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chapter 6 An Evolving Heritage Umm Kulthūm’s glowing treatment in many biographical and dramatic accounts has obscured how old-fashioned her music and image seemed to some by the end of her career. In 1970, one contributor to the Lebanese newspaper al-Nahār attacked her, warning that “she must not sing in Baalbek because she lowers the level of the festival” (al-Khūrı̄ 2000, 97). Her conservative style was made only more apparent by the emergence of new popular idioms beginning in the 1970s and continuing through the next three decades . Several of these popular styles, including sha‘bı̄ and dance-pop, drew on elements of Western popular music. Up to the early 1980s, Western popular music in Cairo, as well as Beirut and Damascus, could still be regarded as peripheral. Yet it was one of several styles that mixed with the central current of Arabic music represented by the repertory of Umm Kulthūm. The fusion of these idioms had previously been seen in the compositions of Muh .ammad ‘Abd al-Wahhāb, who often drew on several different styles of music within one song (Racy 1981). Such intermixing grew in prominence in the mid- and later 1980s. The Arab pop sound that resulted often featured traditional Arabic rhythms articulated through hand claps, finger cymbals, and a drum machine, combined with Western pop instruments and harmonic language. The most broadly and continuously successful of the artists to emerge in the 1980s was ‘Amr Diyāb. His success into the 1990s and beyond illustrated the expansion of Western elements: he took advantage of the music video, or “video clip,” and Western clothing fashions.1 As Arab satellite television stations proliferated in the late 1990s, so did the prevalence of the video clip, prompting older singers to update their look and younger ones to model themselves after Western stars. This included young women performers dressing like their scantily clad counterparts in the West. As the age of the mut .rib (a singer in the t .arab tradition) and the long, orchestrated song gave way to that of the video clip star and the three-min- umm kulthūm / 138 ute pop hit, one might have expected Umm Kulthūm’s music and legacy to become an ever more distant cultural artifact in the decades following her death. Such an occurrence would have followed the musical precedent in Egypt whereby musical styles have been abandoned after about thirty years. Music created in the 1910s, for one example, was rarely performed live by the 1940s (el-Shawan 1980, 186). Yet to the contrary, young listeners in Egypt are remarkably knowledgeable about the singer’s musical and cultural contributions. As one official in the music industry characterized these young listeners’ response, “Maybe in their thirties they’ll turn to her, like they’ve just discovered Beethoven.”2 For some listeners, the process begins earlier. One young Egyptian began listening to her performances in his twenties as he began to “meditate on big questions”—such as the difference between religion and ideology—and discovered answers in her songs.3 Young listeners articulate a distinction between music that calls for such intellectual appreciation and music with which they feel a visceral connection . A young Egyptian half-jokingly asked his fiancée, “Who do we like more, Umm Kulthūm or Shakira?” The fiancée quickly chose the latter but then proudly described her recently inherited cassette collection of Umm Kulthūm’s concert performances.4 Regardless of its exact timing, a young person’s “awakening” to Umm Kulthūm is the result of contemporary memorialization practices. As a graduate student explained through a revealing self-correction, “We grow up with her. And we like her. Or, at least, we are used to hearing her.”5 This experience of becoming accustomed to and eventually appreciating her music grows from many practices of memorialization: official and popular, physical and sonic, seemingly durable and obviously fleeting. The range of actual memorials, including physical monuments, traditional performances of her songs, and stylistic reinterpretations, has succeeded not only in engaging younger generations within Egypt but also in expanding the singer’s international audience in the Middle East, Europe, and North America. While the creators of some memorials have sustained the persona that she worked so hard to establish during her final years, others have challenged her self-structured legacy, offering revisions of her image and repertory adapted to a range of contemporary cultural and political...

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