A few years behind

Music in the Arab world has come a very long way in the past 4 years or so. How? Well, not only have shirts gotten tighter, skirts gotten shorter, and women acted progressively more and more seductive, but it has also become more and more ok. This shift in the focus of the music industry happened in the western hemisphere a while ago, the shift being a trade off between the importance of talent versus skill. Everyone knows that in the US, it’s easier to get a record deal with a pretty face and so-so voice than it is with a so-so face and amazing pipes. Why is that? Because it’s all about the image. People want pretty things (people) to look at, people want something to live up to and someone they can wish they looked like. Not to mention sound technology and such have opened doors to fix all the little bloops in people’s voices so they sound good. In the Arab world, I think it’s more that men want pretty women to look at, since in the conservative culture there’s a significant void of that, and women want to live vicariously through these beautiful, seductive, beauty queen, rock princesses. And they definitely did for a while, things were fine and dandy, that is until at one point your average 18 year old girl started looking and acting a lot less acceptably and a lot more like Carole Samaha (1st video) and Nancy Ajram (2nd video). Girls in the Middle East are trying to act like the women they see everywhere from magazines to newspapers, cell phones to televisions to even the movie screens, and this is a problem because the Arab culture is not one that allows these behaviors by any means. I’m all for the Arab world becoming more lenient, but I worry these young women’s efforts will backfire and lead to an extremist movement to counteract it. There are many people that are very adamant about maintaining their way of life. I just worry that these daring ladies’ efforts for change will lead to a worse and more dangerous change than they intended to obtain.