Local Music Scenes and Globalization – Transnational Platforms in Beirut

Transnational Platforms in Beirut - This book offers the first in-depth study of experimental and popular music scenes in Beirut. Buy hardcopy and/or recommend to librarian via Routledge.


Abstract

This book offers the first in-depth study of experimental and popular music scenes in Beirut, looking at musicians working towards a new understanding of musical creativity and music culture in a country that is dominated by mass-mediated pop music, and propaganda. Burkhalter studies the generation of musicians born at the beginning of the Civil War in the Lebanese capital, an urban and cosmopolitan center with a long tradition of cultural activities and exchanges with the Arab world, Europe, the US, and the former Soviet Union. These Lebanese rappers, rockers, death-metal, jazz, and electro-acoustic musicians and free improvisers choose local and transnational forms to express their connection to the broader musical, cultural, social, and political environment. Burkhalter explores how these musicians organize their own small concerts for ‘insider’ audiences, set up music labels, and network with like-minded musicians in Europe, the US, and the Arab world. Several key tracks are analyzed with methods from ethnomusicology, and popular music studies, and contextualized through interviews with the musicians. Discussing key references from belly dance culture (1960s), psychedelic rock in Beirut (1970s), the noises of the Lebanese Civil war (1975-1990), and transnational Pop-Avant-Gardes and World Music 2.0 networks, this book contributes to the study of localization and globalization processes in music in an increasingly digitalized and transnational world. At the core, this music from Beirut challenges “ethnocentric” perceptions of “locality” in music. It attacks both “Orientalist” readings of the Arab world, the Middle East, and Lebanon, and the focus on musical “difference” in Euro-American music and culture markets. On theoretical grounds, this music is a small, but passionate attempt to re-shape the world into a place where “modernity” is not “euro-modernity” or “euro-american modernity,” but where possible new configurations of modernity exist next to each other.

Chapter Summaries

PART I

Part I – Theory and Methodology – Music Making in a Digitalized World – offers an overview on the effects of globalization and digitalization processes for musicians in the Arab world, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Ethnomusicology, popular music studies, and musicology find it hard to research the rapid developments in these and similar musics and music circles. This part puts forward a methodological approach and a mix of theories that analyzes music and music making from miscellaneous perspectives. The approach is inductive, built on my many years of practice and participant observation in music and cultural markets. It involves “dialogical editing”, “internet ethnography”, and an international “reception test”.

PART II

Part II – Ethnography – Musicians from Beirut born during the Lebanese Civil War – offers close descriptions of alternative music circles in Beirut. The focus lies on “experimental music,” “urban music,” “rap” and “metal and classic rock.” The part includes discussions of music, video clips, lyrics, and cover art. It presents these musicians’ local and transnational networks, ranging from musicians, bloggers, journalists and academics, concert organizers, arts curators, arts councils, embassies, and non-governmental organizations (NGO).

PART III

Part III – Analysis – Six Key Tracks from Beirut – looks at six key musicians and their music closely. By analyzing the trumpet playing of Mazen Kerbaj, it discusses links between free improvised music and sonic memories from the Lebanese Civil War. The discussion of Raed Yassin’s sound collage “Civil War Tapes” observes strategies to perform and manipulate propaganda music, politician speeches, and 1980s pop music. Zeid Hamdan’s track “Aranis” serves as an example of how musicians in Lebanon look both ways: back to the history of protest singing in Lebanon, and outwards to recent trends in transnational niche genres. “Remains of a Bloodbath” shows how death metal musician Garo Gdanian fights with traumatic memories and anger and uses his music to try to find paths forward and release stress. Punk and indie rock singer and guitarist Charbel Haber from the band Scrambled Eggs discusses with “Track 5” his fascination for coincidence and chaos and argues that he is not at all a “revolutionary” musician. Rapper Rayess Bek shows in “Schizophrenia” how he positions himself between Paris and Beirut, rap music, and the arts, and non-government organization (NGO) work.

PART IV

Part IV – Sonic Traces from the Past and Present – offers a history of Beirut through music and noise. The part discusses, with time witnesses, the Europeanization of Arabic music, the creation of a Lebanese music (with Fairuz and the Rahbani brothers), transnational belly dance and “holiday” music from the 1950s and 1960s, leftist protest music from 1967 onwards, and Lebanese rock bands of the 1960 and 1970s – for instance in a rare interview with Raymond Azoury from The Sea-ders. It observes major and minor music and sonic phenomena within the Lebanese Civil war (1975-1990): rock and protest music, and the noises and sounds of bombs, radio, and propaganda. It further discusses pan-Arabic pop music of the 1990s, and propaganda music of the 2006 war between Israel and Hizbullah.

PART V

Part V – Meaning – Reading Lebanese Music Making from Different Perspectives – analyzes music and key musicians in Beirut from historical, socio-political, geo-political, psychological, aesthetical, and Euro-American perspectives. From an artistic perspective, we see these musicians manipulating material with techniques of avant-garde and pop avant-garde. From the Euro-American perspective we hear them attacking “exoticism” and “war” with parody. From a political and historical perspective, we trace feedbacks from the conjunctions between music, warfare and the Middle East. And from a psychological perspective, some musicians use music as self-therapy for dealing with their personal traumatic war memories. The part further inserts examples from musicians and music in Africa, Asia, and Latin America and leads back to one of the main questions of this book: To what extent do these musicians from Beirut challenge concepts of “euro-modernity” and “euro-american modernity”? To what extent do they suggest possible new multi-sited modernities?

Book Info

Local Music Scenes and Globalization – Transnational Platforms in Beirut
By Thomas Burkhalter
New York, Routledge, 304 pages
Series: Routledge Studies in Ethnomusicology
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-80813-2

Discography (Updated 20.12.2012)

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Weeping Willow. Mentally Decayed. Self-Released. 2004: Lebanon
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