A common frequency in the Middle East
Internet radio takes culture across borders
They are places more often discussed in the international section of the newspaper than the arts pages, regions associated with conflict, authoritarian rule, civil war -- or all of the above. Considering how much ink is spilled in American newspapers about such Middle Eastern hotspots as Iran, Lebanon, Israel, and the Palestinian territories, it is surprising how little familiarity most Americans have with the arts and culture of those locales.
Nonetheless, a search around the Internet, particularly of its radio offerings, reveals a wholly different look at these front-page places -- an unmediated glimpse into what gets bodies moving and toes tapping for Middle Easterners of all stripes. And yet, with the Internet deemphasizing physical space in favor of the comradeship of shared allegiances, many of the Middle East's best radio stations are located thousands of miles from Beirut or Baghdad.
The Internet-radio options are simply staggering in their diversity, with music joined by news, talk, and religious programming. For those less than fluent in Arabic, Farsi, and Hebrew, it is the universal language of music that will be of the most interest. Perhaps the first discovery on spinning the dial of Internet radio is how familiar much of it will sound to American ears.
It is comforting, and to a degree entertaining, to tune in the Lebanese Radio Nostalgie Liban and catch the opening strains of Chicago's "Look Away" -- a sign, perhaps, that the taste for musical mediocrity is a worldwide phenomenon.
As it turns out, after the initial shock of recognition, bad American music doesn't sound any better when bookended by a DJ's patter in a language other than English: Fergie is still annoying, even when introduced in Hebrew.
Western culture forms an essential building block for some of the hipper radio stations emerging from Israel and Lebanon -- two Middle Eastern countries that think of themselves, in more placid moments, as facing West. The most popular radio station in Israel among teenagers and 20-somethings, Tel Aviv-based Galgalatz, got its start as an offshoot of a popular station called Tzahal 2 , run by the Israeli Army.
Galgalatz effortlessly mingles Israeli pop and rock with well-chosen English-language selections. One recent evening broadcast saw Galgalatz's frisky DJ Gilda introduce the Shins' "Phantom Limb " right after spins of Björk and the Killers. Galgalatz manages to integrate Israeli music into a single continuum alongside American and European pop and rock, helping make Israeli stars like Idan Raichel , who gives the otherworldly sound of Ethiopian singers a dance beat, and worldbeat diva Din Din Aviv sound just as cool as My Chemical Romance and Shakira. Galgalatz is the sound of a youthful populace in love with American culture that also embraces its own homegrown stars.
Stations from Lebanon and the Palestinian territories evince a similar taste for mixing West and East. Radio Delta Lebanon offers a seamless flow of Lebanese pop for a savvy, multilingual audience -- station bumpers are in English, as is the station's website. NRJ, another Lebanese station, plays standard Top 40, with Justin Timberlake and Akon bookending ads for the Dubai Desert Rock Festival.
Radio Gaza , from the religiously conservative Gaza Strip, featured a New Year's poll of its listeners that suggested that 41 percent of respondents planned to be "very bad" in 2007. The music is a pleasing blend of contemporary Arabic pop (one that includes female singers) and that ever-present thump of bass and skittering, dance-friendly drums. Ramallah-based Radio Ajyal is more traditionally oriented, with religious songs and clips from imams' sermons regular features.
Perhaps the best of the Arabic-language music stations, Radio Mazaj, features a region-wide mix of performers and a steady diet of keening ballads over beds of wailing strings. Mazaj ranges across the entire Middle East, playing songs by everyone from Emirati heartthrob Hussain al Jasmi to Syrian legend George Wassouf to Palestinian-Kuwaiti singer Ahmad Rami . Women show up too, with sultry Lebanese performers Grace Deeb and Nancy Ajram making regular appearances in the mix.
On the Internet, appearances are often deceiving, and Mazaj, the station most emblematic of a Pan-Middle Eastern radio sound, is based in Ann Arbor, Mich.
A recent listen to Iranian Radio's Persian Pop channel offered a deliriously strange linguistic mashup: a woman on this primarily Farsi station singing in Hebrew. The song was Sharareh's "Khabe Tou," and as it turns out, much of the playlist of the Atlanta-based station (which broadcasts entirely in English) is composed of exiled Iranian performers such as Angeleno Faramarz Assef (whose horn-drenched salsa number "Kereshmeh" is a highlight) and superstar diva Googoosh, the daughter of Azerbaijani immigrants to Iran who now lives in Montreal.
Her swooping vocal performance on "Shenas Namehye Man" made clear why Googoosh is a legend to many Iranians, and underscored the tragedy of her being banned by Ayatollah Khomeini, along with all other female singers, from performing in her native country -- an edict that led to her leaving for Canada.
The motto of IranianRadio (which also features Dance and Traditional channels) is "IranianRadio -- your radio," and it is a station primarily for nostalgic Iranian expatriates -- even those teenagers and 20-somethings whose only memories of Iran may be secondhand. Hence the traditional instruments on songs like Mansour's "Bad Akhlaagh" and Ebi's "Kolbeh" ; the commercials for the National Iranian American Council, which promotes "a peaceful solution to the U S -Iran standoff" ; and the Jewish undercurrent of songs like Sharareh's -- a tribute to the tens of thousands of Iranian Jews forced into exile after the overthrow of the Shah in 1979.
The listeners are not only Iranian-Americans, though. IranianRadio logs more than 200,000 unique visitors each month, with listeners from 184 countries. Regardless of its worldwide success, the station's target audience remains the affluent Iranian-American community -- one deeply connected to its roots and culture.
Browsing the message boards for many of these stations, it becomes clear that Internet radio offers a taste of home for a worldwide diaspora longing for the sounds of native lands. Some stations are a tangible fragment of those countries, while others are themselves assembled in exile. What unites the best of these stations, like Galgalatz, IranianRadio, and Mazaj, is their dedication to the universal appeal of good music -- Middle Eastern and Western -- for an audience spread the length and breadth of the world. 