Arab Pop Has Always Been Global

How a Pitchfork article gets the story wrong on Arab Pop

At the turn of the millennium, the dance-pop coming out of the Arab world was everywhere. Bellydancing hits like “Shik Shak Shok” soundtracked gym routines worldwide. Egyptian pop legends like Haife Wehbe and Nancy Ajram made appearances on CNN. A kind of vaguely Arab, pan-Mediterranean sound – like, for example, Alabina’s self-titled hit single – conquered European dancefloors. And the biggest trend of them all was Raï, the Algerian pop genre who spread from its homeland to France, and then from France to every other pop market on Earth except for America’s (where, regardless, the genre still earned attention and strong sales in the niche world music scene).

Pitchfork dropped an article this week, “Arabic Music Is on the Brink of a Global Breakthrough,” that awkwardly handles its subject’s long history of crossover success. The article is a trend piece that surveys the state of contemporary Arab pop, with a focus on emerging Arab artists who are trying to find a place for themselves in the international music industry. Its author, Arab American journalist Danny Hajjar, proposes that this youngest generation of Arab stars chart new ground in the history of the genre — they are more cosmopolitan, more sophisticated, more experimental — and therefore are poised to “go global” to an extent earlier generations couldn’t dream of. 

This kind of framing is pretty common to trend pieces on Asian music. Despite the fact that Western media has never covered our musics in serious depth at any point, editors won’t permit us to write about it unless we somehow demonstrate that Asian acts are new and exciting, unlike all those old acts that cluttered up the World Music bins in the ‘90s. After all, a take like “Arab Pop Is as Global as Always, Also Just as Exciting and Experimental as Usual” doesn’t scream breaking news — and yet that is far more truthful than trying to wrangle a linear narrative of progress out of its rich, complex history. 

Hajjar is clearly deeply knowledgeable about Arab pop; he’s the creator of a (good!) Substack dedicated to the genre. But his Pitchfork piece makes a mistake I see a lot of young Asian-American critics make, where a desire to praise new Asian art accidentally ends up selling its predecessors short. Almost every point Hajjar makes about the latest generation of Arab pop stars could have been equally made of their forerunners; and while there is clearly a difference of degree between these contemporary acts and their immediate elders, the article overreaches in its attempt to portray them as a new phenomenon. The end result is an article that, intending to put Arab pop front and center, ends up marginalizing it. 

Anyways, enough with the broad claims! Let’s work through the article itself. 

Hajjar, to his credit, includes several passages in the piece that accurately traces the history of Arab pop: 

By the late ’90s and early 2000s, there was a growing number of collaborations between Arab pop singers and Western artists, mixing cultural sounds and instruments together. Among them were Sting and Algerian crooner Cheb Mami’s Top 20 hit “Desert Rose” in 1999 and Don Omar and Egyptian pop star Hakim’s 2007 track “Tigi Tigi,” which seamlessly blended reggaeton with the darbuka, a drum used in Southwest Asia and North Africa for centuries.

It has taken decades of consistent maneuvering by artists in Southwest Asia, North Africa, and diaspora communities for Arabic music to reach this new crest of global recognition and respect. Streaming platforms like Spotify and Anghami, along with social media sites like TikTok, have made Arabic music easier for listeners to access, breaking through some of the traditional gatekeeping in the music industry. 

But for every good part there is an awkward passage that elides more history than it should. I’m going to go through them one by one:

Elyanna’s brand of pop offers an updated sound compared to the pop music typically sung in Arabic. For much of the last 30 years, Arab pop has followed a similar formulaic structure, a Westernization of classical Arabic music that can feel monotonous. Elyanna, alongside other Arab and diaspora artists of her generation, are increasingly experimenting and drawing inspiration from a wider array of genres [...]

In this first quote, Hajjar claims a generational divide between a formulaic “Westernization of classical Arabic music” that dominated through the aughts and a new 2020s era of experimentation and diversity. 

It’s kind of hard to square this claim with, say, the work of decidedly experimental Arab synth pop pioneers like Hamid El Shaeri or Hany Shenoda, whose disco contributions have furnished many a Habibi Funk record. Although Hajjar’s “the last thirty years” disclaimer technically excludes their work, which dominated the ‘80s, they are the direct predecessors of Elyanna’s approach to Arab pop. 

Even when it comes to the ‘90s, though, this generalization doesn’t hold much water. Go listen to Hakim’s “Nar Nar Nar:” it starts with a passage of “classical Arab music” pastiche, sure, but it quickly descends into a frankly incredible happy hardcore beat with a folk shaabi flavor – nothing classical to be found here. While Hakim’s style is certainly unusual for the ‘90s, by the time the 2000s came around it was commonplace: there is basically nothing classically Arab to be found in Haifa Wehbe’s 2008 single “Yabn El Halal;” its DNA is Max Martin and Timbaland, not Umm Kulthum and Fairuz.

Nafar [a member of the legendary Palestinian hip-hop group DAM] adds that the surging popularity of today’s Arabic music is different because diaspora artists and creatives are now leading the charge. 

The second quote is even stranger. “Today’s Arab music” is apparently distinguished from the recent past by “diaspora artists and creatives leading the charge.” Frankly, that claim is hard to believe: Arab pop for decades now has been driven by its diaspora. The 2000s era Raï boom was pioneered and performed by French Algerians; going back farther, Hamid Al Shaeri pioneered Arab disco while in London.   

[TikTok singers] are part of what Nafar affectionately calls “the third-culture” wave of artists mixing Arabic with multiple other languages together in their music. Leading the charge are North African artists based in Europe, with many performing in Arabic, French, Italian, Spanish, and English—often in one song.

Finally, the last claim, about the “third-culture” wave of Artists mixing Arabic with other languages, occludes more than it clarifies. After all, in 1999, legendary diva Latifa scored a Europe-wide hit with “Inchallah,” sung in both French and Arabic; Alabina’s self-titled club hit from 1996 was sung in both Arabic and Spanish. And who can forget that iconic member of the Lebanese diaspora, Shakira, who dropped an Arabic chorus into her Spanish-language single “Ojos Así” in ‘98? 

To be fair, not all of the above quotes are Hajjar’s own words; two of these claims are sourced from Nafar, who, as a scene elder himself, certainly knows better. Hajjar and Nafar, both ex-Spotify media professionals, know exactly how best to pitch new foreign acts to clueless American music journalists, by emphasizing their supposed uniqueness, their daring newness. While I can’t say this angle doesn’t get results, it isn’t victimless, either.

In the Western music industry, Asian pop has two market segments – past and “emerging” – and the way we talk about the genres tend to follow that schema. Either Americans come to a genre too late, admiring it like archeologists admire an excavation – think Habibi Funk, the Turkish psychedelic craze, the city pop phenomenon – or we push it into the future: at various points, bhangra, Jpop and Kpop have been declared future pioneers of globalization, but, in some cases decades later, their time still hasn’t arrived yet. 

What’s omitted is this binary is a sense of the present – the fact that Arab music has been here, is here now and will always be here. As long as there has been an Arab music industry, Arab music has been global: the genre itself, after all, encompasses more than a dozen countries, with centers of activity in Cairo, Beirut and Algiers. Narrating the recent history of Arab pop as “emerging,” not yet mainstream, blinds us to the ways in which the genre already inflects American music.

Billie Eilish, for example, has spoken about her admiration of Nancy Ajram’s “Fi Hagat.” On a closer listen of Eilish’s music, its easy to see what she would take away from Ajram’s deep, ponderous voice, flair for drama and chilly, artificial approach to auto-tune. However, Ajram, as a ‘00s pop star, falls squarely into what Hajjar dubs the “formulaic,” “monotonous” years! Ajram experimented with EDM and R&B while the current crop of Arab pop stars was still in diapers, and continues to push the envelope to this day: of course she, and her generation more broadly, have been globally influential. Sure, they never made it in America, but why does that matter? 

There’s a personal element to my beef here. I was born in Bahrain, the child of Indian overseas workers; we were part of an enormous migration of skilled and unskilled labor to the Middle East in the ‘90s and 2000s. It’s not a coincidence that Arab pop emerged as an international juggernaut at the same time as this migration; Indians took their newfound taste in Arab music back home, and Bollywood met the demand with endless knockoffs of the latest Gulf hits. 

Hajjar skews his Pitchfork article towards America: when he talks about “new crest of global recognition and respect,” he means the new recognition and respect from American institutions like Coachella or Universal Records. That’s a good point, but why do we say “global” when we mean “American?” Where do the rest of us live if not the globe? Here’s the real story: the world has been dancing to Arab beats for decades now. America is just late to the party.