Playlist: Alsarah and the Nubatones
Alsarah is a truly talented Sudanese singer/songwriter, enriching the music scene with a mixture of north and east African tunes with Arabic influence. She characterizes her music as “East African retro pop”, and her songs have a life-affirming buoyancy that makes it hard not to dance along as you listen.
She’s crowned as the new princess of Nubian pop and Sudanese retro for a reason, and all I can say is YESSS and MORE PLEASE. She and The Nubatones made a great debut album, Silt, released two years ago. There are many amazing tracks on that album, including Soukura and Habibi Taal, which I am posting here today.
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Change is not coming to Saudi Arabia
On April 4, 2016, CNBC ran an article about Saudi Deputy Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman Al Saud that read like a hagiography. The thirty-year-old prince – who is also Minister of Defense and chair of the Council for Economic and Development Affairs – was described as “stan[ding] in stark contrast to the traditional Western image of a Saudi leader – young, urbane and with views that seem far from traditional.” Bin Salman, the article declared without irony, “is changing the world.”
Bin Salman is the latest in a series of so-called audacious Arab ‘reformers’ lauded by the West. Typically, these men (yes, they are nearly all men) are the youthful, Western-educated sons of dictators, described as passionate reformers restricted by the systems their fathers established. What these narratives overlook, however, is the fact that these men are a product and main beneficiaries of the status quo.
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The Palestinians' hypocrisy on Syria
As Hezbollah, Iran and Assad are relentlessly using “Palestine” to justify their massacres and interference in Syria, we have rarely heard a word of sympathy toward the Syrian people from Palestinian political and public figures. As a matter of fact, except for a couple of writers, Palestinian journalists, intellectuals and artists have kept silent toward the atrocities against to the Syrian people, including the Palestinian refugees in Syrian camps. Even when the story of Yarmouk moved the world, no Palestinian figure came out to denounce the siege and destruction of the camp.
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