In Bad Taste is Salma Mousa’s gonzo-style column at Rolling Stone MENA. New installments on the 13th of every month.
Military escalations escalate, rapidly and without end, and the radio has no songs. There is no better time to evaluate our Arab sonic scape, outside of warfare drones for birds and breaking news beeps. There is no better time to face the catastrophe that we sing along to rather than against.
I put on James Brown’s “The Payback” and roll me up something to smoke. A song like this requires a hit or two. Requires, I say, because for music to serve as the preparation it’s supposed to, it demands a step back and perhaps a breather.
“Now you punk, you gotta get ready, for the big payback.”
For 7 minutes and 40 seconds, James Brown threatens, demands payback. For 7 minutes and 40 seconds, you bow out and compose your own. This is music as priming, as mobilization and assembly.
In between flipping burgers, you pull out your phone from your pocket to switch between two news channels streaming live on YouTube. It’s tragedy broadcasting again.
In between emergency alerts and warfare sirens, you step out for your smoke break (a job you despise, and it despises you in return). You have no shelters in your city, and life seems to happen anyway. Customers line up in spite of what demands the end of the world. You are able (or allowed) one longer than a few minutes – a few more drags.
You close the news tab and you put on a song instead. It reminds you:
“You took my money, you got my honey
Don’t want me to see what you doing to me
I could get back
I gotta deal with you”
A blunt, inescapable nudge, an honest diagnosis. You listen, then you decide: you will not return to the char.
This is a terrifying scenario for the big brothers and the bloodthirsty. Tyrants fear time. They deny you the pause from which revolutions creep. They drown you, purposefully, with hasty living and even hastier songs, or else, the people might strategize. The people might conclude and identify the warmongers and the bullies. Worse, they just might come up with a scary take-down; they just might come after what they are owed. They might come after the hostile nemesis.
The small revolution of a lengthy and brilliant song is the brace, the careful and slow assembly of your payback plan. A rehearsal of justice in an existance where both justice and existence are scarce.
Let us admit: we are dying nations, oppressed by all. Scourged and ground down. In the midst of war noise and stomach growls, we try to put on a song all we get is “Bdna Nrou” when its reckoning, pure rage, that must hijack the radio waves.
“Bdna Nrou,” the radio insists, commands that we relax, chill out, take it easy. Dare we pull the blinds up, it is an ever-crawling fiasco ready to slam us all.
Still, the radio plays nothing worth plotting to. We sing along, we vibe out, we respond to nothing. Music with no urgency of action, no sacred interval, but a steadily approaching demise.
Is it fair to say that what most of our Arab musicians don’t realize, or fail (fear) to acknowledge, is that they are anesthesia technicians hired to monitor a lobotomy.
They sedate their listeners like a cattle herd, then ask them to flip their own meat like they would a beef patty, while the world around them morphs into mere bloodshed.
Our musicians today manufacture hedonistic and hasty music of hooks and catchy tunes. They don’t score the moment, they regulate it just enough. They make songs lengthy enough to fill the quick, shrinking smoke break (are we even allowed those anymore?), keeping your hands busy and your head bare.
Songs that make sure you never take one more, longer drag and flick the cigarette to where you think it would inflict the most damage.
