Saudi Arabia's Accolade:
Last week, the New York Times profiled The Accolade, an all-girl rock band from, of all places, Saudi Arabia.
They cannot perform in public. They cannot pose for album cover photographs. Even their jam sessions are secret, for fear of offending the religious authorities in this ultraconservative kingdom.
But the members of Saudi Arabia’s first all-girl rock band, the Accolade, are clearly not afraid of taboos.
The band’s first single, “Pinocchio,” has become an underground hit here, with hundreds of young Saudis downloading the song from the group’s MySpace page. Now, the pioneering foursome, all of them college students, want to start playing regular gigs — inside private compounds, of course — and recording an album.
Besides, look at the upside: al Zawahiri and bin Laden can now have local, westernized background music when they air one their piety cants on YouTube.
The girls are smart, though... they're staying within both the legal and the social constraints they face. They could push envelopes if they chose, but seem to be happy doing it as they do.
Dope is already a problem, with a cultural preference being shown for Captagon, an amphetamine. Heroin, marijuana, hash, and Ecstasy have their followers, though.
Piercing is somewhat permitted (for women's ears), but strongly discouraged in all other circumstances.
The (satirical?) point I was really pursuing was, if Janis Joplin types had prevailed in Riyadh in the '60s, would bin Laden have prevailed in '01?
In fact, I'm SURE they wil ......
It is not much of a band, so this seems to be a case of the Times making the story rather than reporting it.
With that said, I wish them the band members well, as I do all people that are struggling to deal with the restrictions of totalitarian and/or theocratic rule.
It is not much of a band, so this seems to be a case of the Times making the story rather than reporting it.
I think the story is not that they're a great band, but that they exist at all, sort of like a North Korean rap singer.
I was not commenting on its greatness but its popularity. The article notes that “hundreds of young Saudis download[ed] the song from the group’s MySpace page.” In a country of with more than 20 million people, (excluding resident foreigners) that is not of much significance.
It could be that young Saudis prefer a different kind of music, of course: Death Metal in Saudi Arabia
The Saudis have long used parallel distribtion channels to get what they want. For example, fax trees would distribute unauthorized written materials, and speeches would circulate from hand to hand on cassettes. There was very little internet when I left Saudi, but I would expect them to use the same circumspect distribution methods. A few download from the source, then many smaller sources pop up so it quickly percolates through the population.
My initial thought when I read this was the religious authorities would put the arm on the leaders of the girls' tribes and clans, and the girls would suddenly lose interest in music and decide to pursue other interests. Saudi isn't the USA, and they don't think or act like we do.
It's strange. I had one of the first internet connections and was looking for some documentation on the Excel spreadsheet. So, I went to Yahoo and entered MSEXCEL. That inquiry was blocked and I had to explain why I was searching for sex on the internet, as in mSEXcel. Such is life in the Magic Kingdom.
*Proving once again that "Blazing Saddles" has a line suitable for all occasions.
My Saudi ex-pat buddies tell me that Hotmail was once banned in the Kingdom.
In the Emirates the lines are a little more blurred. Flickr, for example, was banned and unbanned several times in a few weeks. Same with MySpace.
Skype, of course, remans totally off-limits.
Grigor: ultraconservative and barbaric are not synonyms. One can be either, both or neither. But it cannot be denied that many elements of Islam are ultraconservative, i.e., highly resistant to change.
A fellow Saudi band who is also struggling is Sandstoned; three of the band members, including the vocalist, are Saudi nationals. Regardless of gender, all rock artists in Saudi Arabia struggle to find live venues; the laws in the Kingdom are gender-blind when it comes to such matters of propriety.
Granted that totalitarian regimes abound on the planet, what "theocratic" states exist that are not Islamic and driven by Shariah?
(70s rock star stereotypes aside, does anyone know any serious artist or athlete who isn't extremely disciplined and goal-oriented?)
Note there is no political outlet in Saudi. To find that, they have to go somewhere else. They export their political unrest.
Non-Islamic theocracies. The US under Bush. You can look it up.
In fact, in various posts and comments over the years, some commenters have asserted it as if it were a proven fact beyond dispute.
But now that O is going to be pres, we won't have that problem.
Seems that the Trinity money-coining machine his on-again, off-again spiritual mentor milked for twenty years is less evangelical and totalitarian than the UMC.
Would the Vatican count as a non-Islamic theocratic state? Of course, the Papal state used to be much larger than it is today.
During medieval times, I think a lot of European states had elements resembling the theocracies we see today. Dissent or noncompliance with the established religion was punishable.
I wonder if in a couple more centuries the Islamic world will reach the point the Christian world is at today.
You know as well as I do that Westerners live in gated comunities, shut off from the Saudi society. Inside those communities, they are not subject to the rules of Saudi society. For example, women drive inside the compounds, wear normal western clothing with no abaya, and freely associate with men.
The average Saudi couldn't even drive beyond the second gate of the huge Aramco camp in Dhahran. Westerners go to their own schools, their kids associate with other westerners, and most companies send the western teenagers off to western boarding schools. While there is a great deal of professional interaction on the job, there is very litle social interaction between the westerners and the Saudis.
How many of those westerners even bothered to learn Arabic? Even after 30 years? How many embraced Islam? Why did some stay 30 years? Who knows? Maybe they like the Sid.