2023-07-07 06:47:29
It seems that it was not the right time to seek the advice of my friend, the talented poet, who is several years older than me, and who had achieved remarkable success with his words in the “market” of singing. simpler.” He followed his advice with another, more realistic or painful advice: “Consider that you are writing for three hundred million naive people in the Arab world!”
Did the singers of that period acquire their “colors” from reality, or did reality imitate them?
Indeed, my friend used a word harsher than “naive,” but the meaning is the same anyway; Never rely on the “intelligence” of the listener, find the most simple words, then simplify them further, to suit the listeners.
Fortunately, my friend himself did not follow his frustrated advice. It is true that he did not become – for many reasons – the stardom of other singing poets, such as Ayman Bahgat Qamar or Medhat al-Adl, but he wrote many beautiful songs for quite a few singing stars. Among them was one of the most prominent stars of the stage in which we had that dialogue. That is, Alaa Abdel-Khalek.
This was in the period between my two albums, “Tayyara Waraq”, in which the song whose title was titled achieved a remarkable success, and the album “You Will Know Me”, in which the song “Dary Your Eyelashes” and the video clip that was filmed for it achieved success no less than the success of “Tayyara Waraq”. We are talking, then, regarding the period between the early and mid-nineties of the last century, or between the fifth and ninth albums of Alaa Abdel-Khalek, since he left the band of friends that he founded – in the era of the popularity of musical groups – the musician Ammar Al-Shariei, to include, in addition to the male voices, Alaa and Ammar, two female voices – they retired Later – they are Hanan and Mona Abdel-Ghani.
No titles like the nightingale or the king, but rather voices, and even ordinary names as if they were taken from civil registry documents, such as Hisham Abbas and Ihab Tawfik, voices that gained most of their success from the magic touch of Hamid Al Shaeri’s arrangement, and from the word “youth” that added to the song of that time everything that pertained to it.
This was also the period of sounds that seemed normal, without great vocal talents like Abdel Halim and Umm Kulthum, and not even at the “tarabic” level for the next generations, like Omar Fathi, Imad Abdel Halim, Mohamed Mounir and Amr Diab. No titles like the Nightingale or the King, but ordinary voices, and even names, as if they were taken from civil registry documents, such as Hisham Abbas, Ihab Tawfiq, and Hossam Hosni, voices that gained most of their success from the magic touch of Hamid Al Shaeri’s arrangement, and from the word “youth” that was added to the song of that time All that pertains to her, including short songs, casual clothes, “dripping” on stage or in music videos, and “efets” such as “Dabadibo” by Mostafa Qamar, and lots of bright colors in the pictures and posters of albums and clips, lots of yellow, orange, and phosphorus.
Did the singers of that period acquire their “colors” from reality, or did reality imitate them? People of my generation, born in the late seventies, who are perhaps the most affected by the news of Alaa Abdel-Khalek’s passing, certainly still remember that bright colors were the “fashion” of that time, even the darkest of them was the combination of yellow with black, and the high “punk” haircut with a side cut The head, in parallel with the women’s “lion” hairdo and the dresses of the eighties / nineties, in which eyes are “overwhelmed” by the excessive prevalence of colors, a quick look at the clips of Latifa Al-Tunisi or Hoda Ammar, is enough to revive that color memory.
Alaa Abdel-Khaleq is no exception to these colors. He films the clip “Tayyara Waraq” in a yellow field of sunflowers, with an orange “filter”, and the yellow color shines in the dress of Jihan Nasr, the heroine of the clip “Dary your eyelashes”, in parallel with the phosphorescent colors in “T-shirts”. Alaa’ in the same song, to the same extent that the orange color on the cover of his album “Weyaki” dominates.
The songs – which were often criticized in their time – had meanings that did not necessarily require a naive listener, even if I pleaded with him with a dazzling veil of colors, they remained in the memory as a sign of a time that had passed, no matter how nostalgia tried to restore it.
Were those colors, in camera lenses, clothes, shoes, and fields, one of the means of this generation to draw attention, was it the means of that entire (stagnant?) era to resist oblivion?
In any case, the image was not – nor was “driving” on the stage – the only means of difference. Despite the advice of the frustrated “simplicity” of my friend, the talented poet, his words, and the words of his peers of poets, were signs of a cessation following which the presence of poetic art in the lyrics of the song almost ceased. “Youth”, most of whose “poems” later turned into a mere linguistic bridge for limited meanings, was absent from the poetic image and metaphor in favor of lyrical “suffocations” derived from the world of rap, or lazy flirting words inlaid with tons of descriptions of fruits and sweets, tasting vulgarity that has nothing to do with it. For example, in the image of tasting the dew in “Tayyara Waraq” (words by Ahmed Marzouq): “The taste of the dew, O father of a heart, is all green/ The voice of a stranger has begun and his grocer is a family and a house.” He does not know the wisdom of singing in the words of Majdi Naguib: “Joy has a companion and sadness has a companion/ And I’m Al Wa’ad Motahsahib” from “Mersal”, which is Alaa’s first solo album.
Were those colors, in camera lenses, clothes, shoes, and fields, one of the means of this generation to draw attention, was it the means of that entire (stagnant?) era to resist oblivion?
Such words, and the music of their melodies (Medhat El-Khouli / Ahmed Munib), were the first things people remembered when they learned of the death of Alaa Abdel-Khaleq, when the songs – which were often criticized in their time – had meanings that did not necessarily require a naive listener, even if she pleaded with him with a dazzling veil. Of the colors, it remained in memory as a sign of a time that had passed, no matter how nostalgia tried to restore it.
* The article expresses the author’s point of view and not necessarily Raseef22’s opinion
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