Donkey Pop And The Labor of Listening

We were almost done with Habibi Pop, the newly coined genre that took over the Arab world (or whatever world the TikTokers live in) in a blink of an eye. A music genre made of little more than mass produced self-orientalism. Music both capitalistic to the core and coreless at the same time, but what does it matter? It was lucrative. A perfected stardom recipe of linguistic mashups that make the least sense but bring in maximum audience. 

Today, however, we make way to welcome a new genre, one not so different from the prior, yet more concise and hopefully less widespread. A niche mutation, lets just say.  

Enter Donkey Pop, the latest addition to our soundsphere. A reiteration of Saad Elsoghayar’s “Bahebak Ya Hmar” is available in stores today, in every imaginable font. 

But unlike Shaabi singer Saad Elsoghayar, these reiterations are not a score for a comedy film, but a serious – very serious – endeavor.

The irony has collapsed. What was once parody and of the destitute, is now aspirational, sincere even. Our soundsphere today takes itself too earnestly for an industry, turning, in real time, into standup comedy at a dull and witless open mic night.

The story goes like this: my great grandmother, Aisha, was a peasant. She birthed my grandmother working the field, and her donkey carried the two bodies back home. The story ends with no applause. God of strength, god of labor, god of peasants. 

To read deeply into donkeys – though highly implicated: classed, rural, obedient, overworked, mocked, stubborn – is too foolish for a piece arguing against foolish sincerity, but here lies the tension. The tension of supposed-humiliation-turned-record-deal.

For a long time, irony functioned as protection in Arab pop. A way to say too much without being held accountable. A way to flirt with excess, vulgarity, or insult while gesturing toward distance. 

Donkey Pop arrives to sever this tension. It offers the donkey without class, affection without labor, love without weight. It asks us to enjoy being addressed as donkeys, sonically, rhythmically, willingly. 

A donkey audience for donkey music, content with being ridden so long as the chorus repeats. 

With my iPhone, I will record a TikTok of my latest release: an English pop song, embedded within it a single Arabic sentence to assert heritage, one ironically based on satirical music of the wretched. With my iPhone I will record a song of two unoriginal conceptions, opposing conceptions, and no thread to connect the two, or connect back to self.  

With my iPhone, I will record a dance to a song about loving a donkey, not the donkey that carried two bodies without applause, but the donkey catchy enough and light enough to trend. 

Here’s another story: Poet Ahmad Rami wrote 200 songs for Oum Kulthoum. The story ends here. Much applause. God of poetry, god of words, god of craft. 

Instead, today we have donkeys, catchy, viral, and weightless.

But here’s the real catch: Donkey Pop does not speak about the donkey; it speaks to the donkey. And the audience responds. Not defensively, not critically, but warmly. To be called a donkey is no longer to be insulted, it is to be included. Being a donkey in Donkey Pop is both indignity and a privilege. 

The donkey, today, is no longer the one who carries, he is the one who listens. And listening, today, is labor. We listen while scrolling, while working, while waiting. We listen to be seen, to be counted, to be addressed. To be sung to, even if the song names us as stubborn, foolish, overworked bodies. Especially then. 

On our 9-5 smoke break, overworked and underpaid, we are too exhausted to decipher, to choose, to indulge, to mobilize. We love donkeys, absentminded, the way we are taught to love our boss in a suit and tie.

This is the horizon Donkey Pop gestures toward: a future of weightlessness, where history is too heavy to carry and irony too inconvenient to maintain, and to listen, today, is to agree.