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tape) from these shops. I also would exchange recordings with my musician friends, with whom I would compare collections and ask advice about certain artists and recordings. Trading music became an important context for learning about musical aesthetics. Why was one performance of a given artist preferred over another? In which genres did a certain artist excel and, the converse, in which was he or she less skilled? What makes for a good voice, a good melody? Through engagement with local “cassette cultures,” I was able to acquire certain habits of listening that allowed me to learn much about the music that I could not have learned from lessons alone. As one musician told me, “You have to learn how to listen before you can learn how to play the music.”
Old and New
In the exchange of tapes and in the cassette culture in general, discourses of the old (qadīm) and the new (jadīd) are very important. I found that there is widespread agreement that earlier material by older artists is better than their recent material. For example, the owner of one cassette shop, a young man of perhaps twenty-two, argued that the older recordings of the popular singer George Wasoof are better than his new recordings, whereas anything by the late Egyptian singer Abd al-Ḥalīm Ḥāfiẓ would be better than Wasoof’s repertoire from any era. In discourses of authenticity, the old is almost always better than the new, which marks decay (inḥiṭāṭ). Indeed, the newer songs are blamed almost universally for lowering musical taste in Syria. Even many cassette vendors, whose livelihood depends on the sale of the “cheap” songs, argued that they prefer the older material. But closer examination of this discourse of debasement and the threat of the contemporary songs to the existence of the older ones reveals a somewhat different picture. First, not all is lost with respect to the “classical” songs and their conventions. Umm Kulthūm remains the single most popular artist not only on the airwaves but at cassette stands around Damascus and Aleppo. The owner of a stand in central Damascus that sells a variety of modern and “classical” songs, folk music, and even Western pop music claims that on any given day he sells about twenty-five Umm Kulthūm cassettes, whereas he might sell that amount of a contemporary singer only in the first few days after the cassette is released to the market. By comparison, he might sell five to ten George Wasoof tapes or a handful of Amru Diab tapes—both very popular Arab artists who have large audiences in Syria. But the Egyptian diva still reigns as queen of the market with an average of twenty-five tapes a day, every day, for the several years this man has been selling them. Other vendors claimed similar sales proportions: the new singers might sell a lot when their tapes first hit the market, but Umm Kulthūm, Abd al-Ḥalīm Ḥāfiẓ, and Muḥammad Abd al-Wahhāb—the venerated Big Three—remain the top sellers. Syrian stars such as Ṣabāḥ Fakhrī also do well, especially in specialty shops that do not offer the “cheap” music. In such shops in Damascus and Aleppo, one finds aficionados, young and old, of older styles and artists such as Asmahān, Laylā Murād, Nūr al-Hudā, Bakrī al-Kurdī, and Zuhayr Minīnī.
The Stratigraphy of Musical Authenticity
The valuation of the old also is expressed visually in a stratigraphy of musical authenticity. In surveys of dozens of cassette shops in Damascus and Aleppo, and especially those in which cassettes were displayed in vertical cases rather than in storage boxes or drawers, I detected an interesting pattern among the cassettes. In almost all of these shops, Umm Kulthūm occupied the top row in the display cases. Only when the shop or stall also sold recordings of the Qurān was she displaced from the top rung, and in some instances she shared this honor with recordings of the holy text.37 Even in those stalls in which tapes were arranged horizontally, Umm Kulthūm occupied the first row at what would be the top were the case to be righted vertically. In Aleppo, Umm Kulthūm often shared the high spot with other religious vocalists.
The association between Umm Kulthūm, musical authenticity, and her occupation of the highest strata in Syrian cassette shops was demonstrated graphically one afternoon at a small cassette shop near the Victoria Bridge and Hijaz Railway Station area of central Damascus. This particular stand consisted of a vertical display case standing upon a table that held another horizontal case as well as a large cassette player. Running the shop was a young man from Ḥasaka, a town in the Kurdish region of northeastern Syria, and he was accompanied on this particular day by two young men, one from Ḥamā in central Syria and the other from the Ḥawrān region in the south. I approached the stand and asked them if they had any tapes of Khiḍr Yās, a well-known Iraqi singer who was scheduled to give a performance in Syria that month. The young man produced three tapes and placed one in the cassette player for me to listen to it. After a few minutes and the perfunctory questions (You speak Arabic!? Where are you from? Why did you learn Arabic? What are you doing here?), I spoke with them about their musical preferences and asked what they thought was the best music. I had been following up on Iraqi singers after discovering that many rural residents and the denizens of the microbus stations frequently listen to them. After debating the qualities of various Iraqi singers such as Khadr Yas, Alī al-Issawī, and Kāzim al-Sāhir (the popular artist), the young man asked me if I wanted to hear something really good and authentic. When I said yes, he stood for a moment thinking, then grabbed a chair, stood on it rather precariously, and reached up to the top shelf of the display case to bring down a tape of Umm Kulthūm’s “Amal ḥayātī” (Hope of my life). “This is the real thing,” he seemed to be saying as he placed it in the cassette player; to me, his putting in the tape spoke better than any words to his understanding of authenticity. We stood there, the three of us, listening to the great voice, which for these young men, like so many others, was the voice of tradition, perhaps even of the Arab nation (Danielson 1997).
After Umm Kulthūm, I was surprised to find Abd al-Ḥalīm Ḥāfiẓ occupying the second tier in the stratigraphy of musical authenticity in Syrian cassette shops. This Egyptian crooner, popular among youth and especially women but often considered a symbol of vulgarity by the cultural elite during his lifetime, has been resurrected as an icon second only to Umm Kulthūm (and the Qurān), at least in popular cultural displays. In almost all instances when Umm Kulthūm occupied the top rung, Abd al-Ḥalīm Ḥāfiẓ would occupy the second. Only rarely was he displaced by others, and then usually by Muḥammad Abd al-Wahhāb or religious singers.
To my initial surprise, however, Abd al-Wahhāb did not always occupy the third place of pride in Syrian cassette-shop stratigraphy, though he almost always is mentioned among the Big Three. In fact, he often was exiled to a side display case or mixed indiscriminately with other artists having some relation to him or to musical heritage: Ṣafwān Bahlawān (a Syrian artist who studied with Abd al-Wahhāb and adopted his style of singing), Ṣabāḥ Fakhrī, and so on. Often Abd al-Wahhāb occupied his own corner. Instead, after Abd al-Ḥalīm, a variety of contemporary popular
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