Saudi Arabian Night

(Note: Posts on my trip will not be in chronlogical order but simply as i remember signficant moments.)

After having spent a number of days in a city, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia where a majority (so I remember) of the women on the street or in shopping centers were wearing the full burqa, perhaps the most remarkable & disconcerting event for me was to visit a (private) beach club where the entertainment included these local guys, who I thoroughly enjoyed hearing:

Here's some of their music: Jeddah (My Hometown City.) (Go to "Downloads" and you'll see the title.)

It was a striking scene: balmy night at a spiffy beach club on the Red Sea in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, sitting on couches set on rugs on the sand, smoking tobacco from a hookah and eating dates listening to what sounded to me like American rap music with a light show in the background. Interesting. (Btw, do young people still use light shows? Or is it once again? I thought light shows went out decades ago.)

Later, maybe midnight, there was a vast buffet including a whole roasted sheep.

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Yes, they may have the oil and may dislike our foreign policy but they still glom to our popular culture. I guess that's one of the contradictions within the Middle East these days. Certainly if you look at the development of Dubai, the traditional culture has been totally submerged, at least so far as urban design is concerned and which in my view was entirely unnecessary to their economic well-being much less the livability of their city.

Comments

[Wally]

On the question of light shows: Yes, in addition to the old fogeys who gussy up their rote performances with bright lights, there's a strain of improvisatory American roots rock - 'jam bands' - for which light-show accompaniment is standard. The best example was the extraordinary light show at Phish concerts: the band was given to 30-minute group improvisations, and the lighting designer would manipulate (if memory serves) hundreds of individual lighting elements in time to the music, building and subsiding along with the band. The line of arena rockers that passes through the Dead, the Allmans, and so forth has mixed with a funk/jazz-influenced line (shaggy descendants of early-70's Miles Davis) and kept many classic-rock trappings.

Then there's the electronica kids with their irritating programmatic LED-wall shows, but to hell with 'em.