gaza Strip: Agony and Ecstasy of a True Crossover
Queen,” Village Voice, Aug 28, 2001.
208
Robert Christgau, “Natacha Atlas: Gedida,” The Village Voice, July 27, 1999.

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includes world rhytms [sic], new age and the energy of modern music then, listening to

Gedida, you will find yourself immersed in a dream world of playful, tantalizing and

downright [passionate] sounds (no, not literally). Think 50% Ofra Haza + 20% Madonna

+ 20% Enigma + 10% Enya.”209 Atlas wore costumes that emphasized her long, dark

hair, posed provocatively on album covers, and covered James Brown’s 1966 song “It’s a

Man’s Man’s Man’s World” on the album Something Dangerous, her voice indicating a

sarcastic tone. Atlas’ success as a solo artist signified that she could reach fame on her

own terms, and for some American feminists, likely appeared to be an example of

liberated Arab womanhood.

Atlas’ associations with the Transglobal Underground meant that young techno

fans were also exposed to her Arab musical leanings: “As almost the sole purveyor of

Arabic tonalities to U.S. clubgoers and pop audiences, Atlas says she does ‘whatever I

can to represent as many different aspects of Arabic music as possible.’”210 Atlas often

belly danced onstage in performances, and her beautiful appearance likely magnified her

popularity, especially among male listeners. In her introduction of Arab music to

unfamiliar listeners through poppy sounds and a seductive stage presence, Atlas helped

broaden the typical world music audience. While some of her fans were already familiar

with Middle Eastern music, many were new to it. Atlas’ fusion style was appealing to

world music listeners who were interested in “ethnic” with a modern twist. Ted

Swedenburg claims, “Natacha Atlas was one of the major artists pushing Arab music

209
Natacha Atlas, Gedida, Amazon review posted by “Ma WenRui “soukouslover,”:
“Mmmmm, a surreal mix of arabic, new age and euro-dance tunes,” February 28, 2001.
210
Dylan Siegler, “No Borders for Natacha Atlas,” Billboard, May 23, 1998.

126
toward what critics were to call breakthrough time by the summer of 2001. Her May

2001 album Ayeshteni was inventive, eminently danceable, and brilliantly produced.”211

Among critics, Atlas’ multi-ethnic background was often viewed as bestowing her

with a unique ability to cross boundaries, both cultural and musical. As a Billboard

reviewer wrote, “Border crossing comes easily to Natacha Atlas. Her multinational

upbringing, coupled with her musical versatility, has been helping bridge the gap between

breakbeats and belly dancing for a decade.”212 Not only was she viewed as a cultural

boundary crosser, but a musical genre crosser, and someone who could appeal to a range

of audiences, from feminists to techno and hip hop listeners. Some fans were apparently

belly dancers themselves, with numerous Amazon reviewers claiming that the mixture of

rhythms and tempos on Gedida made it perfect for choreography.

Natacha Atlas’ description of herself as a “human Gaza Strip” suggests that she

embodies an amalgamation of cultural influences, including a Palestinian ancestry, and it

also politicizes her identity. As one reviewer writes, “It isn’t so much that her borrowing

of musical flavors is much of a novelty in a polyglot universe--it isn’t--it’s that her

creative juices gush straight from the wounds of conflict.”213 The idea that Atlas’ creative

origins emanate from the heart of the conflict in the Middle East links her to the Israeli-

Palestinian conflict and encourages the belief that her music symbolizes a force of

healing. The public perception of Atlas as half Jewish was central to her image as a

fusion artist, and by listening to her voice listeners could affectively tap into an imaginary

Middle Eastern unification process and participate in it from afar. This affective

211
Ted Swedenburg, “The ‘Arab Wave’ in World Music after 9/11”
212
Siegler, “No Borders for Natacha Atlas.”
213
Irin Carmon, “The Human Gaza Strip.”

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relationship allowed for listeners to assert ideals of diversity and tolerance while also

taking pleasure in the foreignness of the music at the same time.

For audiences engaging with Atlas’ work, some of whom had never heard music

from the Arab world, the sounds built upon long-held orientalist assumptions. Among

Amazon reviewers, descriptions of Atlas’ voice as sexy and intoxicating are common,

and many enjoyed thinking about her blended identity. One wrote, “This [album] is

arguably the best showcase for the talents of Natacha Atlas, with its combination of

Egyptian seductiveness, traditional instrumentation, and modern grooves built around

that enchanting voice. Close your eyes and you can almost smell the air and taste the

mysterious aura of Egyptian culture.”214 These invocations of smell and taste indicate the

reviewer’s desire to experience the music in an embodied, sensual way. S/he takes

pleasure in the “mysterious aura” of the sounds. And rather than connecting Atlas to sites

of conflict, the reviewer seems to assume that she is Egyptian, and that her music can be

heard as an expression of Egyptian culture, certainly a safer association than the Gaza

Strip.

On Atlas’ 1998 album Gedida, her vocals are fluid and seamless and blend with

both traditional Middle Eastern instruments and dance beats, appealing to listeners new to

the genre. Gedida is a trilingual album, featuring lyrics in French, English, and Arabic. In

the song “One Brief Moment,” Atlas sings exclusively in English, appealing to an

English-speaking audience. Her French and Arabic lyrics also signal cosmopolitanism to

an American and European audience. The single from Gedida is a cover of the French

song “Mon Amie La Rose” originally performed by Francoise Hardy in 1964. Atlas’

214
Natacha Atlas, Gedida, “Gedida Grooves,” Amazon review posted by “Wil (AL),”
August 29, 2003.

128
version reached #15 on the French pop charts and #13 in Belgium in 1999. Her version

includes a long improvisatory passage where she incorporates an Arabic scale, giving the

song a “fusion” component, and Atlas’ voice is richer and more operatic than Hardy’s.

The video for this song depicts Atlas singing in a European jazz club, wearing a

form-fitting sequined black dress with gold beads and a sweetheart neckline. The camera

zooms in on band and audience members, several of whom are of black African heritage

and another who appears to be Sikh. Couples dance, and a tall, dark-haired man enters

and locks eyes with Atlas as she sings. The next scene shows her slowly shedding layers

of clothing in the back seat of his car as he drives her home. Popular with a European

audience for its sex appeal and its message of immigrant cultural acceptance, the song

appealed to American audiences for the blending of styles and the glamor associated with

French popular culture. Atlas’ ability to convey sophistication combined with an

enigmatic mix of influences made her intriguing to audiences seeking “worldliness,” and

her ambiguous associations with the Gaza Strip invited listeners from a range of political

positions to identify her music as a source of cultural unification.

Natacha Atlas participated in the enactment a new multicultural ideal around Arab

world music performance. Her voice reflects multiple categories: European, Belgian,

British, Egyptian, Moroccan, Palestinian Arab, and Jewish. Similar to Ofra Haza, who

was perceived as a peacemaker, Atlas was recognized as a border crosser, and her music

offered an opportunity for American listeners to affectively transcend borders along with

her. Atlas and Haza both allowed American audiences to imagine themselves as literally

or figuratively “close” to an open and tolerant Middle East that welcomed a variety of

ethnicities. The extent to which listeners were allowed to participate in this imaginary

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Middle East was dependent on their appreciation of the music. And while Atlas’ audience

was somewhat different from Haza’s, in light of her techno and feminist following, the

narratives of peacemaking through fusion that surrounded both Atlas’ and Haza’s music

is similar. Though Atlas was born in Belgium and lived in the U.K., her father’s pan-

Arab ethnicity and possible Jewish ancestry gave her similar credentials in terms of

speaking to multiple groups.

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Chapter 4: Counter-orienting the War on Terror: Arab Hip Hop and Global Black

Consciousness

“We are the South,” declares Chilean artist Ana Tijoux in “Somos Sur,” a 2014

track from her album Vengo featuring British Palestinian hip hop artist Shadia Mansour.

Built on a polyrhythmic beat interwoven with Arabic semi-tones, the song is a breathless

brass-driven paean to a revolutionary alliance uniting all who are “silenced, neglected,

invisible.” In Mansour’s verse, she raps: “Music is the mother tongue of the world/ She

supports our existence, she protects our roots/ She joins us from greater Syria to Africa to

Latin America.”215 The video for the track features Tijoux celebrating with a crowd

Figure 6: Shadia Mansour in "Somos Sur”

wearing bright indigenous Andean clothing, along with Mansour, who dances dabke in

bare feet and an embroidered Palestinian dress (fig. 5).216 The two women harness an

215
The YouTube clip for this song has 2,917,754 views as of December 2, 2015.
216
Dabke is a Levantine folk dance performed in lines or circles, and usually with
musical accompaniment, at celebratory occasions.

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infectious and disruptive energy, affirming cultural and political alliances between Latin

America and the Middle East.

Summoning the powerful “buzz and rumble” Jayna Brown has detailed in relation

to 21st century Congolese and Angolan musics, Tijoux raps, “This is not utopia/ This is a

joyful dancing rebellion.” Brown’s formulation describes sounds that are created in

landscapes of perpetual war and violence: “The buzz and rumble is the sound of the new

space the music creates, the space people create out of necessity for their sanity…[it] is

the power that rides through these circumstances; improvising on the refuse of

destruction, it is both of the moment and transcendent.”217 “Somos Sur” is produced out

of a similar state of upheaval, speaking to political and economic oppression in the

Global South at large and to Palestinian struggles for political and social equality more

specifically. This chapter examines the diasporic genre of Arab American hip hop, which

extends beyond Arab American artists, and must be considered transnationally in order to

understand its full cultural significance

Reverberations of sonic Arabness in the U.S. are multivalent. I argue that hip hop

provides a vehicle for Arab and Arab American youth to enact a radical counter-narrative

that disrupts the orientalizing “clash of civilizations” discourse, and in this sense,

provides an important occasion for Arab self-determination. Unlike world music and

exotica, genres that target non-Arabs intrigued with unfamiliar cultural forms, Arab hip

hop appeals mostly to Arab and Arab American audiences. For these audiences, the

sounds and words are a means of connecting to a new vision of Arabness, one that is

geographically flexible, multi-layered, and pays tribute to generations past. Furthermore,

217
Jayna Brown, “Buzz and Rumble: Global Pop Music and Utopian Impulse,” p. 128.

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conceptualizing Arab hip hop as a “borderlands” practice allows for a theorization of it as

a diasporic practice that also resists dominant configurations of the nation.

In 1994, George Lipsitz proposed that hip-hop was an example of a new global

“postcolonial culture” due to its technological innovations, such as sampling, which

subverted normative Western musical production.218 Echoing Paul Gilroy’s contention in

The Black Atlantic that black culture long served as a counterculture to modernity, Lipsitz

argued that the form and beats of hip hop displayed a restless postcolonial energy. And as

Tricia Rose contends, hip hop transformed authorship to fit with the structure of orally

based performance, making knowledge and sound communal creations. Like many forms

of artistic expression, hip hop is concerned with communal memory, a site of common

recognition and identification. For Arab Americans, hip hop provides a means of

sonically memorializing previous generations while also disrupting dominant narratives

to articulate a global black consciousness, riffing on Nitasha Sharma’s concept of “global

race consciousness” in the South Asian context, a recognition of the power relations

embedded in global racial formations that Sharma says “emerges from and illustrates the

artists’ negotiations and identifications as non-Whites in America, as non-Blacks within

hip hop worlds, and as South Asians with a diasporic sensibility.”219

Similarly, Alex Lubin has referred to an Afro-Arab internationalism spanning

multiple geographies and encompassing popular culture. Lubin links hip hop produced in

the Palestinian territories to work produced in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and

draws on Walter Mignolo’s theorization of the borderland as a third space, or gap, in

218
Lipsitz, Dangerous Crossroads, p. 36.
219
Nitasha Sharma, Hip Hop Desis: South Asian Americans, Blackness and Global Race
Consciousness, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010, p. 4.

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structures of power: “This geographic linkage is not merely a simplistic politics of

comparison, but is, I contend, an attempt to reconfigure the geographies of modernity in

ways that make Gaza and the lower ninth ward localized articulations of globalized

colonial modernity.” 220 Arab hip hop points to a unique nexus reflecting the web of

cultural and economic realities in the 21st century.

As numerous scholars have indicated, one impact of the 9/11 attacks was to make

Arabs and Muslims increasingly visible in the U.S. public. This reflects a heightened

awareness of Arab Americans’ position in what Nadine Naber has termed a “diaspora of

empire.”221 U.S. military involvement in the Middle East during the first Gulf War in the

1990s signaled a turn toward direct United States intervention in the region that

continued after 9/11 with the war on terror.222 Geographically, the war on terror

discourse formulates a logic of exclusion that delineates what should be considered

“here” and “there,” and “us” vs. “them.” This configuration depends on what Melani

McAlister, drawing from Michael Shapiro, has termed “moral geographies,” a practice of

220
Alex Lubin, “Fear of an Arab Planet: The Sounds and Rhythms of Afro-Arab
Internationalism.” The Journal of Transnational American Studies. Vol 5 (1): 2013, p.
250.
221
See Nadine Naber, Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism. New
York, NY: NYU Press, 2012.
222
Anti-Arab discrimination intensified dramatically following the attacks on September
11. The USA Patriot Act, first passed by congress in October 2001, legalized a range of
governmental activities, including the monitoring of Arab and Muslim groups, searching
and wiretapping without probable cause, trying of “enemy combatants” in military
tribunals, and the indefinite detention of noncitizens suspected of ties to terrorism. At
least 1,000 Muslim men were detained without criminal charges, and a “Special
Registration” system was set up requiring fingerprinting and INS address registration for
men from twenty-four Muslim countries. Of those who complied, 2,870 were detained
and 13,799 were placed in deportation proceedings by 2003. Congress subsequently
renewed the Patriot Act in 2005, 2006, 2010, and 2011, and it has drawn criticism from
civil liberties organizations including the ACLU. The atmosphere of fear sparked by the
government actions significantly impacted Arab and Muslim communities in the U.S.

134
grouping and separating regions or states based on ethical or political views.223 The

sounds and forms of Arab hip hop and spoken word complicate these boundaries,

revealing the falseness of these dichotomies and making apparent the numerous links

between the U.S. and the Arab Middle East. Thus, the artists involved in this movement

insert thoughtful and lyrical notes of dissent into the public discourse about the danger of

Islamic terrorism and Arab difference.

Not only do Arab and Arab America hip hop artists challenge the context of

Islamophobia and Arabophobia, but they are entirely restructuring the “clash of

civilizations” narrative by encouraging and reinforcing cross-ethnic and diasporic

alliances. As Sunaina Maira contends, “This music challenges the context of the

intensified Islamophobia and Arabophobia since 9/11, and also reflects the racial politics

of an Arab American youth subculture that identifies with youth of color and

misidentifies with whiteness.”224 Moreover, these artists resist liberal multicultural

ideologies of affiliation via artistic fusion by producing nuanced articulations of what it

means to be Arab. In a post-9/11 atmosphere, sounds and words by Arab and Arab

American artists embody the painful contradictions that result from living in a “diaspora

of empire,” refusing simplistic expectations for peace through musical integration.

Instead, these artists demand that listeners grapple with what it means to be alienated and

to consider the human dimensions of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.

Following the 9/11 attacks, not only were Arabs and Muslims directly targeted for

discrimination, but in some ways they were pushed outside the realm of allowable

223
Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters, p. 4.
224
Sunaina Maira, ’We Ain’t Missing’: Palestinian Hip Hop—A Transnational Youth
Movement.” The New Centenniel Review. Vol 8 (2): Fall 2008, p. 196.

135
speech. As Judith Butler has argued, after 9/11 there were limitations on what was

permissible in the public sphere. Public grief was carefully regulated, and designed to

maintain the “derealizing aims of military violence.”225 Butler points out that there was a

particular prohibition on speech related to Palestine, with much of this speech

immediately proclaimed to be “anti-Semitic.” Butler discusses comments made by

Harvard president Lawrence Summers, who claimed in 2002, “Profoundly anti-Israeli

views are increasingly finding support in progressive intellectual communities. Serious

and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their

effect if not their intent.”226 Summers’ distinction between effective and intentional anti-

Semitism created “a chilling effect on political discourse, stoking the fear that to criticize

Israel during this time is to expose oneself to the charge of anti-Semitism.”227 Public

discourse surrounding grieving and loss after 9/11 was also bound up with nationalism

and questions about whether certain lives are more grievable than others.

Butler compares the charge of anti-Semitism to the label of “traitor” or “terrorist

sympathizer,” both prevalent after 9/11. Not only are these labels undesirable, but they

are heavily stigmatized, carrying nearly “unbearable” weight for those accused.228 It is

not surprising then that media discourse was largely limited to views upholding allowable

ideologies. Steven Salaita writes, “Often accused of dual sympathies, Arab Americans

feel sometimes as if we are removed (of our own accord) from the Arab World, but

225
Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York,
NY: Verso Books, 2004, p. 102.
226
Ibid, p. 102
227
Ibid
228
Ibid, p. 127

136
equally removed (not of our own accord) from the United States.”229 This sense of

diasporic disconnection as well as limitations on public discourse have contributed to the

desire of young Arabs to narrate their lives and their experiences, and the presence of

Arab American hip-hop demonstrates the possibility for dissent and counter-orientation

in musical spaces.

For emcees Shadia Mansour, Omar Offendum, and The Narcicyst (AKA Narcy),

art and music have offered the possibility of re-inhabiting Arab identity while also

counteracting official state and media rhetoric about the Middle East. Arab hip hop is a

self-consciously diasporic form, engaging with relatives, ancestors, and personal histories

abroad.230 Writing lyrics in both English and Arabic allows artists to speak to multiple

audiences, and the use of sampling, one of the key elements of rap, enables multi-

generational sonic affiliations. Maira contends that hip hop allows Palestinians and

Palestinian Americans to claim subjecthood and to prove that they “’ain’t missin.’”

Beyond this, however, Arab American hip hop reflects a growing dissatisfaction with

government and media discourse along with a desire to be taken seriously as a minority

ethnic group.

As a genre, hip hop has proved highly malleable. From its roots in the South

Bronx, the form has grown and stretched in numerous directions. Hip hop’s roots form a

familiar history, one of technological innovation mixed with social protest. Not only has

229
Steven Salaita, Anti-Arab Racism in the USA: Where it Comes From and What it
Means for Politics Today, Chicago and London: Pluto Press, 2010, p. 81.
230
Arab hip hop is a highly transnational movement, with artists from the Middle East
interacting and collaborating with those abroad. While the majority of the artists I am
discussing are based in the U.S., Shadia Mansour lives in London, and another prominent
emcee, The Narcicyst, AKA Narcy, lives in Canada. Mansour and Narcy signal the ways
that North America and the U.K. are implicated in similar projects of empire.

137
it gained legitimacy, exhibited by the 2014 One Mic festival held at Washington DC’s

Kennedy Center, but it has wide global appeal, reaching to West and South Africa,

Europe, and Japan.231 In the U.S., hip hop has followed a familiar trajectory from margins

to mainstream. Many have decried hip hop’s commercialization, with Nas famously

claiming in 2006, “hip hop is dead.” Debates over misogyny and the de-politicization of

rap have raged for decades, perhaps taking attention away from music that has been less

visible. Due to shifts in the music industry in the past two decades, artists increasingly

produce music independently of labels. As a result, many artists distribute their work and

interact directly with their fans on the Internet. Arab hip-hop provides a window into

these shifts in the industry, which is increasingly dependent on streaming and downloads

rather than material distribution. This new model has allowed Arab hip hop artists to

speak freely about their concerns and develop fan bases that identify with their political

messages, but it also means that the work of these artists does not necessarily reach

mainstream audiences.

Furthermore, popular culture has long been a focus of debates around

globalization, and as Josh Kun points out, “hip hop may indeed be ‘the global youth

culture,’ but its singular globality depends upon multiple localities— its creation,

231
One Mic: Hip-Hop Culture Worldwide, was a 2014 collaboration between the
Kennedy Center in Washington, DC and Hi-ARTS (formerly known as the Hip-Hop
Theater Festival), a New York City organization founded in 2000. One Mic featured
numerous performances celebrating the diversity of the genre. According to the website,
“the festival highlights MCing, DJing, b-boying, and graffiti writing, the original four
elements of hip-hop culture, alongside contemporary interdisciplinary work born of hip-
hop aesthetics.” Participants included Russell Simmons, Eric Michael Dyson, Talib
Kweli, Nas, The Narcicyst, MC Lyte, Jean Grae, and Lauryn Hill.

138
production, and reception within local and translocal sites such as Los Angeles.”232 The

contextual foundations of the genre are key to its accessibility and worldwide popularity.

It is within translocal sites such as Los Angeles, London, and Gaza that Arab hip hop is

created and disseminated, but ultimately, it is in the realm of the internet where much of

the music gets heard and distributed.

Lighting the Spark: The Formation of an Arab Summit

The movement that is now identified as Arab hip hop first emerged in the wake of

the events of September 11, 2001. Questions of collective and personal memory are key

to understanding the movement’s development and its wider cultural significance. As

Pierre Nora theorized in the context of French national consciousness, memory is an

intensely personal form of knowledge, one that is predicated on affect and interpretation.

Although it is highly subjective, memory can also rise to the level of collective

consciousness, and groups hold common memories shared through cultural narratives.

Nora suggests that memory is not invested in accuracy, and is instead based on subjective

recollections. Sound is an important facet of cultural memory, and it can be connected to

both individual and collective memories. Sound also forms one of the material lieux de

memoire, or sites of memory, that Nora argues construct the practice of memory.233 There

is a long and distinguished literary tradition in Arab culture, which Arab hip hop artists

often cite as inspiration, in addition to sounds from the mid-20th century golden age of

Arab music.

232
“What Is an MC If He Can't Rap to Banda? Making Music in Nuevo L.A.” American
Quarterly. 56 (3), Sept 2004, p. 743.
233
According to Nora’s 1989 essay “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de
Mémoire,” sites of memory can be places, objects, images, sounds, or more abstract
concepts that are tied to memory.

139
 One of the first artists to become involved in the Arab American hip hop

movement was William Youmans, AKA Iron Sheik, who completed a PhD in

Communications at the University of Michigan and now teaches in the department of

Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University.234 Youmans chose the hip

hop moniker “Iron Sheik” after the WWF wrestler whom he says embodies numerous

stereotypes about Arabs: “Arabs are villains; they are the bad guys to be despised. I

wanted to reclaim the icon and redo it my own way. If this is a battle for knowledge, we

have to redefine terms.”235

Youmans grew up in the Detroit area, and a visit to his maternal grandparents in

Nazareth when he was in high school sparked his interest in Israeli/Palestinian politics.

The New York Times published a profile of Youmans in 2004 that discussed his message-

based hip-hop, and Youmans’ mother Nadia comments on the intergenerational politics

of hip-hop: “‘This is new music for Arab-Americans; it is hard on the ears of the older

people…I used to have headaches. I said, either you get out of my car or turn it off. But I

like his music, because I love the words.’”236 Mrs. Youmans’ sentiment here indicates

tension between first and second-generation Arab Americans since hip-hop tends to be

perceived as a product of youth rebellion. Will Youmans argues that Arab American hip-

hop is a vital tool for young Arab Americans to negotiate their identities: “With identity

234
I have chosen to focus on the artists who have deemed themselves the leaders of the
Arab American hip-hop movement. As Youmans and Dolan have mentioned, there are
Arab Americans in the hip hop scene who don’t explicitly identify as Arab American
artists, and their music tends to be very different from the politically-charged music of
Omar Offendum and The Narcicyst, the artists I discuss below. See Timothy J. Dolan,
“Iraq is the new Black”: Performing Arabness in Arab American hip-hop, M.A. thesis,
Indiana University, 2014.
235
Danny Hakim, “Drawing a Rap Refrain From a U.N. Resolution: American-Born
‘Iron Sheik’ Rhymes for a Palestinian Cause, New York Times, July 8, 2004.
236
Ibid

140
in flux, the life experience of exile and diaspora fuels Arab American hip-hop. Many

Arab American MCs use hip-hop to relate to a larger community of Americans to make

inroads into an America to which they feel they do not fully belong.”237 Youmans

encourages the community to “nurture and encourage this nascent artistic movement.”238

Youmans also alludes to the inter-generational politics of the movement, arguing that

music encourages Arab and Arab American youth to appreciate their ancestry and assert

an ethnic identity.

Many Arab artists have personally experienced hostility and discrimination due to

their ethnic and/or religious backgrounds. Narcy describes a childhood memory of his

family’s garage door in Montreal being spray painted with the words “retournez chez-

vous animaux” (go back home, animals). He writes, “That moment stayed fresh in mind,

the solid white graffiti would never lose its’ [sic] opacity. Those words meant so much to

me, and I wanted to change the people that did it…I couldn’t help but ask myself, Where

is home? I still don’t have that answer.”239 This formative experience signaled overt

hostility toward Arabs in Montreal, as well as a sense of alienation from other Arab

communities. Narcy eventually became close friends with brothers Nawar and Nawaf Al-

Rufaie, whose family moved to Canada from the United Arab Emirates, and first

introduced him to hip hop. Narcy cites NWA’s albums Straight Outta Compton and The

Wu-tang Clan as crucial to his musical development. Along with Nawar and Nawaf,

Narcy formed the hip hop trio Euphrates.

237
Will Youmans, “Arab American Hip Hop,” in Holly Arida and Anan Amen eds,
Etching Our Own Image: Voices from within the Arab American Art Movement,
Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007, p. 49
238
Ibid, p. 57
239
Yassin Alsalman, The Diatribes of a Dying Tribe, Write or Wrong/Paranoid Arab Boy
Publishing, Quebec, QC: 2011, p. 60

141
 Reflecting the demographics of the second wave of immigrants from the Arab

World, the members of the Arab American hip hop movement generally hail from

middle-class backgrounds and are well-educated. This illustrates the class differences

between Arabs and African Americans, which are similar to the economic gaps between

South Asians and African Americans Sharma describes. Unlike hip hop artists living in

the West Bank and Gaza, Arab American artists are rarely able to claim “street cred” or

direct knowledge of urban violence. The political themes and backgrounds of the artists

led one journalist to call the movement a resurgence of “hip-hop intellectualism.”

From its inception, the global configuration of the movement meant that Arab hip

hop artists primarily relied on the internet as a means of promoting and distributing their

work. During the early-2000s, it was through Myspace and personal websites that emcees

shared their music and connected with other artists. Iron Sheik and N.O.M.A.D.S,

Offendum’s collaboration with Sudanese American rapper Mr. Tibbzs, sold CDs and

merchandise on their personal websites and maintained Myspace pages to connect with

fans. While they were often in different locations, the Internet enabled communication

and collaboration between artists. Narcy first discovered the work of Syrian American

emcee Omar Chakaki, AKA Omar Offendum, in 2002, and they began corresponding

online. The two eventually met in person at a concert in Washington, DC in 2005, and

began collaborating in 2006.240

The rapid growth of social media in the past ten years has facilitated new methods

of self-promotion for the artists without label representation. For Offendum, as well as

The Narcicyst and Shadia Mansour, social media is a primary means of promotion and

240
Omar Chakaki, Twitter message to author, December 2, 2015.

142
distribution. All three maintain active Facebook musician pages with between 20,000-

30,000 followers. They share links and videos, as well as tour dates, and fans can send

messages. YouTube is another major source of visibility and circulation. These three

artists have created videos for some of their most popular songs, which often gain

hundreds of thousands of views. Mansour’s 2011 song “Al Kuffeye Arabiye” ft. M1, for

example, currently has 767,300 YouTube views, and Narcy’s 2009 song “Hamdullilah”

ft. Shadia Mansour currently has 994,330 views.241 The ubiquity of YouTube as a means

of listening and sharing music facilitates a broad transnational audience for Arab hip hop.

Several other key participants in the early scene included Nizar Wattad, AKA

Ragtop, part of a crew called The Philistines, and Tarik Kazaleh, AKA Excentrik. In

early 2005, Offendum and Ragtop, both based in Los Angeles, teamed up to make the

first hip hop compilation dedicated to a free Palestine. They looked for musicians to

contribute, and according to Offendum, "the response was overwhelming. The artists who

contacted us weren't only Arab American, they came from all sorts of backgrounds."242

Wattad is Palestinian American and was raised in rural Tennessee. He started The

Philistines with his younger brother Bader (B-Dub), and MC/producer CJ (Cookie Jar), a

Filipino artist. The artists on Free the P contended that when it comes to the suffering of

Palestinians under the control of the Israeli state, few Americans were aware of the

reality of the situation. Offendum and Ragtop maintained that U.S. media representations

have often ignored Palestinian civilian casualties, instead focusing on Israeli safety

241
“SHADIA MANSOUR Ft M1 (DEAD PREZ)-AL KUFIYYEH 3ARABEYYEH
(OFFICIAL VIDEO),” YouTube video, posted by Shadia Mansour, Sept 1, 2011,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21OXQ4m1-Bo; “The Narcicyst featuring Shadia
Mansour "Hamdulillah" Official Music Video,” YouTube video, posted by Channel
Narcy, Sept 14, 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ISHZQJdeSw.
242
Meghan Askins, “Arabs on the Mic,” Wiretap Magazine, December 20, 2006.

143
concerns, and the two artists intended the project to be a response to mainstream media

discourse.

The resulting album includes tracks from 24 artists, including Latinos, African

Americans, two hip hop crews from Gaza, an Iraqi Canadian, an Israeli American rapper

from Michigan, and a Palestinian American spoken word activist. Iron Sheik contributed

"Neo-Con Luv," a satirical song about George W. Bush’s administration, and Suheir

Hammad performed two poems, the first of which states that anywhere in America, "You

are standing on stolen land." The proceeds for the album went toward the production of

the 2009 documentary film Slingshot Hip Hop about Palestinian hip hop, created by Arab

American filmmaker Jackie Salloum. Slingshot Hip Hop was one of the first full-length

documentary films about Arab hip hop, and it follows numerous artists including the

Arab Israeli crew DAM and several female artists, Arapeyat and Abeer Alzinaty (AKA

Sabreena da Witch).

Aside from focusing on the Israeli/Palestinian crisis, a major theme of the Arab

hip hop movement has been the increasing hostility toward Arabs in the West. According

to Yassin Alsalman, AKA Narcy, 9/11 was the breaking point for young Arabs in North

America who were frustrated with legacies of colonialism and inter-Arab violence as well

as representations in the Western media: “From our history of war to post-colonial

studies on identity, Arab culture has been plagued by the constant intervention of outside

forces and misrepresentation through public forms of media.”243 As part of his master’s

degree in media studies, Narcy created an inventive hip hop project called The Arab

243
Alsalman, The Diatribes of a Dying Tribe, p. 38.

144
Summit along with Omar Offendum, Tarik Kazaleh AKA Excentrik, and Nizar Wattad,

AKA Ragtop.

This project resulted in an album, Fear of an Arab Planet, and culminated in a

performance at the Arab American Anti-Discrimination Conference Gala in Washington,

DC. A civil rights organization, the Arab American Anti-Discrimination Conference

(ADC) was founded in 1980 by an Arab American senator, Jim Abourezk, who was

became concerned about anti-Arab sentiment and biased media representations of Arabs

in the wake of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. The organization is comprised of legal,

communications, and government affairs teams to help serve the Arab American

community. The ADC seeks to “empower Arab Americans, defend the civil rights of all

people, promote Arab cultural heritage, promote civic participation, encourage a balanced

US policy in the Middle East and support freedom and development in the Arab

world.”244 The 2007 gala included a speech by former president Jimmy Carter, a

presentation by media scholar Jack Shaheen, and a performance by the Axis of Evil

comedy troupe. Alsalman describes the gala as a disillusioning experience for several

reasons.

First, a 17-year-old Iraqi American soldier was invited to sing the national anthem

at the event, which he deemed blatant propaganda: “The entire moment stood still in my

heart; how could we be such pawns? How could we allow them to present a failed war to

the gala attendees through such a young indoctrinated girl?”245 The soldier’s rendition of

the Star Spangled Banner brings to light the ADC’s commitment to a particular

nationalist ideology—at least at this particular event—one that accepts the US

244
ADC website, accessed, Dec 10, 2015, http://www.adc.org/.
245
Alsalman, Diatribes, p. 48.

145
government’s narrative about the war in Iraq as a means of liberating the Iraqi people and

promoting democracy. Featuring a young Iraqi American woman showing her allegiance

for the United States also sends the message that women in particular were grateful for

US intervention.246

Beyond the performance of the national anthem, Alsalman also discovered after

the event was already underway that the FBI was sponsoring it and soliciting new

recruits. He describes being approached by an Arab FBI agent who invited him to join,

who said, “Wse need people like you.” Later the group was given pens and keychains

with the words “The FBI is for you” written in English and Arabic.247 Alsalman felt that

the political meaning of their performance was invalidated by the FBI’s presence at the

event; their message was being appropriated by the state.

The incongruity of the FBI’s presence was heightened when the Arab Summit

members discovered they were under suspicion for activities that had transpired earlier

that day, when they had worn t-shirts emblazoned with the word “terrorist” during a

rooftop video shoot. The group was asked to provide footage from the shoot to explain

their behavior. Alsalman writes, “Returning to Montreal, I realized that I am now one of

246
The US State Department has a long history of using music, and specifically hip-hop,
to nurture positive perceptions of the country abroad. As Penny Von Eschen and others
have documented, jazz was an important tool of diplomacy during the Cold War. More
recently, hip-hop has been used to leverage support during the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan. The state department launched “Rhythm Road” in 2005, an initiative aimed
at countering “poor perceptions” of the US in Muslim countries in Asia, the Middle East,
and Africa. Next level, an initiative sponsored by the State Department and UNC Chapel
Hill, was launched in 2014 and According to Hisham Aidi, “The tours aim not only to
exhibit the integration of American Muslims, but also, according to planners, to promote
democracy and foster dissent.” (See Aidi, “Leveraging hip hop in US foreign policy,” Al
Jazeera, Nov 7, 2011).
247
Alsalman, Diatribes, p. 54

146
those Arabs in the machine; they know who I am and things will probably get worse.”248

The irony of being asked to join the FBI and also being under inspection by the same

organization illustrates the state’s approach, which has been to employ heavy surveillance

of the Arab and Muslim communities while also attempting to infiltrate Arab/Muslim

organizations and to wield hip-hop as a means of diplomacy.

The Arab Summit’s album Fear of an Arab Planet explicitly plays on Public

Enemy’s 1993 album Fear of a Black Planet. The album mixes hip-hop tracks and audio

clips from the 1976 Sean Connery film The Next Man, also known as The Arab

Conspiracy. The film takes place during the Arab oil embargo, and Connery plays a

Saudi minister who becomes the target of assassination attempts by Arab terrorist groups

after he proposes to recognize Israel and support Israeli membership in OPEC. The intro

to the album highlight a portion of the film where Connery waxes poetic about olive

branches and freedom fighters in a speech at the U.N.: “I call for a direct dialogue with

Israel so we can create a Palestinian state with men of goodwill at a conference table and

not from the debris of exploded villages and human life…how do you kill a dream? The

dreamer, yes. The dream, never. The dream survives.”249

In the film, Connery’s character is killed in the final scene by his love interest,

suggesting that Arab moderates are doomed. Remixing audio clips from the film allows

the artists to subvert the original meaning. The initial clip sets the scene for the album

and proposes a new “Arab Summit,” in which various members will come to discuss

pressing global issues, referencing the Arab League’s postwar efforts to create a unified

248
Alsalman, Diatribes, p. 56
249
The Next Man, Directed by Richard Sarafian, (1976; Trinity Entertainment, 2006),
DVD.

147
political entity. According to Omar Offendum, “we strive to actually create a productive

summit of our own from the ground up, where topics we wish could be addressed more

sincerely [than] in the ‘summit industry…’”250 Beyond inaugurating the members as the

leaders of the Arab American hip hop movement, Fear of an Arab Planet advances a

commentary on the failure of Arab governments to work together as well as the

consequences of Western imperialism in the region.

Beyond its use of multimedia clips, the album’s musical samples hold sonic and

political significance. The first vocal track, “We Need Order” samples a 1973 track by

the Chicago soul/ r&b group The Chi-Lites. The lyrics of the original song are directed at

the Vietnam War: “We’re hung up on the knowledge of War/ Something, that most of us

have never seen/ But, how sweet it would be to wake up in the morning/ And find it was

all a dream.” In the context of the Arab Summit song, the “war” the song mentions is the

more recent War on Terror: “The Orient is in Gemorrah and sin as hijacked as our order

has been, denied back like brothers at the border with prints and eye scans, bag heads and

bystanders dragged dead, Flag bent. Assassination assertive, a fascination with murder,

the past erased and unheard of, we trapped in ancient disorder, blasting flames of a

mortar attack that came in the morning, all hard to ignore like the pain of lacking a name

for this coffin.”251

The Chi-Lites sample brings a soul aesthetic to the track, and also draws a parallel

between the black American experience in the 1970s during Vietnam and the Arab

American experience after 9/11. As Alsalman writes, “Many of the songs we chose to

250
Stefan Christoff, “Interview: Arab hip-hop forces unite for justice,” Electronic
Intifada, October 1, 2007.
251
Alsalman, Diatribes, p. 112

148
sample came about at a time when African American artists were asserting their right to

be equal and in search of a common existence amongst [sic] the disparaging conditions of

urban America.”252 Beyond the direct commentary of the lyrics, “we need order,” the

sample provides a sonic juxtaposition of soul and hip hop, drawing a comparison of the

two styles as well as paying tribute to an explicitly African American soul/disco

aesthetic. Here, the artists engage in a common hip-hop tradition of sampling soul tracks

from the 1970s, and at the same time acknowledge that they are working to build links

between Arabs and African Americans.

The track “Justice Tomorrow” adds another layer, combining a Fairuz sample

with The Temptations’ 1973 song “Ain’t No Justice.” Beginning with a clip from

Fairuz’s famous song “Zahrat al-Mada’in,” or “The flower of cities,” an ode to Jerusalem

as a holy city. Fairuz is widely considered a national treasure in Lebanon and she is

renowned throughout the Arab world. She first became known for her work with the

Rahbani brothers in the 1960s and 70s, and eventually rose to the level of national icon.

The song “Zahrat al-Mada’in” was written in 1967 after the Arab-Israeli war and the song

was released after an arson attack damaged the al-Aqsa Mosque in 1969. As Joseph

Massad writes, the song “vacillates between martial music, Byzantine Arab church

hymns, and somber sentimentality.”253 Fairuz opens with the lines, “It is for you that I

pray, O city of prayers…” and the song celebrates the holy multi-religious history of the

city, concluding with the words, “by our hands the peace will return to Jerusalem.”

“Zahrat al-Mada’in” has served as an anthem for the city in the years since it was written,

252
Alsalman, Diatribes, p. 43
253
Joseph Massad, “Liberating Songs: Palestine Put to Music,” Journal of Palestine
Studies, vol. 32 (3), Spring 2003, p. 25-26

149
and the Palestinian Authority awarded Fairuz with the first Jerusalem Prize for Culture in

1998.

The Arab Summit’s use of this song is an acknowledgement of the importance of

Jerusalem in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and a tribute to the nostalgia of Fairuz’s song.

Their reference suggests an appreciation of the historical importance of music in defining

a pan-Arab politics, and also collapses the temporal space between the late-1960s and the

present moment. In Pierre Nora’s terminology, the Fairuz sample works as a lieu de

memoire, as it is a well-recognized song among first generation members of the Arab

diaspora who were alive during the 1967 war. In the track “Tomorrow’s Justice,”

Fairuz’s voice is interrupted by the sound of a helicopter, and the sample shifts to the

Temptations Song “Ain’t No Justice,” along with the sounds of public protests and a

voice saying “the state of Israel is not a fleeting experiment.” The helicopter sound

evokes images of the occupied Palestinian territories under surveillance by the Israeli

state.

By combining the sample from Fairuz’s song about Jerusalem with the Motown

track claiming there “ain’t no justice,” the song creates a transnational bridge,

analogizing the struggle for African American justice and the Palestinian struggle against

the Israeli State. The track includes verses by Ragtop, Excentrik, and the Narcicyst, and

their words cover a variety of subjects including from injustice in Palestine, to the war on

crack to Saddam Hussein. Excentrik raps, “Whether you an immigrant or children of

slaves, you can see it in the difference of the living in conditions like missions tortured

Indians force ‘em to Christians, we call ‘em Palestinians we ain’t missing.” Here,

Excentrik points to a connection between both African American and Palestinian

150
experiences and the U.S. government treatment of Native Americans. Additionally, the

Temptations song claims “there ain’t no justice in that picture that you’re painting of me

in your mind,” which alludes to media depictions of Arabs after 9/11 and the circulation

of stereotypes about Arab men in particular.

The final “bonus” track at the end of the album, titled “Wartime (Wil’out),” is a

free jazz recording featuring saxophone, oud, tabla, and percussion. The chaotic bebop

sounds on the track pay tribute to jazz of the late-1960s that pushed the boundaries of

what was considered music. Fusing free jazz with Middle Eastern percussion adds

another layer of complexity and noise to the track, and it also brings together the jazz

manifestation of the radical politics of the Black Arts Movement with fast and

rhythmically turbulent tabla improvisation. As a whole, Fear of An Arab Planet ties

together the rebellious aesthetic of the early hip-hop moment with the reality of the War

on Terror. The Arab Summit is careful about the comparisons they trace, and the artists

make historical connections between periods of colonial subjugation and the post-9/11

moment. Moreover, by combining Arab and African American sounds, the album makes

use of the hip-hop technique of mixing and recycling styles to create something new.

Fostering a Global Black Consciousness

Arab hip hop artists follow in the tradition of Arab writers and spoken word artists

like Suheir Hammad, who published her first poetry collection, Born Palestinian, Born

Black, in 1996. Hammad’s poetry provides a productive bridge between literature and

music, and her work pioneered solidarities between Arab and African American cultures.

The title of her first collection, Born Palestinian, Born Black, is a radical statement that

ties together the black American experience and Palestinian suffering. Conveying a hip

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hop aesthetic influenced by the music she grew up with in Brooklyn, Hammad reached

considerable fame when she appeared on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam beginning in 2001.254

Hammad was born to a Muslim Palestinian family in Amman, Jordan; they had left the

town of Lydd after the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 and immigrated to Brooklyn

when Suheir was five. Her work articulates a direct connection with the Arab world as

well as the urban landscape of New York. She links the experience of living as a young

woman in Brooklyn in the 1990s to that of living in the Middle East as a Palestinian.

For example, in Hammad’s poem “99 cent lipstick,” she memorializes young

victims of gun violence and inner city poverty, describing “a deep dark void sucking / in

my deep dark people.” She juxtaposes poems that reflect on the black urban experience

with poems about Palestinian identity and the brutality perpetrated by the Israeli

government’s occupation. In “Silence,” she writes, “I wonder what he/ heard as he ran/

wonder what he/ thought as the/ american bullets/ flew from/ israeli hands/ through god’s

air/ to murder another/ one of freedom’s sons.” Here Hammad considers the sonic

dimension of violence, meditating on the sensory experience of a Palestinian boy as an

Israeli soldier shoots him.

Hammad’s poetry addresses a wide array of subjects surrounding Arab American

identity, including gender and ethnicity, especially discernible in a poem entitled

“exotic.” Hammad proclaims, “don’t wanna be your exotic,” and then, “the beat of my

lashes against each other/ aint some dark desert beat.” She voices her opposition to being

objectified as a “fragile colorful bird,” suggesting that her status as a woman of color in

the U.S. intensifies her sense of diasporic dislocation. Arab racial and ethnic difference

254
Russell Simmons apparently read Hammad’s poem “first writing since” and offered
her a two-year contract with Def Poetry Jam.

152
and questions of “minority” status are complex because the U.S. currently classifies

populations with Middle Eastern backgrounds as “white.” As many scholars and cultural

critics have argued, this has created contradictions between the official state

categorization and the lived experience of Arabs and Muslims.

Hammad’s poem “First Writing Since” shortly after 9/11, describes her feelings

about the attack as a Palestinian woman from Brooklyn. She was supposed to report to

work at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, but was running late. She writes

about her wide range of reactions, explaining that she was both devastated by the loss and

concerned about heightened stereotypes. She felt defensive and mourned the lives that

were lost, but worried about her brother who had just joined the Navy. Considering the

complexity of Hammad’s reactions, it is no surprise that the term “terrorist” would soon

enter the popular American lexicon as a shorthand for Arabs and Muslims, and that these

categories were often collapsed into one monolithic whole that obscured the real diversity

of both groups.

It is useful to consider similarities and differences between writers and artists of

Hammad’s generation and those from the first wave of Arab immigration to the U.S. in

the late-19th and early-20th centuries. Arab Americans from “Greater Syria” began

coming to the U.S. in the 1880s. This first wave of immigrants tended to be Greek

Orthodox or Maronite Christians, and often worked in the service industry. First and

foremost, those in the early group confirm that the “terrorist” label did not emerge until

later in the 20th century. Writers who gained recognition in the first wave of immigrants

include Kahlil Gibran, who went on to gain prominence as a poet and author of The

Prophet. In the 1920s, Gibran participated in a society called The Pen League in New

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York City, also known as al-Majhar, or the diaspora. Other members included Nasib

Arida, Abdul Massih Haddad, and Ameen Rihani. According to the organization’s

mission statement, the objective of The Pen League was to promote a new generation of

writers and “to lift Arabic literature from the quagmire of stagnation and imitation, and to

infuse a new life into its veins so as to make of it an active force in the building up of the

Arab nations.” 255

Salom Rizk, an immigrant from Syria, illustrates the prototypical narrative that

developed among the first group of Arab immigrants to the U.S. Rizk published a memoir

in 1943 titled Syrian Yankee, and he eventually toured the country telling his life story,

sponsored by Reader’s Digest. Born in a small town in Syria and orphaned at a young

age, Rizk lived with his grandmother until he discovered that his mother had been born in

the U.S., meaning that he was actually a U.S. citizen. However, it took many years before

Rizk was able to prove his identity and make the jouraey to America. He expected the

U.S. to be a kind of wonderland from the descriptions he had heard, and was therefore

disappointed when he came to live with his uncle and work alongside him in a meat

packing plant. The job was harder because of his limited knowledge of English, and he

was called a “damn foreigner” by his boss and treated with disrespect by the other

workers.

Rizk’s narrative is a classic rags-to-riches tale, and he expresses great admiration

for American values of liberty and democracy throughout the memoir, explaining at the

end that realizes that he had to earn his citizenship with hard work. Rizk finally left the

meat plant to become a traveling salesman after learning how to speak English in an

255
Nadeem Naimy, The Lebanese Prophets of New York, Beirut, Lebanon: American
University of Beirut, 1985, p. 18.

154
elementary school. While he had technically been born an American citizen, he didn’t

feel he actually belonged in the U.S. until he learned the language and found a career at

which he could succeed. While Rizk’s story can’t possibly represent that of all Arab

Americans in the first wave, it is clear from the memoir that the discrimination he faced

was mostly because of his foreign status and linguistic difference, not because of his

specific identity as an Arab.

By 2001, however, a new constellation of shortcuts or associations had been

attached to Arab culture. Religious fervor became a significant component of the

narrative around 9/11, and many commentators made the assumption that all Arabs were

Muslim; Muslims from outside the Middle East as well as Sikhs and other religious

groups were targeted as possible terrorists. As Steven Salaita argues, after 9/11 the

emergence of a movement toward “imperative patriotism” meant that any questioning of

the U.S. government or foreign affairs was determined unpatriotic, and therefore suspect.

This also meant that “American-ness” was limited to those who qualified as patriotic,

eliminating many immigrants including Arab Americans and/or Muslims who couldn’t

prove their loyalty to the U.S. Some chose to leave rather than face this kind of scrutiny,

and many were taken in by the government for questioning.

By the beginning of the 21st century, this “Arab as terrorist” stereotype was firmly

established. Performing an analysis of media images of Arabs during the 20th century,

Jack Shaheen contends that racist depictions of Arabs as terrorists began in response to

the Palestinian resistance movement and became widespread in the 1970s and 1980s:

…in the late 1940s when the state of Israel was founded on Palestinian land. From
that preemptive point on—through the Arab-Israeli wars of 1948, 1967, 1973, the
hijacking of planes, the disruptive 1973 Arab oil embargo, along with the rise of
Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi and Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini—shot after shot

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 delivered the relentless drum beat that all Arabs were and are Public Enemy No.
1.256

At the same time, however, during the post-9/11 era there were sympathetic

representations of Arabs and Muslims in the media, which Evelyn Alsultany contends

served to reaffirm American multiculturalism and open-mindedness. According to

Alsultany, television depictions introduced the binary of the “good Arab/Muslim” vs. the

“bad Arab/Muslim” based on the subjects’ allegiance to American liberal ideals.

Rather than producing solely negative stereotypical images, popular media also

specialized in the production of sympathetic Arab characters that served to reinforce what

she calls “diversity patriotism.”257 For example, television shows 24 and Homeland often

depicted “good” or likeable Arab characters alongside terrorist villains, projecting the

notion that the U.S. has reached a “postrace” era where racism was no longer a major

concern. In reality, these depictions provide evidence of a new form of racism that

appeared at first glance to be celebrating difference.

The shift that took place after 9/11, therefore, was toward the ubiquity of

stereotypical images that had already been in circulation. As Nadine Naber contends, by

the 1990s, Arab Americans were unavoidably connected to a region important to U.S.

military and economic interests. Increasing U.S. military intervention beginning in the

1960s and 1970s transformed Arab Americans into a “diaspora of empire,” which

coincided with a shift from what she describes as “model minority” to “problem

256
Jack Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs, Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press (third edition):
2014, p. 28-29.
257
Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation After
9/11, New York: NYU Press: 2013, p. 17.

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minority.”258 Naber underscores the fact that Arab Americans’ “problem minority” status

has forced the community to focus on the terms of Orientalist vs. anti-Orientalist rhetoric.

Instead, she seeks to theorize a “diasporic feminist anti-imperialism” to counteract the

limitations enacted by the “problem minority” status. Arab hip hop artists have worked to

formulate this kind of diasporic politics and to complicate dominant associations by

introducing poetic language, and also directly addressing what it means to be a diaspora

of empire.

The question of what it means to be a “problem minority” has informed much of

the work of Arab writers and artists since 2001, and has also introduced the possibility of

aligning with other communities of color, especially African Americans. Mustafa

Bayoumi narrates the experiences of young Arab Americans in his 2009 book, How Does

it Feel to be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America. The title itself, a reference to

W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk, introduces a parallel between African

American and Arab American experience. Bayoumi contends, “A century later, Arabs

and Muslim Americans are the new ‘problem’ of American society….”259 His book

follows the narratives of nine young Arabs and Muslims in Brooklyn, recounting their

experiences after 9/11.

Rasha, a nineteen-year-old Syrian American who immigrated with her family at

age five, describes her family’s three-month detainment in New York prisons in 2002.

Rasha and her parents, sister, and two brothers were taken from their home in Brooklyn

by the FBI and held separately in the Metropolitan Detention Center without charges. The

258
Nadine Naber, Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism, New York:
NYU Press, 2012.
259
Mustapha Bayoumi, How Does it Feel to be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in
America, New York, NY: Penguin Press, 2008, p. 2.

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family had never been granted U.S. citizenship, but they were fortunate to have a lawyer

and community support and were eventually let go. The three months in detention still

took a psychological toll. According to Bayoumi, “Rasha wouldn’t tell me if any physical

abuse befell her eldest brother or father, just that they were mostly silent about their

experiences after the family was reunited.”260 In 2003, the Justice Department completed

an investigation alleging abuse of male detainees at MDC.

There is evidence to suggest that the Arab American community has been under

surveillance by the U.S. government at least since 1967. An FBI plan under Richard

Nixon named “Operation Boulder” authorized security checks on all visa applicants with

Arab surnames in the wake of the Arab-Israeli War, and “further authorized the FBI to

spy on the Arab American community through compiling dossiers on people’s lawful

political activities and even monitoring the magazines they read….”261 These monitoring

activities came to light once again with the case of the L.A. 8 in 1987. A month after the

initiation of the first Palestinian intifada against Israel, seven Palestinian men and one

Kenyan woman were arrested in Los Angeles for distributing materials in support of the

Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The FBI sought to deport the activists based

on their political activity. The case was in legal limbo until it was finally thrown out in

2007. Episodes of government surveillance were also reported during first Gulf War in

the 1990s. These cases validate the claim that Arab Americans form part of a “diaspora of

empire,” since the government has often monitored and responded to them based on

events overseas.

260
Bayoumi, How Does it Feel, p. 39.
261
Ibid, p. 264

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 As Mustafa Bayoumi suggests with the title of his book, How Does it Feel to be a

Problem?, questions of racism and marginalization have led to increasing identification

with blackness. Arab hip hop demonstrates the presence of a “global black

consciousness,” based on Nitasha Sharma’s concept of a “global race consciousness”

which she says “links individuals across time, space, and racial categories.”262 Sharma

makes the case that South Asian hip hop artists redefine South Asian and black relations

“as mutually constitutive and created through lateral acts of cross-pollination.” Not only

do they change what it means to be an American Desi, Sharma claims, but they also

demonstrate the possibility of building community around ethnic difference.

Sharma intentionally separates ethnicity from race, arguing that ethnicity

comprises a sense of belonging from shared ancestry and culture, while race is largely an

external category: “South Asian American hip hop artists defy expectations of the new

second generation by turning away from both an ethno-national identity (as ‘Sri

Lankans,’ for instance) and from an assimilated mainstream White identity.”263 Instead,

the young South Asians she profiles voluntarily choose to identify with blackness. And

likewise, “Aware of their liminal status in relation to co-ethnics, Blacks, and Whites, they

sample the race consciousness and counterhegemonic messages of hip-hop lyrics and

fuse them with an immigrant perspective.”264

There are numerous parallels to be made between Arab American and South

Asian American hip-hop communities. Like Arab American immigration, the history of

South Asian migration to the U.S. also happened in two waves, the second of which

262
Nitasha Sharma, Hip Hop Desis: South Asian Americans, Blackness, and a Global
Race Consciousness, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010, p. 91
263
Ibid, p. 39
264
Ibid, p. 109

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began after the 1965 Immigration Act. Sharma describes a politics of assimilation among

first generation South Asian Americans, who often reject associations with blackness in

an attempt to retain the benefits of middle-class life. This approach facilitates a

conservative cultural insularity, revealing that “ethnicity also enacts racism upon others

through conservative notions of authenticity that dovetail with mainstream racial

politics,”265 displaying a disidentification with other ethnic minorities, including African

Americans and Latinos.266

Sharma argues that class is an important factor, as many middle-class South Asian

families “sought to maintain mainstream American markers of success” and to minimize

the impact of racism by identifying with the “model minority” paradigm and by

emphasizing upward class mobility and white collar professions.267 Similar dynamics are

at play in the Arab American community, with class and generational politics affecting

the ways that members approach their racial identities. Like South Asians, second

generation Arab Americans are negotiating between the expectations of their parents’

generation and the American mainstream.

There are also similarities between South Asians and Arab Americans as far as

the specifics of racial categorization. Both groups have been treated as “in between”, and

as “not quite white” by the U.S. state and the public at large. The legal system has more

often deemed Arab Americans “white” than it has South Asians, but as Sarah Gualtieri

points out, there are numerous 20th-century court cases that illustrate the “not-quite-

white” status of Arab Americans. For example, “…the Syrian racial prerequisite cases

265
Sharma, Hip Hop Desis, p. 41
266
Ibid, p 47
267
Ibid, p. 44

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heard in federal courts between 1909 and 1915 demonstrate that buried beneath the

reasoned rationales of the legal rulings lay contradictions, ambiguities, and discrepancies.

Quite simply, the courts were having difficulty deciding who was a ‘white person.”268

Diasporic Reorientations

An important member of this transnational network of Arab hip hop artists,

Shadia Mansour, has been called the “first lady of Arabic hip hop.” In fact, she is one of

the few women involved with the movement.269 Known for collaborations with a number

of prominent MCs including M1 from Dead Prez and the Narcicyst, Mansour has said

that she wants to enact a “musical intifada.”270 Though raised in the U.K., Mansour has

traveled and performed in the Palestinian territories, and her work reflects her dedication

to raising global awareness about Palestinian suffering. Mansour speaks to multiple

audiences, but her largely Arabic lyrics suggest a desire to reach Arabs both in the

Middle East and the diaspora. Her track “Lazim netghayyar,” or “We have to Change,”

featuring Omar Offendum, sends a clear message about the dire need for a new approach

to the Palestinian Israeli crisis. Though almost entirely in Arabic, the song appears with

an English translation on Youtube. Mansour declares, “The earth is moving counter-

clockwise and the world is losing its balance/ Tell me where else is there for us to go?/

We have to change!” The idea of the earth rotating the wrong direction speaks to the real

material effects of the Israeli occupation.

268
Sarah Gualtieri, Between Arab and White: Race and Ethnicity in the Early Syrian
American Diaspora, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009, p. 74.
269
Jackie Salloum’s film Slingshot Hip Hop profiles several other Palestinian women
artists Abeer (the witch), for one, but they have gained less international visibility than
their male counterparts.
270
Jon Donnison, “British Palestinian rapper conducts a ‘musical intifada,’” BBC News,
September 7, 2010.

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 Mansour opens the track with an audio sample from an interview with Juliano

Mer Khamis, an Arab Israeli actor, director, and activist who was assassinated near the

theater he founded in Jenin in 2011.271 Khamis says, “We are facing the end of the

destruction of the Palestinian people by the Israeli forces. We are in a situation today that

not only the political and economical [sic] infrastructure was destroyed. Israel is

destroying the neurological system of the society.”272 Juxtaposed with black-and-white

images of Israelis and Palestinians during the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948, the quote

conveys the magnitude of the devastation on Palestinians’ lives. Mansour uses historical

images to powerful effect in the video, illustrating the creation of the state of Israel after

Figure 7: Mansour in her 2013 video, "Lazim netghayyar”

World War II and the subsequent occupation of Arab Palestinian land. She stands in the

271
Khamis was also apparently Shadia Mansour’s cousin.
272
“More Insights—Juliano Mer Khamis, self-explained.” Un-Truth, April 9, 2011,
accessed Dec 1, 2015, https://un-truth.com/boundaries-borders/more-insights-juliano-
mer-khamis-self-explained.

162
center of the screen and highlights particular images by dragging them across the display.

Her own image also becomes transparent and is merged with the background images of

Palestinian people running in the streets and meetings with global leaders including

George W. Bush, Condaleeza Rice, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Yasir Arafat.

Mansour emphasizes the importance of women in particular by holding up two

portraits of Palestinian peasant women from the early-20th century while asking, “Tell

me, where else is there for us to go?” Mansour calls for recognition of the past and

present suffering of ordinary Palestinians as well as a shift in Palestinians’ perspectives.

She raps, “We are between two occupations: the occupation of the brain and the

occupation of the country/ No doubt that the road to equality is complex/ but our future is

to begin to free ourselves from mental slavery.” By moving away from Western and

Israeli domination, she suggests, Palestinians will be more likely to educate themselves

and gain self-determination. Omar Offendum’s verse speaks directly to Arabs and Arab

Americans who may not be doing their part to help Palestinians. He says:

The 21st century began with earthquakes, hurricanes,

And bombs destroying the Towers of Babel
The blood of Arabs is still flowing
But nobody ever cares
And this is our problem
Succumbing to conflict and forgetting our family
Stop being selfish
Think of your brother
Think of your father
And remember those who speak like you.
So that your children and grandchildren can walk in your shade

Offendum’s bold appeal to fellow Arabs in this verse and Mansour’s ultimate message

about the desperation of the Palestinian situation in 2013 exemplify her commitment to a

“musical intifada.”

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 Shadia Mansour’s call for resistance is perhaps most evident in her 2011 track “Al

Kufeyyeh Arabiyya” or “The kufeyyeh is Arab,” which she wrote upon discovering a

company producing Israeli kufeyyehs imitating the Arab scarves with the Star of David

on them. The track features M1 of the Brooklyn hip hop group Dead Prez. Together,

Mansour and M1 describe the cultural importance of the scarf to the Palestinian

community and draw parallels between Arab and pan-African resistance: “From the

ghetto to Gaza/ I keep my RBG up,” M1 proclaims at the end of his verse, referring to the

pan-African flag. Following early hip hop convention, Mansour’s lyrics are at once

satirical, belligerent, and earnest. She raps, “Good morning cousins/ Come in and honor

us with your presence/ What would you like us to serve you, Arab blood or tears from our

eyes?” Her outrage arises from the realization that even after taking over the land of

Palestine, Israelis continually appropriate and imitate Arab culture. For Mansour, the

kufeyyeh is the final straw. Rapping about her pride in her Palestinian heritage, she says,

“I am Shadia Mansour/ And this scarf is my I.D.” M1’s demonstration of solidarity on

this track speaks to the genuine transnationalism of Arab hip hop and of 21st century

youth culture more broadly.

Explicitly political rhetoric is also apparent in much of The Narcicyst’s work.

P.H.A.T.W.A, the most direct response to the “war on terror” on his 2009 album The

Narcicyst, is accompanied by a satirical video that gained popularity on Youtube.273 The

song, which stands for “Political hip hop attracting the world’s attention” or “Purposeful

hatred against the wrong Arabs,” depicts Narcy going through security in an airport.

273
“The Narcicyst, “PHATWA,” YouTube video, posted by Channel Narcy, April 9,
2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtoHCUMpNMY. As of November 15, 2015,
the video had 378,615 views.

164
When his African American friend asks, “who do you think they’re gonna harass more,

man? You or me?” Narcy responds, “Obviously me. You know Iraq is the new black.”

With a catchy chorus that includes the lyrics “I get deported somewhere to die,” Narcy

raps in front of prisoners in orange jumpsuits dancing with bags on their heads and gets

interrogated by an F.B.I. agent who calls him a “rapper guy” and rattles off a series of

Arab-sounding names when he forgets his name. At the end, an Arab FBI agent asks him,

“Do you think we should get out of Iraq?” and Narcy replies, “it depends what you mean

by ‘we.’” The video is based on Alsalman’s own experiences of being stopped and

interrogated in airports. In 2008 he was detained and prevented from entering the U.S. on

the Canadian border. The P.H.A.T.W.A. song and video use satirical humor to shed light

on post-9/11 Arab experience, and they humanize Narcy as a harmless MC who is

needlessly under suspicion by the FBI.

In the song “Hamdulillah,” Narcy works to humanize Muslims throughout the

Western hemisphere. The video for “Hamdulillah” is the most-viewed of any of The

Narcicyst’s tracks on Youtube, and it features an Arabic chorus by British Palestinian

singer Shadia Mansour.274 Mansour pays tribute to ancestors in Gaza (and Basra) in her

chorus. The mood of the song is somber and reflective, and Narcy allows for a level of

vulnerability that is unusual for hip-hop. The title means “praise to God” in Arabic, and

Narcy speaks about his love for his family members and his faith in Islam: “Bismillah,

means to will in God’s name/Without the ball and chain/A slave falling to claim/

Bismillah, will forever hold inner peace.” The video shows images of over a hundred

people, most of whom are Narcy’s friends and fellow artists. The portraits depict people

274
The video had 1,043,362 views as December 9, 2015.

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of all ages, genders, and ethnicities. About half of the women wear hijab and some of the

men wear skullcaps.

The portraits are short video clips showing the person or couple looking into the

camera, conveying a sense of unity among differences. Sonically, the song is built around

Mansour’s vocals with a simple string accompaniment identified as Arab with a repeating

qanun riff. “Hamdulillah” is a visual and sonic tribute to the heterogeneity and beauty of

Islam, and it counters mainstream narratives about the religion as inherently violent.

Narcy refers to the moment when the “militants tried to split this law,” a comment on

disputes about the implementation of Sharia law or the ban on music in Islam. The song

pulls together Narcy’s political ideology with his desire for a transformation in media

depictions of Arabs and Muslims.

Figure 8: Narcy in the video for P.H.A.T.W.A.

In a more recent project, an Arabic EP entitled Nargisee, Narcy pays tribute to his

166
Arab heritage and engages in several artistic collaborations, with tracks featuring Tamer

Nafar and Mahmour Jrere from the Palestinian group DAM, Algerian Canadian MC

Maryam Saci, and Nizar Wattad AKA Ragtop from The Philistines and Arab Summit.

Nargisee is almost entirely in Arabic, and takes on the politics of diasporic identity as a

tribute to friends and ancestors from the past. The album begins with an introduction

from Alsalman’s grandfather, who speaks in formal Arabic in a distinguished tone,

evoking nostalgia for the formal pan-Arab education style that was the product of a

previous generation.

The cover art exhibits visual nostalgia in a style Narcy terms “future vintage,”

with artwork by his wife, Sundus Abdul Hadi, incorporating early-20th century photos

from the Arab world that superimposes the faces of the artists on the album over the

originals. As Narcy writes in the album booklet, “The album art is inspired by

photographs of our families during the golden days of the Arab world, when war was a

distant future that was yet unknown, but colonization was still a reality…I dedicate this

booklet to our grandmothers and grandfathers, who have grounded us and made us know

and appreciate our rich heritage and complicated histories.”275 The photos are captioned

with the locations, which include “Basra, 1950,” “Jerusalem, Palestine, 1948,” and

“University of Damascus, 1970.” Narcy memorializes his friend and co-founder of the

rap group Euphrates, Nofy Fannan, in an image of the two of them along with producer

Nawar Al-Rufaie sitting in a biplane with the caption “The past in the future, towards the

Euphrates.” These images are poignant in their creative re-collecting of people and eras

that never coexisted, and they point to a longing for a utopian past. Narcy’s reference to

275
The Narcicyst, Nargisee, The Medium, 2014.

167
an era when “war was a distant future,” for example, is unrealistic, since the Arab world

had already experienced war and colonialism prior to 1948.

The inventive hybridization of past and present is evident in the music as well as

the album art. “Sikeena” featuring Omar Offendum is a poetic meditation on life and

violence. The song samples the famous Lebanese singer, Majida El Roumi, performing

the song “Ya Beirut,” originally a poem by Nizar Qabbani written during the Lebanese

Civil War. The sample is evocative for its melancholy vocals and classical Arabic sound.

Figure 9: Narcy on the cover of his 2014 album Nargisee

Offendum raps in Arabic about how “the road to Syria is paved with blood/ A crescent

made fertile from all the corpses/ Below the earth – buried worries and stories/ Who’s to

168
blame?” and “nothing is clear anymore in this cloudy world.” The track expresses

exhaustion with the level of violence in the Middle East following the hope and

excitement of the Arab Spring. Offendum suggests, “my advice brother is to be patient,”

while Narcy questions the dedication of the Islamic religious community: “But where is

the Ummah? Why do you no longer think of your mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers?

A United Arab Republic/ pfff like Biggie said, it was all a dream.” These lyrics are

representative of the mood of many in the Arab world and the diaspora who are

emotionally and mentally exhausted by the toll of perpetual wars.

Born in Saudi Arabia, Omar Chakaki, AKA Offendum, grew up in the

Washington DC area and attended the Islamic Saudi Academy in Alexandria, VA, a

bilingual school with classes in both English and Arabic. Offendum moved to Los

Angeles in 2005, and he worked as an architect until 2013, when he quit his job to pursue

music full time. Offendum describes his early musical experiences as complicated due to

his education in in Islamic school:

Growing up in and around Washington DC had me listening to Donnie Simpson

in the morning and watching BET way before it sold (out) to Viacom. Yet as an
Arab- Muslim boy attending the Islamic Saudi Academy, I was taught by many of
my teachers that music was haram (forbidden). Obviously that didn’t stop me
from listening to it—in fact it probably made me listen longer and harder—but it
did make it difficult to immerse myself in the culture without their ridicule. Some
of the same teachers would make us memorize countless verses of classical
Arabic poetry, all while emphasizing the importance of this lyrical art as the
backbone of our language. Yet when we would try to explain how rap was also
poetry, they laughed at how ridiculous this was.276

Rather than listening to music at school, Offendum describes the school bus as the

place to listen to walkmans and memorize new music by Tupac or the Wu Tang Clan. He

additionally mentions Biggie, Nas, Common, Scarface, and Outkast as artists that

influenced his musical development. In college, Offendum started a hip-hop duo with a

276
Alsalman, Diatribes, p. 67.

169
Sudanese American friend from middle school, El-Tayeb Ibrahim, aka Mr. Tibbz.

Together they were known as The N.O.M.A.D.S (Notoriously Offensive Male Arabs

Discussing Shit). They recorded an album entitled Dissonance & Dissendat in 2004,

which covers a variety of topics including racial profiling, Islam, Arab identity, and

alcoholism. The album maintains a light tone despite its serious subject matter.

The title of Omar Offendum’s 2011 solo album, Syrianamericana constructs an

imaginary geographic space between Syria and America, which Offendum has said is “a

Nation-State-of-mind, where everything is connected and everyone is welcome.” Many

of the songs on include verses in both English and Arabic, and the album navigates

Offendum’s complex identity. The chorus of the song “Destiny,” for example, includes

the line “It’s hard living in the West when I know the East got the best of me/Could be

looking in my eyes but you don’t really see the rest of me.” Offendum suggests that there

is an element of his identity that non-Arab Americans cannot understand, and the Arabic

verse in the song speaks directly to this divide. The song articulates Offendum’s

“Destiny” to be a man caught between two worlds, living in the West and observing the

suffering that is the consequence of inter-Arab violence.

He alludes that the root of this violence is Western imperialism, but that Arabs,

and Syrians specifically, must also take responsibility to stop it. Through his verses,

Offendum explains the difficulty of living in the U.S. as a second-generation immigrant

with ties to the Middle East, since he is powerless in the face of the pain he is witnessing

in his homeland. In an Arabic verse he speaks directly to the violence in Damascus or the

area known as “greater Syria”: “If we say ‘an eye for an eye’/ There won’t be any eyes

left in Sham/ Bilad al-Sham.” In the English verse Offendum says there are unappreciated

170
elements of Arab culture in the West, which put together suggest that “you might not

have learned to live with me/But sure as hell can’t without.”

“Destiny” remixes a sample from Paul Anka’s 1958 hit “You Are My Destiny,”

which reached #7 on the American Billboard charts. The choice of this sample is

significant because of Anka’s Lebanese-Syrian Canadian background. He was born in

Ottawa to a Syrian father and Lebanese mother, and moved to New York City and began

working with producer Don Costa at ABC-Paramount. Anka is one of the most successful

and well-recognized North American musicians with an Arab ethnic background. In

using this sample, Offendum is honoring Paul Anka’s ancestry and shedding light on the

history of Arab performers in the U.S. The sound of Anka’s voice, though remixed,

works as a lieu de mémoire that encapsulates a midcentury assimilationist aesthetic.

Offendum uncovers Anka’s concealed second generation Arabness and accentuates it by

rapping over the track in Arabic. The song’s declaration, “You are my destiny,” produces

a nuanced outlook on diasporic identity. Offendum articulates the challenges of living in

the West while looking toward the East, but he also embraces the insight he obtains from

his hybrid background.

Conclusion: The Arab Speaks of Rivers

Omar Offendum views his fluency in both Arab and American cultures as a

unique opportunity to translate between the two. As a hip-hop artist, he values the

abundant tradition of poetry in Arab culture. The tracks “Damascus” and “Finjan” on

Syrianamericana both translate poems by the celebrated 20th century Syrian poet Nizar

Qabbani. Offendum’s musical translations educate English-speaking audiences about

Qabbani’s work, and they emphasize the close relationship between hip-hop and poetry,

171
blurring boundaries between “literature” “high art” and “pop culture.” Another track,

“The Arab Speaks of Rivers,” translates Langston Hughes’s famous poem “The Negro

Speaks of Rivers” into Arabic. “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” first published in 1921 and

known for its Afrocentric perspective, draws parallels between the Mississippi River, the

Euphrates, and the Nile.

As Langston Hughes writes, “I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older

than the flow of human blood in human veins.”277 Offendum’s track begins with an audio

clip of Langston Hughes speaking about his composition of the poem, which then

transitions to his translation of the poem into Arabic. Offendum’s reading is set against a

drumbeat and a simple piano accompaniment. He speaks in formal Arabic in the manner

of renowned modern Arab poets such as Nizar Qabbani and Mahmoud Darwish. Aurally

and conceptually, “The Arab Speaks of Rivers” ties together the celebrated poet of the

Harlem Renaissance to the great poets of the Arab world. It also introduces Arabic

speakers to Langston Hughes’s international perspective and honors his influence,

encouraging English speakers to revisit the original poem.

More broadly, Offendum excavates the work of poets and artists from previous

generations in an effort to challenge the vilification of Arabness after 9/11. The track

“Mother’s Day” samples a track by the early-20th century “golden age” Syrian diva

Asmahan, who was the sister of the celebrated singer and performer Farid Al-Atrache.

Asmahan was extremely popular in Egyptian films in the 1930s and 40s, and many

consider her a pivotal figure in Arab popular music. Offendum dedicates the track to his

own mother, and he sings in the chorus, “There’s no way that I’ll ever be able to repay

277
Langston Hughes, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” 1921.

172
you, ma.” The Asmahan clip he samples is from a love song entitled “Emta Hataraf”

from the 1944 film Gharam wa intiqam (passion and revenge). This sample plays behind

Offendum’s rhyming about how his mother raised him after his father died when he was

twelve, serving as a tribute to the importance of sound in personal and familial memory,

and not just collective remembrance.

173
Conclusion: Music, Violence, and Social Transformation

While completing this dissertation, the news of the coordinated attacks that killed

130 people in Paris on November 13, 2015 and the subsequent scrutiny of Muslims and

Arabs in the West loomed large. Public discourse has recently focused on strategies for

limiting the migration of Syrian refugees to the U.S. At the heart of such controversies is

an underlying concern about Arabs and Muslims as potentially dangerous to Western

society, and nearly fifteen years after the 9/11 attacks, anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia

remain prevalent. The rhetoric of fear and isolationism has become particularly evident in

the presidential campaign of Donald Trump, who has called for all Muslims to be banned

from traveling to the U.S.278 Trump’s rhetoric has been widely condemned by other

politicians and public figures, but it is worthwhile to compare the public discourse

regarding Muslims following the Paris attacks to debates about Israel and Palestine;

Judith Butler’s contention about the limitations on public discourse become easily

apparent in the present atmosphere.

Furthermore, the violence and resulting racism that have been increasingly

prevalent in the past fifteen years raise questions about the powers and limits of sound

and music in catalyzing real social change. While music can raise awareness and form

connections as in the case of Arab hip hop, there are limits when it comes to the forces of

state and military violence. For the past several years, the U.S. government has used hip

hop as a tool of diplomacy in the Muslim world. In fact, the US State Department has a

long history of using music, and specifically hip hop, to nurture positive perceptions of

the country abroad. As Penny Von Eschen and others have documented, jazz was an

278
Jeremy Diamond, “Donald Trump: Ban all Muslim Travel to U.S.,” CNN Politics,
December 8, 2015.

174
important tool of diplomacy during the Cold War.279 More recently, hip hop has been

used to leverage support during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The state department

launched “Rhythm Road” in 2005, an initiative aimed at countering “poor perceptions” of

the US in Muslim countries in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.280

Next level, an initiative sponsored by the State Department and UNC Chapel Hill,

was launched in 2014. The artists, some of whom are Muslim, have served as

ambassadors by performing and speaking about the Muslim American experience.

According to Hisham Aidi, “The tours aim not only to exhibit the integration of

American Muslims, but also, according to planners, to promote democracy and foster

dissent.”281 As Evelyn Alsultany has described, international State Department projects

have been accompanied by domestic efforts to promote goodwill between the

government and Arab Americans.282 As Aidi writes,

Given the import of African-American culture in the U.S., cultural globalization is

often the dissemination of African-American styles…The spread of American
culture has also coincided with the globalization of Islam: the increase in
immigration and communication technologies means that Islam’s teachings and
art forms are circulating worldwide, streaming into the West through media flows
and minority communities….to young Muslims, the African-American history
spread by the music and other media flows represent struggle, an alternative idea
of modernity and cosmopolitanism, as well as a different relationship to the
West.283

More specifically, he contends, “Muslim youth on both sides of the Atlantic are, along

with their non-Muslim counterparts, building movements and narratives that casually

279
Penny Von Eschen, Sachmo Blows up the World, Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2006.
280
Hisham Aidi, “Leveraging hip hop in US foreign policy,” Al Jazeera, Nov 7, 2011.
281
Ibid
282
Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media After 9/11
283
Hisham Aidi, Rebel Music: Race, Empire, and the New Muslim Youth Culture, New
York: Vintage, 2014, xxi-xxii

175
traverse history and geography to imagine a utopian future for themselves.”284

There is evidence that Arab American hip-hop specifically has been used as a

vehicle for government diplomacy. A 2005 State Department press release, for example,

described a performance by Yemeni-American rapper Hagage aj Masaed (aka AJ) at the

Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery in conjunction with an exhibit on Yemen and the ancient

incense trade. The title affirms, “Arab-American Rapper Promotes Arabic Heritage

Through Music,” and the article reveals an interest in promoting positive relations

between the Arab American community and US government institutions. The tone,

however, indicates a simplification of the complex issues at hand: “In a concert blending

East and West, an American belly dancer performed alongside the rapper during three of

his songs, showing the Arabian influence on the United States. Moreover, Masaed’s

attire—a headscarf, a Baltimore Orioles baseball jersey and blue jeans—also illustrated

the blend.”285 By focusing on the belly dancer and the clothing of the performer, the

article shifts focus attention from the very real experiences of discrimination after 9/11

and the violence enacted abroad under the war on terror.

On the other hand, members of the Arab hip hop movement were active in the

Arab Spring uprisings of 2011-2012, and YouTube’s wide reach helped circulate their

clips transnationally. While the region-wide revolutions were politically complex and in

didn’t necessarily lead to the massive social liberation many were hoping they would, it

is important to acknowledge the role of music in the wave of demonstrations and protests.

The song “#Jan25,” a collaborative project involving emcees Omar Offendum, The

284
Aidi, Rebel Music, p. xx
285
Brittany Sterrett, “Arab-Amercan rapper promotes Arabic heritage through music,”
US Fed News Service, Including US State News, July 11, 2005.

176
Narcicyst, Freeway, Ayan, and Amir Suleiman, celebrated the thousands of people who

took to the streets of Tahrir Square in January 2011. The title references the crucial

importance of Twitter hashtags in circulating updates and information about the protests.

As Offendum himself wrote, “…this track serves as a testament to the revolution’s effect

on the hearts and minds of today’s youth, and the spirit of resistance it has come to

symbolize for oppressed people worldwide.”286 One writer called “#Jan25” a “soundtrack

to the revolution,” emphasizing the clip’s viral status and the fact that it became widely

popular in Egypt.287 In fact, in addition to hip hop being vital to the “soundtrack” of the

Arab Spring, the movement also raised awareness in the U.S. about diasporic hip hop. In

this way, though limited, music and sonic imaginaries do sometimes have material

impacts on social and political events.

As with #Jan25, the contemporary electronic music collective project Checkpoint

303 brings together many of the themes I have discussed throughout this dissertation

including sound and memory, geographic belonging, and sonic identification. Made up of

members from Palestine and Tunisia, the group is named after an Israeli checkpoint near

Bethlehem. Checkpoint 303’s latest project, The Iqrit Files, is a haunting intertextual

document that sonically reanimates the Palestinian town of Iqrit, which was forcibly

depopulated by the Israeli Defense Forece in 1948. The Israeli Supreme Court later ruled

that the village’s residents could return to their homes, however, the IDF destroyed the

286
“#Jan25 Egypt - Omar Offendum, The Narcicyst, Freeway, Ayah, Amir Sulaiman
(Prod. by Sami Matar),” YouTube video, posted by Sami Matar, Feb 7, 2011,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCbpiOpLwFg.
287
Julia Pyper, “#Jan25: A Soundtrack of the Revolution,” Art Threat, August 15, 2011.

177
town on Christmas Day, 1951.288 The Iqrit Files combines songs, audio clips, and

ambient sounds to narrate the history of the village and its people. “In 1948,” for

example, includes an audio clip of Eleanor Roosevelt reading the Universal Declaration

of Human Rights, intermixed with an ‘oud melody and a Palestinian woman singing a

folksong. The final track, “Return to Iqrit,” imagines the eventual return of the town’s

original citizens and their descendants.

As the four preceding chapters demonstrate, sound and music have long

functioned as vital modes of U.S. engagements with the Middle East, and popular music

has offered a unique means of affiliation with the constantly shifting category of

Arabness. As I have argued, the concepts of mock orientalism, Afro-orientalism,

affiliatory desires, and a “global black consciousness” help to trace the multiple ways that

sounds of Arabness have manifested in American culture. Beyond simply shedding light

on the perceptions and formulations of Arabness in the 20th and 21st centuries, sonic

expressions have also shifted and complicated the many ways that Americans have

engaged with the Middle East.

288
Gideon Levy and Alex Levac, “Drafting the Blueprint for Palestinian Refugees’ Right
of Return, Haaretz, October 5, 2013.

178
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