a dialectic of Other Cultures... or something

The cultural tension in Egypt has to be taken as a given. When i was first in Egypt 3 years ago, a Syrian born singer named Ruby was causing a stir in the egyptian parliament over this video:


Literally every shop/restaurant/whatever in Egypt has a television tuned to a music station (usually melody hits), and when that song came on, business honestly stopped.
Contemporary videos tended to look something more like this:



Lots of face covering, giggling, and lots of references to 'traditional' Egypt. The fact that the guy never gets her is standard. In fact, it was more common for the video to end with the singer waking up, or fading away, thus negating any immorality by presenting the video as a dream.

So, 3 years later, what do video's in egypt look like?
Well this one's pretty popular:

You really have to watch it long enough for the bed scene to understand how much egyptian cultural acceptance has changed in the last 3 years...
but has it changed?
This is what I'm so goddamn curious about.
It never really occurred to me until i left Egypt how unusual it is that you are literally continuously bombarded by soft core music videos. Even in america the level of saturation isn't this high.
And yet these videos offer absolutely zero reflection of accepted cultural values. Its almost like their purposely flaunting what they claim they don't want. And it has to be described as flaunting - because most of the time the videos are played with the sound turned down while other music is played over it. And this is where egypt entirely loses me.

I guess maybe this is just an example of reverse sexual orientalism:
(from wikipedia)

"...But it was not until the 19th century that "Orientalism" in the arts became an established theme. In these works the myth of the Orient as exotic and decadently corrupt is most fully articulated. Such works typically concentrated on Near-Eastern Islamic cultures. Artists such as Eugène Delacroix, Jean-Léon Gérôme and Alexander Roubtzoff painted many depictions of Islamic culture, often including lounging odalisques, and stressing lassitude and visual spectacle. When Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, director of the French Académie de peinture painted a highly-colored vision of a turkish bath (illustration, right), he made his eroticized Orient publicly acceptable by his diffuse generalizing of the female forms, who might all have been of the same model. If his painting had simply been retitled "In a Paris Brothel," it would have been far less acceptable.^{[citation needed]} Sensuality was seen as acceptable in the exotic Orient. This orientalizing imagery persisted in art into the early 20th century, as evidenced in Matisse's orientalist nudes. In these works the "Orient" often functions as a mirror to Western culture itself, or as a way of expressing its hidden or illicit aspects."

Actually, that works pretty perfectly. shit.

this was a stupidly long post, so i'll just leave you with these two MUST WATCH VIDEOS!!!!





actually i really want to write a seperate post on those last two videos... but another time i guess.