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Al-Ahram Weekly 17 - 23 August 2000 Issue No. 495 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 17 - 23 August 2000 Issue No. 495
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Music in the sky
By Tarek Atia
photo: Sherif Sonbol
Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Pop singer Mustafa Qamar scared my friend Hani half to death on his way to work this morning. Good old Hani was driving along, minding his own business, when all of a sudden a 30-foot-high billboard image of Qamar appeared out of nowhere. Mustafa had his arms crossed and was glaring down at Hani and the rest of the commuters on Ramses Street, with a gaze that could only be called belligerent. "I am the best singer this side of Fayoum," Qamar seemed to be saying. The whites of his eyes were blindingly white, unnaturally white, against an unsettling tangy-orange background.
The Qamar billboard is just the latest to grace Cairo's skyline this summer. Thanks to a revved-up race to be this summer's music sensation, city billboard-sellers have been making a fortune and, in the process, keeping Cairo commuters hip to all the latest releases.
Nearly every single day, it seems, singers are literally becoming bigger. His or her image must be larger, more striking, and bolder, than all others. The first to appear was a sultry-looking Mohamed Mounir, sitting thoughtfully in a traditional-looking doorway, dreaming of the girl next door. Appropriately enough, his new tape is called Fi Ishq al-Banat (Loving Girls).
Next to appear was an angelic, all-in-white Amr Diab, posing majestically amidst a rainbow collage of purple and blue. True to his tape's title, Amr's image is Tamaly Ma'ak (Always with you). Not to be outdone, Nawal Al-Zoghbi goes Bedouin in a big way on the billboard for Layaly (Nights) -- looking pouty, like she can't decide what to do tonight. A few days later, who else shows up but Hisham Abbas in the guise of a towering maharajah.
Yet, there were bigger things to come. Over the 6 October Bridge skyline, veteran actor Mahmoud Abdel-Aziz looks like a huge sensation with an interesting-looking billboard for his new tape of songs from his movies. He is depicted in a karate-pose yelling out, "Kimi Kimi Ka." But then, the next day, a gigantic image of Mohamed Fouad, looking depressed with his head against a wall, showed up and consumed the entire area once claimed by Abdel-Aziz.
So what happened this year to inspire all this mega-promotion? The rules of the pop music game are definitely changing and billboards, along with more costly and artistic video clips, are paving the way for a new level of hype. It's competition on a fiercer level than ever before and it's translating into bigger sales on the ground.
I spoke with Mohamed Abdel-Rahman, proprietor of one of the city's biggest music retailers, based in Heliopolis. He said this year was definitely the most intense he's seen in a long time. "If you thought you were going to sell 300, you end up needing 1,000," Abdel-Rahman says. Even CDs are starting to sell big. Abdel-Rahman attributes the heavy sales to the manifold methods the singers and record companies have found to market their wares. This year, everybody has a different method.
Amr Diab premiered his video clip a day before the album came out. A month before his new work came out, Hakim did an ad for MobiNil using a melody based on its title song. Nawal Al-Zoghbi has used her latest hit song on a Pepsi ad. Hakim and Mounir hyped their new tapes big-time at giant concerts in Marina on the North Coast.
One record executive I spoke to described the race to put up ever larger posters as a "slaughterhouse" competition -- kill or be killed.
The major difference this year seems to be timing. It used to be that after the perennial best sellers, like Amr Diab and Mohamed Fouad, released their summer tapes, everyone else would wait at least a month before venturing into the market. Not any more.
Next year, competition may get even stiffer. International companies like EMI and Sony are set to invade the market. Currently, they're trying to buy up singers by offering six and seven figure contracts. Local companies will be hard pressed to match them.
We're definitely in for a wild ride, but the real question is this -- Is the music getting any better as a result? Personally, I don't think so. It's mostly all just fly-in-the-breeze, of the moment, kind of stuff. Not bad to listen to, but it'll soon be forgotten, only to be replaced by more of the same. At the very least, billboard creativity seems to be reaching for greater heights.
