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.
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