At the turn of the millennium – when one Gulf War was past and another soon to come hip-hop was going from “golden” to platinum, and the world was going global. The genre’s transition to its “shiny suit” era – perforating the mainstream with larger-than-life production, extravagant music videos, and glossy sheen – dovetailed with its experimentation with a more international catalog, expanding beyond the more commonly sampled 70s and 80s disco and soul records. Beats that introduced fantastical, otherworldly sonics became au courant, particularly those that already had an exotic framing in Western music, such as the South Asian and Arab soundscape.
Legendary hitmaker Timbaland, fresh from his work with Jodeci, Ginuwine, and the incomparable Missy Elliott, was during this period infusing his signature stuttering kick-drums with international sounds from the MENA region. In 1999, he was behind the beat for Jay-Z’s classic record “Big Pimpin’”, which sampled Egyptian percussionist Hossam Ramzy’s enrapturing performance of Baligh Hamdi’s “Khosara Khosara.” Likewise, R&B legend Aaliyah’s breathy and enthralling “More than a Woman'' sampled the opening instrumental melody to Syrian singer Mayada El Hennawy’s “Alouli Ansa.” The song was released as a post-mortem single exactly a week before September 11th, 2001, a day that radically and permanently shifted the conception of the Arab identity in the average American mind.
Sampling sounds from the Arab world continued to go in and out of vogue as years progressed – Petey Pablo, Foxy Brown, A$AP Rocky, and Fabolous would all try their hand at making hits tinged with Arab-influenced production.Samples were far from the only means that hip-hop would engage with Arab constructs, however, as artists would find a variety of ways to inject their conception of an Arab aesthetic at leisure, at times to near-comically farcical offense. No record would outdo the brazenly slapdash application of Orientalism that was 2008’s “Arab Money” – a Busta Rhymes record with an exasperatingly incoherent hook, mimicking Arabic intonations with the accuracy of a racist toddler. In the Rik Cordero-directed music video, the Brooklyn rap icon and his long-time collaborator, Spliff Star, traverse through a poorly green-screened and nondescript desert, landing in the palatial estate of an “Arab prince,” played by businessman Ali Naqvi, who is of Persian and Indian descent. “We are actually acknowledging the fact that the Arabian culture -- a Middle East culture -- is one of the few cultures that value passing down hard work riches that's been built amongst the family,” Busta would later say in his defense to the vocal backlash. In a remix, the song would replace the unintelligible chorus with a stilted recitation of the opening lines of the Surah Al-Fatiha of the Qur’an, a perplexing choice considering the sustained debate between Islamic scholars regarding the consumption of secular music.
While adjudication on whether consumption of secular music is haram within the Islamic faith ultimately ranges from “forbidden” to “embraced with caveats,” the use of more “Oriental” sonics in contemporary popular music from the Global North began to act as an apparatus for indulging in illicit themes. The exotic framing of the Arab identity in the 21st century tinged music that was coded as “Arab” as a site of danger and ill-repute, whether authentic or constructed.
The application and evolution of orientalist tropes in music has been a niche focus of study amongst musicologists. “McClary and Locke, drawing on Edward Said's groundbreaking Orientalism (Said 1978), read musical and theatrical orientalism more broadly as a regime of power and knowledge,” Matthew Head writes in Musicology on Safari: Orientalism and the Spectre of Postcolonial Theory. He adds that “both address orientalism as a repository of patriarchal and colonial images of gender, sexuality and ethnicity.” The result is a landscape that engages with a mythologized conception of Arab identity, conveyed through distinct and reductive musical elements.
The nature of Orientalism renders the question of true cultural or ethnic accuracy irrelevant – the goal is to embody the concept of an “exotic” sound through a suite of musical signifiers, regardless of whether or not they are organic or indigenous to the region being represented. In Derek B. Scott’s Orientalism and Musical Style, he identifies features such as “insistent syncopated rhythm, the bare harmony with octave doubling,” double reeds, and tambourines as “part of an Orientalist musical code.” Scott notes that “when Orientalism appropriates it is not used simply to represent the Other; it is used to represent our own thoughts about the Other.” As a result, an approximation of a soundscape is sufficient in establishing the “Other” within Western music; fidelity to cultural tradition and accurate reinterpretation was never the primary objective.
An example of this distinction is seen in the use of the term “Arab scale.” Traditionally, Arabic music is marked by a collection of melodic modes known as the maqam – a system of microtonal scales that is largely preserved through oral tradition. When the term “Arab scale” is used in a western context, it is often referring to one of two options: the double harmonic scale, which closely approximates maqam hijazkar, and the phrygian dominant scale, whose augmented second step resembles maqam hijaz. Both scales have served as the undercarriage not only for popular music records that aim to inject a sense of the exotic into their melody, but film scores, operas, and musicals as well. Take the insidious opening number of Disney’s beloved animated movie Aladdin, “Arabian Nights.” In a more contemporary example, legendary composer Hans Zimmer crafts the score for Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, a film that has been critiqued for its erasure of the books’ Islamic influences; in its stead, the score employs heavy use of the duduk and harmonic minor scales as a sonic shorthand. The several dozen remaining scales with microtones and quarter tones – somewhere in between C and C#, for example – are near-impossible to replicate with classic Western instruments such as the piano.
With that socialization comes stigmatization. It is not uncommon to find Phrygian and double harmonic scales to be associated with melancholy, haunting or some other desolate sentiment, regardless of the lyrical context. A YouTube video by musician Adam Neely asks “Can the Phrygian Scale sound ‘happy’?”, while a video by musician, record producer and YouTube personality Rick Beato calls the double harmonic scale the “Darkest Scale in Music.” While it is true that tones are used to inject a specific mood into a piece of music, when these frames are consistently associated with a specific ethnic group, it implies a sonic affiliation, whether intended or not, that ties Arab identity with “darkness.”
A song like Sam Smith and Kim Petras’ chart-topping, Grammy-award winning single “Unholy” is the consummate example of a Phrygian dominant pop record – a carnal and titillating dance record with a gritty bassline. The tune is a tale of infidelity by a married man, made plain by the chorus: “Mummy don't know daddy's getting hot/At the body shop, doing something unholy.” The song is explicitly queer and sex-positive, clearly playing with the concept of queerness being viewed as sinful within religious orthodoxy. The campiness of the narrative constructs an edgy and subversive queer story. Simultaneously, by leveraging the Phrygian scale, especially in the chorus, the song particularizes the music with Middle Eastern sensibilities. The visuals toy with “satanic panic,” undercutting the hyperbolic reclamation of queer performance, linking the exotic with the socially reprehensible. In essence, one marginalized group contends with their vilification by commodifying and repurposing salacious tropes associated with a separate “Othered” demographic.
Similarly, 50 Cent’s 2005 hit, “Candy Shop,” has marked erotic overtones in a performance that indulges the stigmatized virility of Black men – hypersexuality being a longstanding white supremacist trope – through Orientalist channels. The melody was crafted by producer and keyboardist Scott Storch, who said he was intentionally harnessing an “exotic feel”: “I was really working on this sound, a lot of Middle Eastern stuff with strings and flutes.” The music video is an extension of the seductive trope akin to the image of belly dancers in the Arab world; collaborator Olivia welcomes 50 Cent into a brothel full of tantalizing and irresistible women, with each room introducing a new fantasy.
Beyonce has had numerous records that invoke the phrygian dominant scale. “Naughty Girl,” one of her earliest singles from her debut solo album, is yet another Scott Storch production. The song underscores a menagerie of disco stylings with Storch’s signature at the time: phrygian dominant string arrangements. The result is a siren song of sorts, as Beyonce both breathily croons and climbs the phrygian scale in rapid-fire staccato while regaling listeners with lyrics of sexual conquest and overwhelming lust. A few years later, she would revisit the formula alongside Shakira with the hit record “Beautiful Liar.” Here, the thematic invocation is made explicit. The beat is replete with the classic stringed oud and ney woodwind instruments, with a recurring percussive sound that evokes a rattlesnake. In the music video, Beyonce and Shakira belly dance in a smoky room covered in calligraphy that approximates Persian script, as they sing about being charmed by the same man and choosing to discard him.
The connecting theme across these records is a sense of hedonism, as the phrygian scale is used to introduce and open up the listener to illicit storytelling. The musical cue associates the Western concept of the “Orient” with salacious behavior, not as a rendering of Islamic positions on sex and lustfulness, but rather as an orthodoxy that posits a distinction between Christian morality of the Global North and the nebulous “other.” As Edward Said writes in his seminal text, Orientalism, “the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience,” adding that “European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self.” This epistemological juxtaposition established within cultural work serves to reinforce an image of the Arab world as a site of danger and immorality, despite the fact that many of these pop cultural works are framed as an exploration of liberation by indulging in the verboten.
Lil Nas X’s most incendiary song to date, “Montero (Call Me By Your Name),” engages with this tension directly. As with “Unholy,” the song contends with the stigma around queerness – the lyrics are about challenging a partner to embrace their queerness, while the visuals are a vivid engagement of the public haranguing of queer individuals being doomed to hellfire for simply existing. Producing duo Take a Daytrip were transparent about invoking a “Middle Eastern or Moorish or Spanish sound” in the architecture of the melody. When asked about the intentionality behind using the phrygian scale to invoke a melodic allusion to Satan in an interview for Vulture, they acknowledged “having certain things in our back pocket where, if we want to cause tension, this is what it sounds like. If we want to ease tension, this is usually what that sounds like.” However, they demurred “it definitely wasn’t like, ‘Oh, this is something to definitely dance on the devil to.’”
In Orientalism, Said points out how these tropes have been historically used in artistic representation. “The Oriental genre tableau carried representation into visual expression and a life of its own,” he points out. “Sensuality, promise, terror, sublimity, idyllic pleasure, intense energy: the Orient as a figure in the pre-Romantic, pretechnical Orientalist imagination of late-eighteenth-century Europe was really a chameleon-like quality called (adjectivally) ‘Oriental.’” This is evident in contemporary pop, where American jingoism is intrinsic to the thematic bifurcation of an “Arab” inspired record. The subversive message is rooted in its musical exotification, one where the disembodied “Orient'' is a site of spectacle.
By the time of the 2003 update of Orientalism, the second Gulf war in Iraq was fully engaged, despite vocal opposition from American residents and Arab scholars. “Bookstores in the US are filled with shabby screeds bearing screaming headlines about Islam and terror, Islam exposed, the Arab threat and the Muslim menace,” Said wrote in a new preface, “All of them written by political polemicists pretending to knowledge imparted to them and others by experts who have supposedly penetrated to the heart of these strange Oriental peoples over there who have been such a terrible thorn in ‘"our’" flesh.” The invasion was violent, but it also reinforced the narrative of the Middle East as a nebulous “foreign evil,” deprived of context and specificity. Not long after,the transition was reinforced in pop culture. Shows like 24 and Homeland thrived, where American protagonists were combating endless Arab threats. The Middle Eastern identity became a collapsed projection of unrestrained villainy, a universal label that ignored the diverse ethnic and religious identities that exist under the Arab umbrella in favor of a convenient reinterpretation.
While it is no longer socially acceptable to employ such blanket tropes in the depiction of the contemporary Middle Eastern identity, what remains is still far from ideal. We are left with a reinterpreted concept of the Arab world that serves as a counterpoint for cultural exploration, disembodied from any tangible or material reality of current Arab tradition, trends, or existences. The Orient that serves Western needs is one that is completely rebuilt for Occidental reimagination,where it can serve as a hedonistic foil to America’s shining beacon of morality. It is further regurgitated and legitimized within America’s dominant pop culture exports, particularly music, within the subtextual themes where the envisioned Arab character is made flesh. Popular music is collectively complicit in rendering the Arab soundscape as inextricable from sin. It is a cruelly ironic culmination for the Islamic identity, which has continuously questioned the positionality of audio art as halal.
