Some Meanings of the Spanish Tinge in Contemporary Egyptian Music

Arab popular music from the mid-1990s onward strikingly displays the influence of Spanish and Latin music styles: the Spanish tinge. While these musical fusions are relatively straightforward (if varied) in execution, their meanings are more complex. Mere consideration of the Arabic adjectives associated with Spanish influence—Latini, Andalusi, filimanku (flamenco), gharbi (western), bahrawsati (Mediterranean), ‘ alami (global)—as well as the multiple categories into which Spanish-tinged songs are sorted— shababi (youth), hadis (modern), bub (pop)—suggest the dense tangle of meanings that Spanish-tinged Arabic music presents to Arab listeners. ¹ This chapter aims to begin the process of unraveling these meanings, as understood by Egyptians. It is neither my intention to document the Spanish tinge exhaustively, nor to explain it in “objective” historical terms. Rather, my aim is hermeneutic “ethnohistory”: ² to interpret how Egyptians themselves interpret the Spanish tinge as a historical trend; how they relate it to their past, explain its salience in the present, and assess what it means for the future. It is the production of historical knowledge, rather than reconstruction of history itself, which is the point of the study: to understand how people organize their own experience of music history. This chapter thus stands in the ethnographic more than the historiographic tradition. It constitutes a “second order” interpretation, the usual epistemological condition for cultural anthropology (Geertz 1973: 15), not history.