Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

A brief-history of the Arab ballad

 

I have just finished reading Global Middle East Into The Twenty-First Century . Apart from a couple of essays which I have found dry, the collection of 24 short essays is really worth reading.   It is accessible to both students and those who are eager to read about different topics related to the region in its global context, from music, food and Levantines in Latin America to oil, Egyptian cotton, Mo Salah and ports of the Persian Gulf...

The cultural sources of black radicalism

لَذَّةُ القَلَق The Pleasure of Distress

Chile: 11 September 45 years ago "The contrast between the beauty and the brutality that people are capable of was inescapable. The social power people invest in music became a permanent part of my thinking. Notable for its absence in the time after the coup was the  nueva canción  (new song) folk music movement. Urban musicians had taken rural traditional music and transformed it into inspirational expressions calling for human dignity, equality and compassion. The military regime outlawed it, and it disappeared entirely from the public Chilean soundscape. Overnight,  peñas —gathering places for  nueva canción  musicians and fans—became a thing of the past. It was risky to play or even possess instruments such as the  quena  flute or the  charango  guitar because of their association with the socialist movement." An Eyewitness of Pinochet's Coup

There are similarities between the South Korean protest movement in the 1980s and the regime crackdown and the Arab uprisings since 2011, but one of the differences was that South Korea had already embarked on industrialisation and achieved it. Capitalist relations dominated and thus the struggle for bourgeois democracy was part of that transformation. The slogans and songs by the current protest movements in Sudan and Algeria come to mind when we read the following:  Protests inspired by South Korea's "March for the Beloved" See also March for the Beloved

The Astounding Eyes of Rita

Royal Opera House Muscat (Oman) and Budapest Symphony Orchestra (Hungary) led by composer  Yasser Abdelrahman

The Silent Theology of Islamic Art

Bob Dylan's embrace of Israel's war crimes

A Pakistani version of "Take Five"

Allende's Poet

Sounds and music from Istanbul, Turkey. Sunday between noon and 1pm on 104.4 FM (London) Or resonancefm.com (worldwide)

Sunday between noon and 1pm on 104.4 FM (London) Or Resonancefm.com (worldwide) Gaza : from a rally organized by Stop the War Coalition and Palestine Solidarity Campaign (UK). The rally took place on 8th of January in Friends Meeting House in London. Among those who spoke were: George Galloway MP and writer and fighter Tariq Ali. Obituary : Mansour Rahabani . Renowned Lebanese composer Mansour Rahabani died Tuesday 13th January following a bout of pneumonia, leaving a legacy of innovation in the music and theater of Lebanon and the wider Arab world. Read: Kafka Era of Double Standard