Monday, April 4, 2011

Soundtrack of a revolution

Ahmed Omran is a boy of "January 25". In Egypt, declared as such amounts to implement a bar code of the soul. You cross the limits in Tahrir Square in Cairo, and looking at a new and unimaginable future - until a few months ago - comes on suddenly. Ahmed Omran is also a musician, an excellent musician known not only at home.

He toured all over Europe with his band, Wust El Balad, performing in those suburbs clogged with fellow nostalgic. Along with the traditional Arabic music fused with jazz melodies. They are ambitious and idealistic, because if you are under 30 years has a duty be, even if you live in a place where the police want to read the lyrics of your songs before you start a concert.


In Tahrir Square, January 25, 2011, beginning the music they made automatic rifles of the men of Hosni Mubarak. Then came the songs. That of Wust El Balad about a new rising sun, hope, true, playing in the streets, even inside the Opera House and everybody seemed innocuous verses full of illusions ("The sun will sing a new day will come ..

song and I wake up ... It will do so with words on life and hope, as I have not ever heard, "the song Shams El Nahar). Then I became an anthem. The anthem of the boys on January 25, Tahrir Square. Each song has its own rebellion, revolution, each based their ideals on the notes of a soundtrack.

In Iraq and Afghanistan before, in Egypt and Tunisia today, kids like Ahmed and his Wust El Balad, began performing in the basement, where the music was still seen as an expression of the devil. Not to mention a century ago. It was a slow and inexorable instinct popular uprising. Ahmed said: "We knew we were going somewhere in a place never before explored.

But we did not know where he was and how we'd arrived. " The melody of Tahrir Square, one of the many melodies of the Egyptian Revolution brings to light an underwater world of young people who, through a form of virtual emulation, designed to sneak through websites blocked intermittently, have realized the power of the means available.

"We like to think - Ahmed jokes - we'll be for our country that represented the Doors for America's largest student protests of the late sixties. Even if their music were different and were much better than us. " "This is the end, beautiful friend ... This is the end, my only friend ...

my friend "(The End, 1966). Jim Morrison wrote it for some reason while war raged in Vietnam. It could be the pain of a girl who had left him. It could be anything. But it became a mantra for a generation of twentysomethings is lost forever. Children who believed that everything would change, so it was worse but for that atrocious called Vietnam.

It's the music that draw near to those young people, the "Blue Bus" unsuspecting soldiers carrying little more than brats to their end. Sometimes it is not necessary to declare themselves committed to become a symbol. In the bottom as it happened in Egypt to Wust El Balad, which translates in Italian means "to the city center, the center of the nation." "The words are everything," says the first female rapper Egyptian Princess Emmanuelle, another cultural phenomenon of the moment, arose in the underground clubs of Cairo.

"With the words, comparing ourselves among ourselves, we discovered that we have many things in common. To attend the same sites, to have the same taste in music, the same passions. We waited for a divine sign, something more to show us the path. Now it is and nothing will ever be. " Emmanuelle was performing with a veil to cover her head, until a few years ago, today may be un'indemoniata the Queens rapper and nobody would notice the difference.

His lyrics fierce, sung in English, targeting the status of women in the Arab world, enhance the quality remembering that the devil mentioned in the Koran - "evil" - is not synonymous with the female as far back would the Islamic give to understand. Her songs build bridges between the ideals Coptic Christian and Islamic culture, as anthropological factors of the same equation.

He has not had an easy life, but today she gives meaning to the word hope. P * I * Checkpoint 303 years have not particularly comfortable musical existence. Tunisian born and they too are now a symbol on the North African scene, but also for their determination to blunt the texts with which for years sided with the oppressed Arab world.

SC Mocha is a Tunisian who, together with Palestinian SC Yosh formed the group: The name is inspired by the blocks of Israeli police against Palestinians. They make electronic music, inspired by elaborate and unusual sounds, like the sound of bullets that you have to dodge in the occupied territories.

Active in politics for years using guitars and percussion. They just finished a tour in South America, as in Tunis to Ramallah is the most famous by Ricky Martin in Puerto Rico. They, too, perhaps unwitting symbols of a changing world at the speed of light. Perhaps all of the strategies used by the West to win the "hearts" of Middle Eastern and Afghan populations, it is not the decisive one.

Perhaps enough to rattle the Iranian regime in Tehran to export illegally, hundreds of acoustic guitars. In Kabul, even before the Americans could understand if their arrival was awaited with favor, the teens were already able to imagine it, America. But not because they recognized the sound of the Black Hawk that buzzed over their heads, as they knew by heart all the songs of Bruce Springsteen.

And talk about a place where, until ten years ago, if we discover that a house had a radio or CD of foreign music, you amputate both hands. The Kabul Dreams began to perform in the rubble of buildings bombed only a few years ago. We define the only rock group in Afghanistan and for now no one has denied, although the scene of Herat and the capital are starting to sprout dozens of eager imitators.

Crack in the Radio, their most resounding success, tells of a beautiful girl who works in a private radio station in Kabul. Stanzas rather innocent, but verses of love for a young man. If it were still in power, Kabul Dreams would be the nightmare of the Taliban, in all likelihood they will execute in the national stadium.

And perhaps this is the measure most useful for measuring progress in ten years of war often demeaning. If not all of Afghanistan is peaceful, even if our contingent risk their lives every day, local radio stations put on the songs cries are a twenty year old named Suleman Qardash, dj love with a brunette.

Every revolution, in fact, has its own anthem. Then to discover that the three components are of three different races on the card atrocious enemies of each other, we can appreciate even better the mighty power of music during the war. And of course this also applies to Iraq, which has opened the way to the Middle East and now also the Maghreb.

In Baghdad, after Saddam's fall, amid the car bombs and defenses concrete placed by the marines, something unthinkable happened: the birth of a heavy metal band. The first can trigger around her enthusiasm and hope, in equal part to irritation and hatred. The Acrassicauda, Latin name for the black scorpion, common in Mesopotamia, are a group of four boys who began performing under the regime of Saddam Hussein.

They were allowed to go out in public as long as you sing songs with lyrics that bring out the dictator. The tools that suggested the Jewish music were abolished. With the arrival of the Americans, Acrassicauda have rewritten their songs and produce their shows for the Americans in Baghdad, up to peck reviews of newspapers in the U.S. sector. The success was immediate. And so the birth of a sullen resentment against them. Today they live and perform between Syria and the United States to escape the death threats that Islamic extremists have in the country. The teens who dream of hope and a future Baghdad, singing: "They Want to kill the rest of the youth, They think we're weak But we are much stronger.

They start the war and we pay the dues. No, we will not fight any longer. " The song title is Massacre. A tragic anthem for a country that has a desperate desire for tomorrow.

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