YALLAH! UNDERGROUND AND THE ART OF SURVIVAL by Claudia Edwards
COPY-EDITED BY KAMERYN WHYTE Farid Eslam’s film Yallah! Underground traces emerging young artists from the Middle East forming a musical underground, and dashes across borders between Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan and Israel. The film spans from 2009 to 2013, capturing the Arab Spring and rapid social and political upheaval, and finishes with reflections from these musicians and cultural producers about their continued motivations still under attack. The goal of the message is about transference across generations, given the recognition that transformative resistance has only just begun. The musical genres and styles by the fifteen artists and groups featured err on the side of pop, hip hop, and indie rock while incorporating traditional Middle-Eastern vocal melodies, and instruments like the oud or darbuka are not uncommon to hear in a rock outfit with electric guitars. A small number of women artists resisting the submissively sexualized female pop iconophilia are represented in the film as well, even though the act of making rock music may result in familial rejection or else misunderstanding from parents and family who accept the severe statepropaganda claiming that rock music is evil. In heavily repressed cities like Beirut or Cairo, bedroom producing might be the only option. Guitarist Ousso Lotfy of Cairo claims that the government killed the rock scene when it outlawed distortion guitar, deeming it too satanic. When a spirit of resistance is present,
even in total sonic abstraction, censorship is the name of the game, harkening to the artistic censorship of earlier dictatorships under Castro, Hitler and Stalin. Palestinian hip hop artist Samm relates how “they’ll say everything goes against religion,” and that “many people consider music more dangerous than a machine gun.” Another hip hop producer discusses his efforts to dismantle the global perception of Muslim fanaticism, wishing to create music that is just about music, or about struggle, but not exclusively about divisive religion. While speaking about the production of the film, director Farid Eslam admitted to shooting many commercials and music videos in order to secure funding; rather than compromising the final message, the team made the choice to produce commercial work and intentionally limited their funding sources. This feels evident in the production through both video-quality and locations. Plenty of interviews are taken from the inside of cars, bedrooms and living rooms with decent cameras and sound equipment, but a great deal of the footage is also shot from the streets or from the inside of cars looking out. As well they use phone-cameras to avoid the risk of cameramen being visible during protests, near borders, or in other areas where filming is prohibited. In this way the Arab Spring and all media-savvy social movements and upheavals that followed it have drastically changed the art of filmmaking itself. The democratization of video sharing platforms, social media, and easily accessible cell phone cameras in the hands of citizens has made possible the capture of fleeting abuses or fleeting victories, while modestly increasing accountability in the case of abuses. Furthermore, it has completely restructured the content of our daily news, where transparency, transferability and shareability dictate which news surfaces or becomes viral. Filmmakers and documentarians have not simply adapted to or appropriated these technologies for filmmaking purposes, but are now using them in simulation of the citizen’s or the protestor’s relationship to hand-held video; the content of unrest has become interlaced with the new medium. The CBC, and mainstream news outlets internationally have also responded to this shift, passing out iPhone cameras with small external mic attachments to their correspondents, who go out and capture spontaneous B-roll at cultural events, protests and marches with the goal of capturing more surprising or incendiary news-items.
In his essay “On Art Activism,” Boris Groys, author of Art Power, extracts the importance of aesthetic revolution; “…every action that is directed towards the stabilization of the status quo will ultimately show itself as ineffective—and every action that is directed towards the destruction of the status quo will ultimately succeed. Thus, total aestheticization not only does not preclude political action; it creates an ultimate horizon for successful political action, if this action has a revolutionary perspective.” (Groys, 2014) Making music collectively has long stood to combat isolation, where community building also serves to challenge the oppressive status quo. The outright embrace of a political and revolutionary narrative in Arabic rock and hip hop feels as refreshing as it does invigorating. Against all odds, without financial, cultural or even corporate support, without even an audience, these artists are still driven to write, to stimulate, and to challenge one another. For underground artists of the Arab world, creating music that is sensorially experimental and lyrically charged has become a tool for social change. Speaking about the progressive interplay between effective activism and effective art, Groys asserts that “contemporary art activism does not rush to abandon art but, rather, tries to make art itself useful. This is a historically new position.” Living in cities and countries under occupation or under constant threat of attack, politics are an inescapable facet of everyday life that bleeds into art: with strict borders and checkpoints between nations, cities, neighborhoods and waterways, even the sea is political. Yallah! Underground serves to remind us that artistic communities, at their core, come together as an act of survival; the need to create and collectively exchange sustains us, and it is imperative. Sources: Groys, Boris. (2014). On Art Activism. In e-flux. http://www.e-flux.com/journal/on-art-activism/ Watch the trailer at : http://www.ridm.qc.ca/en/ programmation/films/881/yallah-underground