This transcript is from a CSIS podcast published on December 26, 2023. Listen to the podcast here.
Jon Alterman: Danny Hajjar is a Lebanese American music journalist and curator of the weekly newsletter, Sa'alouni El Nas, which highlights music and culture from the Middle East and North Africa. He's been published in leading news outlets, and he worked at Spotify. Danny, welcome to Babel.
Danny Hajjar: Thank you so much for having me, Jon. I'm really excited to be here.
Jon Alterman: So, it's remarkable you can be a music journalist remotely. I guess everybody can do every job in the music business remotely. How does that affect the way people make and consume music?
Danny Hajjar: I think what's great about music now, especially the music accessibility, is that you can kind do anything anywhere. So, you have a lot of artists, producers, and creatives who have sophisticated software in their homes. They're able to record and share files very easily. The ease and quickness with which you are able to do those things creates a lot more opportunity. You no longer have to necessarily travel to LA or London to a certain studio to record with a certain artist. If an artist is based in Los Angeles and wants to collaborate with an artist based in Tunis, Tunisia, they could do that fairly quickly now.
Jon Alterman: And do they? Are you seeing those cross-border collaborations?
Danny Hajjar: Absolutely. You see that quite a bit, particularly within certain communities. For me, the greatest example really is within the Sudanese hip-hop community.
Jon Alterman: I didn't realize there was a Sudanese hip-hop community.
Danny Hajjar: Oh, yeah. They're really, really awesome. People like TooDope and MazMars are really great, along with a few others. Nadine El Roubi is also a great example. She's based in Boston, and she collaborates with folks who are based either in Sudan or in Cairo, and they have tracks together. So, you see a lot of that happening within the scene and just an effort to bridge those geographical divides.
Jon Alterman: And then how do people get music? I mean, you can get all the Middle Eastern music you want sitting in Washington, DC. How are people getting music, and how are artists being compensated for their music if so much is online?
Danny Hajjar: The compensation, it's going to be dependent on whichever streaming platform folks are listening to. They all have their own sort of models, but essentially with consumption, it's kind of up to the digital service provider or a DSP, so Spotify, Apple Music, or Tidal. If you're in the Middle East, there's one, Anghami, that's very popular for Arabic music. There are artists that are still recording things on CDs and cassettes, which is how some of us grew up and like to listen to music. So that is also another way.
Tek Tek by DYSTINCT
Danny Hajjar: The other big one I would say that's really helped with some of the emerging Arab music scene’s notoriety is TikTok, actually, which has been really interesting to watch. A lot of artists are recording their short-form videos or sharing snippets of songs on TikTok. It's gotten popular with folks who don't necessarily speak Arabic but just love and appreciate the vibe. It's across different things.
Jon Alterman: It strikes me that there was a time when, for instance, Paul Simon went to South Africa, came up with a concept and the music for Graceland in 1986, and he went to Brazil and came up with Rhythm of the Saints in 1990, but now you can sit in your living room and get access to all of it. Are you seeing that sort of hybridity coming into Arab music in a very different way than it used to?
Danny Hajjar: The emerging scene, what's really cool about it is they're taking other genres that aren't necessarily native to the region but they're making it their own. You are seeing the rise of Arab hip-hop where they're taking things that are from Brooklyn or LA or even the UK, and they're making it their own. They're adding sort of their own Arab flair to it.
Jon Alterman: What does that mean?
Danny Hajjar: It can be in the production itself where they'll add certain instruments. They'll use certain scales that are very similar to traditional Arabic music, for example, but create it their own way, but obviously also just in the rhyme scheme, a lot of it is in Arabic. They're mixing languages: Arabic and English and French and Spanish, a lot of different things together. They're using very colloquial terms, obviously. I would credit Egyptians in particular for that. They're very good at this. Moroccans are using Afrobeats and they're doing Afrobeats in Arabic, which is really fascinating. If you like Burna Boy, for example, imagine him in Arabic. There's a lot of artists that are doing things like that. They're adding some of their own beat patterns to it that are very Moroccan.
“El Bakht” by Wegz
Danny Hajjar: Drill right now from the UK is also a big one for a lot of rappers in Egypt and even in Iraq and across the scene more broadly.
“Poker Face” by Dareen
Danny Hajjar: Saudi Arabia recently signed an agreement with the person sort of credited for creating K-pop. He is now under contract with Saudi to create S-pop and essentially duplicate that model for Saudi artists. Reggaeton is just a genre that no one can ever escape, and so you will see some artists, particularly from North Africa, who will try to dabble in that. I've heard Algerians combine Rai and Bachata. Never thought that that would be a thing, but it works really well.
“Enty Bachata Rai” by Bilal Assarguini
Danny Hajjar: I've heard heavy metal in Lebanon. You're seeing Gulf artists use very native sort of Khaliji tempo structures and beat structures and rapping over it, which is really cool.
“Theeb” by Moayad
Danny Hajjar: It's kind of a combination of a lot of different things in music, and I know I talked a lot about hip-hop here but that extends to a lot of different genres. In Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine, you'll see that with electronic music, for example, and a lot of indie music, which is really cool.
So there's definitely influences from all over but again, they're adding their own spin to it. They're adding their own flair to it that is both maintaining the credibility of the genre and maintaining pride in their own identities.
Jon Alterman: What's the role of traditional music? Do you feel that the traditional music has a different role in the evolution of Arab music than it does in a place like Africa, Europe, Asia?
Danny Hajjar: Traditional Arabic music still permeates the culture. It's hard to ever ignore or ever dismiss the Fairuzes, the Umm Kulthums, the Abdel Halims of the world. They're still very much influential. I would say the closest derivative of that continues to be Arab pop. Arab pop still remains dominant throughout the region. Nancy Ajram, Wael Kfoury, Amr Diab, among others still still remain very dominant.
But now what you're starting to see is some Arab hip-hop artists, for example, they're sampling. They're sampling old songs, remaking it, making a rap beat, trap beat, or a drill beat out of it, and adding kind of their own flair to it, which is really interesting.
“Kan Lak Ma’aya” by Cairokee
Danny Hajjar: Or there's an artist like Elyanna, for example, who has done different covers of very traditional or classic Arabic songs like Ahwak by Abdel Halim.
“Ahwak” by Elyanna
Danny Hajjar: She has a very beautiful piano rendition of that song. So you're seeing stuff like that, which is really interesting.
I think there is a great respect for the people that came before this current generation within the Arab music scene. There is a great respect for those artists and who they are and what they stood for and their ability to create music and what they meant to the people. There is that respect that's still there, in my opinion.
Jon Alterman: How have lyrics changed? I mean, I don't think of Fairuz or even Umm Kulthum, while she was used politically, she didn't sing about political things. Do politics and social commentary play a different role in Arab music now than it did 15, 20, 30 years ago as it moves away from state production and toward independent production?
Danny Hajjar: I don't know if it plays a different role. I think it just plays a larger role in general in the sense of artists having a little bit more creative freedom or a little bit more creative agency to express opinions differently. Obviously, that being said, there are certain places where that's just not going to be the case, and they could put themselves in serious trouble with respective governments, for example, if they say certain things. But, currently, a lot of artists are using their platforms on social media to highlight what's going on with Palestinian civilians in Gaza. There are artists that are creating music, expressing their solidarity with the Palestinian cause. You're seeing a lot more artists being outspoken in that way.
“Rajieen” by Various Artists
Danny Hajjar: In the same token, you'll see some artists, depending on what country, express support for different political parties, for different leaders. That continues to happen, and that has been a tradition in Arabic music for a while, and similarly in a lot of respects to American music. I'm thinking particularly after 9/11, there were so many artists, particularly in country music who had very overtly political music. Some of it was very anti-Arab even and Islamophobic, but a lot of them were very much pro-America and all these sorts of things. That kind of dichotomy or comparison is interesting to see. You have a lot of artists that are also expressing their politics in their music.
I would personally argue that Palestinian rappers are kind of the standard-bearers, in my opinion, of protest music, simply because they contend with the occupation on a day-to-day basis. So a lot of them are using rap as a way to overtly discuss kind of the occupation or the plight of Palestinians, what's happening in their own lives on a day-to-day basis. And they tend to do that fairly consistently.
“Sheikh Jarrah” by Daboor
Danny Hajjar: That's not necessarily the case, for example, with Moroccan artists who, despite high youth unemployment and the protests that happened in Morocco last year, not a lot of Moroccan artists necessarily are creating music to discuss that in the same way that Palestinian artists would to discuss that occupation. So, it really is country and community dependent.
Jon Alterman: So that's sort of the politics side. Do you see a social commentary side that's different? I mean, not so much to try to create political change but to talk about the plight of being a young person, about unemployment, things like that?
Danny Hajjar: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, particularly, I know I keep coming back to hip-hop here…
Jon Alterman: You do keep coming back to hip-hop, Danny.
Danny Hajjar: I do, I do. I mean, that's my favorite genre. I'll be honest. But particularly with hip-hop, given that it is a genre of protest, and it is a genre of social commentary, it's the same in the Middle East and North Africa. You have a lot of Egyptian rappers who are talking about kind of what it was like to grow up in underserved communities in Alexandria. You have artists in Tunisia kind of discussing similar situations in Iraq. There is a lot of social commentary.
Jon Alterman: Do you think there's something unique about the way people use social commentary in Arab hip-hop that's different from American forms or other forms?
Danny Hajjar: I think what's unique, frankly, is that it's becoming more and more overt now in a region where that wasn't always the case. You didn't always talk about the taboos out loud. And now, for example, in Egypt, you have a whole genre of built-on taboos in Mahraganat.
“Mahragan Bent El Geran” by Hassan Shakosh and Omar Kamal
Jon Alterman: Could you talk about Mahraganat a little bit?
Danny Hajjar: So Mahraganat is a genre of music that is highly Egyptian. Depending on who you ask, it either started in Cairo or it started in Alexandria. It's kind of based on low production tech, very sort of edgy beat patterns, synth patterns, and lyrics that are very explicit, just very much discussing taboos out loud. It's gained a lot of popularity. Despite what the Egyptian government has tried to do over-and-over again, which is ban a lot of Mahraganat artists from performing in Egypt, try to ban the genre altogether, it still enjoys quite a bit of popularity, both within the country and certainly outside of Egypt.
Hassan Shakosh, who is kind of the poster child I would argue, with Mahraganat. He performed in New York and a couple of other places last year. And some of them have a very strong social media presence. Hamo Bika is one who has a very strong TikTok presence.
Jon Alterman: So who's producing this music? Where are they producing it? If you had an idea that you wanted to be an artist, where would you be based?
Danny Hajjar: In your own home, which is really cool. A lot of these artists are producing their own music. They're mixing and mastering their own music. They're writing their own lyrics. They're uploading it, and they're releasing it. A lot of these artists are independent. Not a lot of artists are with the major labels, only a handful I think really are. There are some artists that are with smaller local labels, but a good majority of them are independent, and so they're doing everything on their own time and in their own way, which is really fascinating to watch.
Jon Alterman: Are there a lot of artists who produce things at home and then also have concerts or can travel around the region with concerts? What's the line between online streaming of music and being paid to perform music?
Danny Hajjar: A lot of these artists definitely try to perform live wherever they are. So, you know, you do see a few of these artists performing either within their own home countries or communities or they're either traveling very regionally. So you may have Moroccan artists who are traveling to Tunisia or Egypt, or even to Europe, frankly, where a lot of Moroccan artists enjoy quite a bit of popularity.
Jon Alterman: Among a large Moroccan expatriate community.
Danny Hajjar: Absolutely. I mean for Moroccans and for Algerian artists, in particular, yes, their audience is kind of the rest of North Africa, but I would argue that a good chunk of their audience and probably their primary audience really are not just the diaspora in Europe, but really just Europeans in general. Because those artists are also performing in French or Spanish and Italian, and that can resonate with a lot of different communities in Europe. And they enjoy quite a bit of success there.
A lot of artists right now are being tapped to perform in Saudi Arabia or the UAE because right now, those two places are kind of driving a lot of the different cultural sort of output with different festivals and concerts and very big sort of lavish events around music. So, a lot of those artists are also finding ways to perform there, and they're able to travel and perform. I think they love that. I think they prefer doing that, too.
Jon Alterman: Do people understand the lyrics? I mean, one of the things I've always heard from all my Arab friends is everybody understands Egyptian Arabic because of music and film because so much of cultural production was Egyptian for many years. But now you're talking about Moroccans, Algerians, two dialects that a lot of people find difficult. You're talking about the Gulf, another set of dialects. Do you find that people actually do understand? That people are more able to understand the lyrics, or do people not really care about the lyrics?
Danny Hajjar: I mean, I'm sure it's a mix of both. You know, I would make the argument that not everybody understands Bad Bunny, but he is consistently the most listened to artist globally almost every year. Except for this year, he was beat by Taylor Swift, which was something.
Jon Alterman: That hurts.
Danny Hajjar: You know, that does hurt. I personally like Taylor Swift. I'll admit that, but not everyone speaks Spanish. Not everyone understands kind of the slang even that Bad Bunny is using in his lyrics. But something about his music really resonates with people. You catch a vibe with what he's saying or what he's performing. It's similar to Moroccan artists or Saudi artists who are doing the same thing. You know, you may not pick up on every single thing within the dialect, but you feel something. You can feel the emotion. You can feel the energy that an artist is putting out there. There is something there, and I think that's what makes music so beautiful.
Jon Alterman: So, if you can make music from anywhere, are there Arabs in the United States, in Europe, who are making meaningful music for folks back home?
Danny Hajjar: Absolutely. There is a growing diaspora contingent of Arab artists who are representing the third-culture kids, right? So they're kind of representing the fact that they have a foot in one land and a foot in another land and merging everything together. So, you have a lot of artists like Lana Lubany, who is Palestinian American. She performs her music, and she mixes English and Arabic together, which is how a lot of children of immigrants in these communities grew up speaking, so that is something that is certainly taking off.
“Sold” by Lana Lubany
Danny Hajjar: You know, artists like Felukah who's based in New York, and she's Egyptian, you know, she does the same thing.
“Desert Woman” by Felukah
Danny Hajjar: Artists like Tamtam, who is Saudi, same thing. Elyanna, I think is one that's pretty interesting because she is someone who is performing primarily in Arabic, but she's based out of LA. So, you know, things like that also you'll see.
But you know at the same time, you'll also see artists who are Arab but aren't performing in Arabic, and they just happen to be Arab, and they want to be able to perform any kind of music without having that identity sort of, in their view, limit them. So someone like Anees, for example, who has completely blown up as an artist, he's doing incredibly well. He's got millions of streamers each month, you know, performed on Jimmy Kimmel and all this sort of stuff. He's Palestinian, and he'll talk about being Palestinian, and he's very proud to be Palestinian, but it's not something that you'll necessarily see in his music. His music is very separate from that, and we need all of that.
“Sun and Moon” by Anees
Danny Hajjar: I think all of those kinds of artists are important. We need everybody representing themselves in their own way because they're all different pieces to the larger puzzle of this emerging scene.
Jon Alterman: Do you sense that this degree of hybridity, the cosmopolitanism of the music scene and the intra-regional exchange in music is changing Arab culture in a real way?
Danny Hajjar: I think what's happening is you're now seeing more and more formalized musical processes take shape in the region. And what I mean by that is you're starting to see an industry that is larger than just one or record label, like it was decades ago. You're seeing more labels pop up, which is creating, proper A&R across the region and is creating proper channels for production and licensing and creativity. You're seeing things like Sole DXB in Dubai that's kind of marrying culture and music together.
I would say it's similar to ComplexCon in the United States where you're bringing all these different communities together: the artistic communities, music communities, and cultural communities. You're seeing something like XP in Saudi Arabia, which is a huge, massive music conference that takes place every year over the course of three days that anybody who's anybody in the Arab music industry is there. It's akin to South by Southwest at this point, it's on that level.
Jon Alterman: And not so long ago, Saudi Arabia banned public performances of music.
Danny Hajjar: Yeah. I mean it's opened up now. It's very different now where you're seeing big music festivals taking place, and they're getting major artists like Calvin Harris or Travis Scott. These sorts of things are changing very quickly, and there's a formalization and recognition of music as an industry that is beyond just the Arab pop world. I think that's really important and really cool to see.
Jon Alterman: What do you think the next surprising thing in this space is going to be?
Danny Hajjar: The goal that any Arab artist, creative, producer, or label exec that I’ve talked to has said that what's happened with Latin music and what's happened with Reggaeton and what's happened with K-pop—that's the goal. That's the goal for Arabic music. I still think we're years away from that, but we're starting to see the foundation be built. I do think that once we get to a point where you're in the United States and the number one song on the Hot 100 for Billboard is an Arabic song, I think that's the goal. I think people are really aiming for that, and I think we can get there, which I never thought I could say in my lifetime, but I think we could get there.
Jon Alterman: Danny Hajjar, thank you very much for joining us on Babel.
Danny Hajjar: Thank you so much, Jon.
(END.)