The year is 2013, and I am staring at graffiti in my home city of Beirut. On a concrete wall in the trendy, upper-class neighbourhood of Achrafieh, a pair of nunchucks and a masbaha are pitted against each other, their black silhouettes separated by a ‘versus’ like contestants in a boxing match (see Figure 1). The ‘versus’, here, is written using Arabic characters – the number seven [٧] and the letter aleph maksura [ى] – that together are meaningless in their literal language but that whimsically approximate the Roman characters ‘vs.’. The image is a little blown out, as though the artist oversaturated the stencil; it looks amateurish, but that is the point. It is a homespun advertisement for a ‘battle’ between two local indie bands, its nunchucks representing relative newcomers Who Killed Bruce Lee (WKBL), while the Islamic prayer beads stand for established alternative music darlings Mashrou’ Leila. It was sponsored by Red Bull.
Image of the 2013 Red Bull Soundclash’s promotional graffiti on a wall in Beirut’s Hamra neighborhood (by author, January 2020).
The graffiti is part of a promotional campaign for Red Bull’s ‘Soundclash’ event,Footnote 1 and it establishes the concert’s cultural stakes before the artists even take the stage. Mashrou’ Leila, who write lyrics in Arabic and sometimes take formal cues from classical Arabic music, among other sources, are positioned as the standard-bearers of Arabness, here visually conflated with Islam. Conversely, the nunchucks and their referent, WKBL, represent the wild, raw masculinity of English-language, Euro-American rock via the imagery of a big-budget action movie, itself a potent signifier of ‘Western-ness’ achieved through exoticized Asian martial arts practices and stereotypes of ‘Eastern’ cunning. With a few small, badly painted symbols, Red Bull’s advertising team has dramatised the long-standing tension between Beirut’s ‘conflicting’ identities as ‘the Paris of the Middle East’ and ‘the capital of Arab hope’, playing into a reductive cultural schema for understanding Lebanon.Footnote 2
The actual event delivers on the promises of the ad campaign. Lebanese comedian Nemr Abou Nassar presides over the crowd, backed by Jade, a long-time musician and venue owner in Beirut’s alternative and EDM scenes. Fadi Tabbal, of Tunefork Records, sound engineers the night. The Soundclash showcases the best of Lebanon’s independent cultural scenes, but Red Bull displays its homegrown talent in an East-meets-West clash of civilisations meant to shock and awe audiences local and foreign alike. While each of the five rounds demands a range of styles and skills, neither band deviates too far from the cultural role it has been assigned. For example, in a round requiring the competing bands to collaborate with musicians whose style departs significantly from their own, Mashrou’ Leila appears with Franco-Moroccan singer and actress Hindi Zahra, while across the room, WKBL performs a mashup of a song called ‘Pool Party’ and Bach’s ‘Minuet and Badinerie Orchestral Suite No. 2 in B minor’ with Maestro Harout Fazlian and six flutists from the Lebanese Philharmonic Orchestra.
Red Bull has been a presence in Lebanon’s alternative music worlds for several decades, but its 2013 Soundclash established the company as a major patron. I begin with this event because, in addition to centring Red Bull in Lebanon’s landscape of cultural patronage, it renders visible and audible the ways that corporate investment has become wrapped up in larger questions about Lebanese cultural belonging and local senses of self. The 2013 Soundclash highlights the imbrication of Red Bull’s corporate outreach and interests with the conditions of possibility in which musicians work, suggesting an influence that exceeds the logistics of marketing concerns and enters discursive territory. The event’s prescriptive approach to cultural performance belies a more complicated field of exchange, however. Since 2013, Lebanese alternative musicians have found or made ample room to tactically work with and within Red Bull’s parameters, capitalising on corporate support and financing as a means towards an end.
In this article, I argue that when musicians work with transnational corporations like Red Bull, they labour to claim the possibility of imagining what alternative music in Lebanon could sound like. Their collaborations with these companies are aspirational; in entering corporate relationships, musicians seek to leverage corporate resources and reach in pursuit of a future that might be written on their own terms. Drawing from a combined 36 months of directed ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2013 and 2019 in Beirut, I consider three case studies that demonstrate a diversity of ways in which alternative musicians in Lebanon have worked with and through Red Bull’s cultural outreach programme in pursuit of possibility. These cases are constructed in conversation with a larger ethnographic archive amassed through interviews, participant observation, concert attendance, dialogical and close listening and analysis, and my own experiences as a Lebanese person of a similar age, class position, and ideological orientation as many of my interlocutors.
The first case examines musician and producer Zeid Hamdan’s decades-long relationship with the brand, drawing attention to the ways that musicians frame and calculate the opportunity costs of their involvement with development efforts like Red Bull through the framework of ethics and values. In the second case, garage-blues band The Wanton Bishops’ unprecedented contract with Red Bull granted them access to the brand’s international recording studios and revolved around the filming of a documentary about their journey. Although their collaboration with the brand ultimately did not bring them the success they sought, the music that they made with Red Bull after the end of their collaboration renders audible key tensions within the contested terrain of alternative music-making in Lebanon today. In closing, I consider the case of the indie-folk duo Safar, whose engagement with Red Bull reveals how the brand shapes alternative music’s aesthetics through seemingly minor decisions about funding. Although Safar worked with the corporation, when faced with the opportunity for larger commercial success, the band refused, seeing the possibility elsewhere. Together these bands outline the problem space of alternative music in Lebanon, highlighting the ways in which musicians have endeavoured to seize the capacity to aspire.
I borrow the lexicon of aspiration from anthropologist Arjun Appadurai’s (Reference Appadurai, Rao and Walton2004, Reference Appadurai2013) writings on aspiration and futurity.Footnote 3 In his 2004 essay ‘The Capacity to Aspire: Culture and the Terms of Recognition’, Appadurai argues that aspiration is a cultural capacity that is distributed unevenly. The ability to imagine a future and to orient oneself towards its realisation in concrete terms, he points out, is contingent on understanding the structural barriers to that future and having the knowledge and tools to intervene. Aspiration, here, is also a capacity to navigate existing social norms, axioms, or customs in pursuit of a desired future. If Appadurai’s aspiration, located among the abjectly disenfranchised, is navigational, I frame artists’ work with transnational corporations like Red Bull as cartographic. Where navigation implies an established terrain and rules for understanding and traversing it, cartography is a practice of mapping that is interpretive and in part a mode of invention. A cartographic undertaking implies a foray into terra incognita, an enterprise that necessarily involves taking on risk and expending resources in service of pursuing opportunity and making the unknown known. Cartography shapes perceptions of what is real and what is possible through the aesthetic rendering of possibility. Its product, the map, is a palimpsest – an accumulative artefact, a tool for the imagination (Mohammed Reference Mohammed2009). Maps are the product of both a specific space-time and an orientation to space-time, a rendering of the interplay of social, political, economic, cosmological, and ideological forces at multiple scales. Where cartography and its attendant products have operated in and through the realm of the visual, this article considers the process of mapping in its sonic dimensions. Here, listening to and making alternative music is a practice of echolocation in which sound is not just embedded within larger discourses about history, memory, or belonging, but is also a crucial tool in orienting oneself within these discourses on a personal, communal, and structural level. In their cartographic undertakings, sound here becomes a method through which musicians map and shape spaces of possibility.Footnote 4
In Lebanon, alternative music emerged in the late 1990s against the backdrop of large-scale reconstruction and rehabilitation projects following the end of the country’s 1975–1990 civil wars. Due in large part to the absence of any established infrastructure – not only in the arts but also at the most basic levels of public utilities – alternative music in Lebanon was initially staunchly DIY (Do It Yourself), with an ad hoc approach to music-making and circulation. In the nearly three decades since its founding, the work of building and sustaining local alternative music has been predicated on the ability to navigate the country’s rapid neoliberalisation. As the political class staked their claims over Lebanon’s government and resources, the rest of the country found itself without a state to rely on for basic needs like electricity, water, food, and gasoline.Footnote 5 What flourished in place of a functional government was an ultra-capitalist, highly privatised society, in which the conditions of living and creating became dependent on corporate and non-governmental interventions. Even for those who belong to the educated and mobile upper-middle class, as is the case for most of the alternative music’s milieu, the capacity to imagine a future is not evenly distributed. Members of alternative music’s vibrant lifeworld are largely united by a desire to live, sound, and do otherwise; to imagine and fashion futures that have thus far not been an established part of the dominant social and cultural terrain. Their willingness to engage with transnational corporations like Red Bull is a way to turn ‘wishful thinking [in]to thoughtful wishing’ (Appadurai Reference Appadurai, Rao and Walton2004, p. 82) by leveraging these companies’ resources and experience to explore socio-sonic topographies.
Although they are a far cry from the types of development efforts that often animate academic and journalistic imaginaries of the Global South, corporations like Red Bull, Dewars, Absolut Vodka, and Coca-Cola represent the lion’s share of funding and development efforts for independent music-making in Lebanon. This phenomenon is not unique to Lebanon, and in its Euro-American iterations, it has been central to a substantial body of interdisciplinary scholarship since the 1990s. Particularly in relation to the question of music’s relationship to corporate branding and promotion, scholars have argued that promotion has become essential to music-making rather than simply to its sales and circulation (Powers Reference Powers, McAllister and West2013), materially, sonically, and ideologically reshaping popular music into an avatar and vehicle for promotional practices (Meier Reference Meier2017, Reference Meier, Deuze and Prenger2019). Red Bull’s interest in and approach to its affiliation with Lebanon’s alternative music worlds calls attention to the social and cultural dimensions of branding efforts (Banet-Weiser Reference Banet-Weiser2012) by highlighting the ways that positive associations with music and musicians are collapsed onto the brands that utilise and affiliate with them (Klein Reference Klein2009). Here, brands cultivate goodwill by performing their investments in local scenes through experiential branding efforts like Red Bull’s Soundclash (Carah Reference Carah2010).
This article sits in constellation with scholarship within this domain that focuses primarily on musicians rather than the corporations with which they are entangled. In resonance with this scholarship, I am interested in why artists seek out such relationships and how they make sense of their commercial entanglements rather than whether independent music is commensurate with corporatisation (Baym Reference Baym2018; Hesmondhalgh and Meier Reference Hesmondhalgh, Meier, Bennett and Strange2014; Klein et al. Reference Klein, Meier and Powers2017).Footnote 6 For many, these entanglements are not ideological. Indeed, it is difficult to be committed to infrastructural independence in Lebanon, where there are virtually no official or publicly accessible establishments or infrastructures to speak of. In conversation with Bethany Klein’s (Reference Klein2020) framing of the concept of ‘selling out’ as a useful heuristic, or ‘discursive barometer’, for the study of the relationship between culture and commerce (p. 7), I approach the concept of corporate collaboration in Lebanon’s alternative music worlds in pursuit of a framework for understanding artists’ work that is not inherently rooted in research that is – implicitly or explicitly, in Klein’s case – fundamentally limited by its Euro-American archive and the attendant intellectual genealogies that frame its analysis. My aim is to provincialise dominant, industry-centred, frameworks by insisting on a return to the particular in and through the ethnographic study of alternative musicians in Lebanon.
1. Zeid Hamdan: The ethics of corporate collaboration
Red Bull is best known globally as an energy drink. Established in Austria in 1987, the company invented the category of energy drink in Western markets and quickly grew into a multi-billion dollar corporation, boasting the lion’s share of its market by the late 1990s (Economist 2002). The brand took what seemed like a natural step into the world of professional sports sponsorship in the late 1980s, and has since expanded its operations with ventures into car racing and extreme sports sponsorships.Footnote 7 That Red Bull, an energy drink, is affiliated with professional and extreme athletics is not surprising given its association with high-stakes, adrenaline-fueled tasks, and the relative frequency of corporate sponsorship seen in the sports world.
In 1998, however, Red Bull’s corporate sponsorship strategy took an unexpected turn with the establishment of the Red Bull Music Academy (RBMA). Conceived in partnership with Yadastar, a German consultant agency that managed its creative and curatorial elements until the dissolution of the Academy in 2019, RBMA was a workshop and lecture series targeted towards independent up-and-coming musicians.Footnote 8 The event, held for the first time in Berlin, brought groups of thirty musicians to various cities across the world to participate in 2-week-long terms, during which musicians were granted access to recording spaces and gear managed by a studio team of accomplished producers. While making music and collaborating with fellow attendees was highly encouraged, the only mandatory element of the Academy was attendance at twice-daily lectures by well-known musicians, producers, engineers, or other pioneers in their fields.Footnote 9 Admission to the RBMA was conditional on an audition via demo tape or vetting by local cultural ambassadors, and guaranteed participants a fully funded trip with accommodations in the host city as well as unlimited access to the Academy’s spaces and activities (Zeid Hamdan, interview with author, 28 February 2019). In addition to the academy itself, the RBMA as a division produced long-form editorials on its ‘RBMA Daily’ website, hosted and broadcast radio shows on its RBMA Radio station,Footnote 10 sponsored stages at existing global music festivals, and organised its own RBMA festivals and showcases. Each of these branches highlighted the work of Academy alumni, adding valuable exposure to an already substantial list of perks offered in exchange for participation in the RBMA programme.
Founded in 2007, the Red Bull Media House is a branch of Red Bull tasked with running the company’s various media divisions under one centralised corporate body. Upon its establishment, the media house took on responsibility for the RBMA, and further expanded the company’s musical involvement by founding a record label, ‘Red Bull Records’, and a music publishing arm in addition to television production, photography, and publishing divisions. Under the corporate umbrella of Red Bull’s media house, each of these divisions commissions, produces, and circulates original content in line with the company’s stated ‘purpose of providing a global platform to promote creativity’. It is important to note, however, that partnership with one division of the Media House does not guarantee involvement with other branches; artists who are selected to participate in the RBMA, for example, rarely get signed to Red Bull Records or featured on a Red Bull TV segment.
In the musical arena, Red Bull has taken the project of organising and producing to a much larger scale. Today, the company organises a Red Bull music festival in sixteen cities across the globe, has exclusive distribution rights to live streams of several established music festivals such as Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza via its Red Bull TV service, and has launched ‘Red Bull Amplifier’, a platform from which to support music startups. Past established formats like the music festival, the brand credits itself with pioneering new ways of organising musical performances. Events are organised and managed by cultural marketing offices based in most of the 171 countries in which the company operates programmes and distributes its energy drink. These offices are staffed largely by locals who bring marketing expertise, cultural competence, and established social and business networks to the table, and who are thus able to design, adapt, and implement sales and outreach programmes that are highly specific to their local market. As liaisons between local and global scales of operation, and arbiters of Red Bull funding, local cultural marketing managers are gatekeepers of corporate sponsorship and collaboration.
For musicians, relationships with Red Bull are conceived and experienced less as entanglements with a transnational corporation than as interpersonal relationships. The company’s model of working with and through local representatives allows for a more abstract mode of relating to and working with Red Bull, fundamentally altering the ethical, ideological, and affective calculus involved in weighing the costs against the benefits of collaboration. In other words, this structure allows the corporation to pursue its interests through individuals who are able to position themselves as friends, allies, and advocates who work in the interests of local artists and musical worlds to facilitate access to Red Bull’s well-funded cultural patronage programmes. These dynamics and their articulations became most clear in a February 2018 conversation with Zeid Hamdan. Hamdan – whose career as a musician and producer has spanned almost two decades and has included the role of frontman in bands like Soapkills, The New Government, Zeid and the Wings, and Bedouin Burger – told me about his decades-long relationship with Red Bull. ‘They are like a minister of culture’, he mused:
in a normal music environment you have publishers, you have producers, you have labels, so…here and there they give you support, or advances. In the Middle East there’s nothing like that. So I was lucky to be able to have Red Bull…if I need a push in any aspect, they understand the need, and they would give me support. Sometimes they would print flyers for me. Sometimes they would help with the bar at an event where I needed a bar. They would send the waiters and the bar. Sometimes they would pay for the equipment. Sometimes they pay travel costs. So it’s been super helpful, and they’ve been doing it since I started. (Interview with author, 8 February 2019)
That Hamdan likened Red Bull’s involvement with Lebanon’s independent music world to the work of a governmental body was telling. While the country’s Ministry of Culture financially and symbolically supports authorised musical practices, the majority of alternative music in Lebanon either deviates too far from the officially sanctioned cultural dominant, or simply is not popular enough to attract significant government attention.Footnote 11 In its place, brands like Red Bull have taken on the twin roles of patron and investor in local music scenes. While their interest in Lebanon’s alternative music is consistent with its global branding initiatives, it is only a minor realm of Red Bull’s presence in Lebanon. The company’s investments in nightlife and extreme sports yield far greater financial returns. This is typical for Red Bull as a brand, but is particularly effective in Lebanon, as it coherently speaks to dominant local understandings of self. For example, Red Bull’s self-image as a drink that represents vitality, action, and thrill-chasing is in many ways commensurate with dominant ways of understanding Lebanon as a country in which daily life is a game of Russian Roulette, where everything runs the calculated risk of becoming collateral damage to political violence and most ‘would rather die on the dancefloor than live on their knees’.Footnote 12
Further underscoring their developmental role in Lebanon’s alternative music world, Red Bull was funding Hamdan’s upcoming trip to the Oscars as part of the compositional team for Nadine Labaki’s film Capernaum, and he had been excitedly posting about the event on his social media accounts. During our conversation, he received a text from Red Bull Lebanon’s cultural manager Sam Wahab letting him know that the brand would have appreciated being tagged or mentioned in Hamdan’s posts. The text set Hamdan into frenzied motion, and he quickly went over to his laptop to correct his mistake. ‘They really like my work’, he told me as he typed:
I could not fly to LA. But then they said, ‘we’ll pay the ticket’. But, it’s true that I react as if I owe them, because of this ticket. I have to thank them. They need this to be able to help me. But, they’re friends, you know? Sam’s a friend. So when they help me I need them to look good in front of their bosses. (Interview with author, 8 February 2019)
While Hamdan assured me that there had never been any aesthetic strings attached to Red Bull’s support, his exchange with the brand’s representatives during our meeting highlighted that there were social implications to his involvement. Red Bull’s offer of funding, framed as a favour between friends, carried with it the expectation that Hamdan would be explicit and public about his indebtedness to the brand and its cultural managers. Despite the frantic energy with which he set out to correct his error on the morning that we met, Hamdan seemed nonplussed at the idea that Red Bull’s support came with these kinds of strings.
For Hamdan, the costs of collaboration and sponsorship – of Red Bull’s presence in Beirut’s alternative music world – were far outweighed by the benefits. Many of his friends and colleagues, however, took issue with what they perceived as an ethically questionable relationship with a consumer brand. ‘When I started collaborating with Red Bull’, Hamdan recalled:
a lot of my friends…said “it’s a soda! Come on man, what the fuck are you doing? You don’t have to sell your soul to the brand. You’re promoting a bad product!” And I told them, “what is this? Look, they’re not forcing me to drink the product, they’re not asking me to do an ad.” I drink Red Bull, I enjoy it. I enjoyed it before I discovered coffee! So I was familiar with the product, and then the people…when I met the people, not the product, the team. I feel close to them, you know? …They [Red Bull] grow a scene, they help it mature, they accompany it, they go with it, they breed it. It’s very good. (Interview with author, 8 February 2019)
Faced with the assertion that affiliating with Red Bull was tantamount to ‘selling your soul to the brand’, Hamdan gestured to what he perceived to be a much less concerning cost, acknowledging the scene-building efforts that the corporation took on and supported. At stake in this exchange were Hamdan’s personal and professional ethics. By aligning himself with a transnational corporation and agreeing to exchange social media endorsements for financial support, Zeid appeared to put his ambition above his ethics, acting on personal rather than collective interest. Significantly, however, Hamdan’s friends were less concerned with the fact of his collaboration with a transnational corporation than they were with the particular product being sold. For Hamdan, the passive promotion and occasional praise mandated by Red Bull were a far cry from other sponsorship deals that required artists to verbally and actively endorse a commercial product. Rather than buying into Red Bull’s corporate rhetoric, Hamdan understood his relationship with the brand as more of a measured affiliation – a well-studied transaction within the moral economies that co-constitute alternative musical practices in Lebanon.Footnote 13
Hamdan is an example of how artists calculate the ethical and opportunity costs of corporate collaboration. In Lebanon’s alternative music world, he wields an immense amount of cultural influence. As one-half of trip-hop due Soapkills, Hamdan has, since the late 1990s, been a driving force in the establishment and continuity of alternative music in Lebanon. His investments and contributions to alternative music’s future have been both musical and material. In particular, since Soapkills’ dissolution in 2006, Zeid has been an avid collaborator and has as co-owner of MOOZ Records mentored young musicians by recording and producing them in his studio, often also forming some sort of official musical collaboration with them for a time.Footnote 14 Hamdan’s successful and symbiotic partnership with Red Bull clarifies how the brand has speculatively and strategically figured into and made itself inextricable to the career of one of the most influential and consequential figures in Lebanon’s alternative music world. That Hamdan continues to foster this relationship, fully aware that the company’s local office sought to leverage his symbolic and cultural capital for its own gain, is evidence of the ethical calculus he outlined during our meeting. Here, strategic access to resources granted by corporate collaboration was for him worth the ethical opportunity cost.
Hamdan’s insights offer a clear barometric reading and cardinal orientation in the project of understanding the values, concerns, and priorities co-constitutive with alternative music in Lebanon. Notably absent from these calculations are the well-rehearsed questions of artistic autonomy and integrity. In line with Hesmondhalgh and Meier’s (Reference Hesmondhalgh, Meier, Bennett and Strange2014) observations about Euro-American iterations of independent music, for musicians like Hamdan, lifestyle brands like Red Bull rarely pose a serious threat to artistic autonomy. While my interlocutors noted that Red Bull representatives had at times strongly encouraged artists to make aesthetic shifts in their sound, none reported feeling like these changes were a condition of the brand’s financial support. As Hamdan’s story about his friends’ reactions to his ties to Red Bull suggests, the terms along which integrity is constituted comfortably accommodate corporate involvement. I argue that Hamdan’s relationship with Red Bull is more productively theorised as a cartographic undertaking which animates and is animated by an aspiration for cultural belonging, community, and an orientation towards Lebanon in which these things hold in them the potential for a better future.
2. The Wanton Bishops: Aspiration’s end(s)
I attended AUB Outdoors for the first time in years in May 2019.Footnote 15 While the event was unremarkable as a carnival, I was drawn to it by the fact that the multi-day event’s musical lineup featured several alternative bands. While there were several bands of interest performing the night I attended, I was there to see the Wanton Bishops, who had been billed as the event’s headliners. The band began their set to loud applause. Their bright floral visuals and flashing light show captivating in the darkness. Scene set, frontman Nader Mansour burst onto the stage in his signature ‘bad boy’ look – pants almost obscenely tight, striped shirt rolled up to his elbows and unbuttoned to his sternum – and immediately launched the band into their first song, ‘Waslaha’. Ever the showman, Mansour danced across the stage, a mesmerised crowd encouraging him by yelping, yelling, singing along, and moving to the beat. I was as surprised by the audience’s enthusiasm and seeming familiarity with the music as I was at the band’s presence on AUB Outdoors’ lineup. I had heard through other artists that The Wanton Bishops were no longer performing, and their inactivity over the last few years seemed to confirm these claims (Figure 2).
The Wanton Bishops perform live at AUB Outdoors (by author, 5 May 2019).
The Wanton Bishops emerged onto Beirut’s alternative music circuit in 2011, quickly distinguishing themselves through Mansour’s growling baritone and harmonica playing, and their Garage/Blues sound in a musical landscape dominated by indie rock/pop or folk bands. While the Bishops have hosted a revolving cast of drummers, guitarists, and bassists – recruited both from Lebanon and abroad – at its core were Nader Mansour and Eddy Ghossien. The band independently released their first EP, Bad Rhyme, in 2011, and followed with their debut album, Sleep With the Lights On (2012), establishing themselves as active members of Beirut’s then-bustling and rapidly growing alternative music scene.
The duo made waves in 2014 when they announced that they had signed a publishing deal with Red Bull Media House’s Publishing Portfolio and would spend the Spring of that year touring the United States. The tour was funded in its entirety by Red Bull, who also shot and produced a documentary titled Walk it Home chronicling the tour and recounting the story of the band’s rise to fame. The documentary premiered in 2015 at Red Bull-funded gala events in both Paris and Beirut and was released on Red Bull TV’s website for public streaming.Footnote 16 That same year, the band wrote and recorded their second EP, Nowhere Everywhere, which was produced by Fadi Tabbal at his Beirut-based Tunefork Studios and partially recorded and mastered at Red Bull Studios in Los Angeles.
While The Wanton Bishops’ growling garage-blues sound shone through on the EP, Nowhere Everywhere featured for the first time songs with Arabic- and English-language lyrics and an Arabic music-inflected sound.Footnote 17 ‘Waslaha’, the song that opened The Bishops’ AUB Outdoors performance to the roaring applause of their audience, also opened the EP, immediately immersing listeners in the band’s new sound. The recorded version of the song opens with a synthesised bass loop, which gives way to the first verse of the song. ‘You’re so pretty, you’re so fine/I’ll run for you to the battle line’, Mansour sings in English, before echoing the vocals on the harmonica. The synth loop repeats throughout the verse, as does Mansour’s call and response between his voice and his harmonica. Heralding the first chorus, the instrumental backing cuts out for two beats before re-entering, sounding entirely new lines to complement and highlight the difference between the English-language verses and the Arabic-language chorus. Mansour’s voice, multi-tracked, chants through the chorus, singing: kam ishtahaytu waslaha/laylun ma ba’ada layla/lamma malat khasraha/al fajru sarakha ah ya Layla! (‘How I craved her/night after night/when she turned her waist/the dawn exclaimed ‘oh night/Layla!’).
During these Arabic-language choruses, Mansour’s vocal production pivots from the growling scratchy blues yells for which he has become known to a clearer, more nasal, melismatic chant. The multi-tracking of Mansour’s voice further distinguishes this section from the verses. These vocal characteristics evoke musical styles such as the ataba and mijana, which have been and continue to be practised primarily by Bedouin communities in the Levant.Footnote 18 Nowhere Everywhere is filled with such sonic contrast, illustrating the band’s approach to what Mansour has called ‘not fusion music, but confusion music’,Footnote 19 referencing the myriad sonic and cultural influences at play in The Wanton Bishops’ more recent sound.
Implicit in Mansour’s performances and press surrounding the Wanton Bishops’ work since 2015 is the assertion that their new sound draws from traditional or classical Arab sounds and cultural practices with which the band members grew up. Indeed, it stands to reason that Mansour, who is from the Eastern Lebanese city of Zahle in the Bekaa Valley, drew sonic inspiration from traditional music that he heard and continues to hear when back in his hometown. When I spoke with one of Mansour’s close collaborators during The Wanton Bishops’ affiliation with Red Bull, however, they noted that the impetus to make music that sounded ‘more Lebanese’ came at the urging of their corporate funders. ‘Little by little’, they told me:
the guys that were investing in us started to tell us “Guys, we need to make Lebanese music, it has to be more Lebanese.” I was younger, stubborn, and for me it was “no, I’m not doing that.” It was an alternative Blues/garage band, that’s what we did. But Nader understood it…I’m not gonna lie to you, I never did it. I was never a big fan of Oriental or Lebanese music…and I did not know how to play with it. He [Mansour] did a lot of research, he dug into it. He did his homework, but—let’s say you’re doing your homework, you have no idea what you’re doing, but you’re reading the book, so whatever you’re going to do is like the book, but in your own way…that’s how we were doing things. We need a bit of electro, we put it in. We need one riff of oud. There was so much pressure, because there was big money on the table. (Interview with author, 12 July 2019)
This musician’s experiences highlight the aesthetic and ideological terrain through which musicians needed to navigate; faced with an opportunity for financial success and wider, international circulation, The Wanton Bishops adapted their sonic orientation, adding a ‘Lebanese’ twist to their garage-blues sound. While Mansour saw this as a reasonable and acceptable price to pay for access to the possibility afforded by being in Red Bull’s sphere of influence and receiving their funding, his collaborator did not feel the same. Their discomfort and lack of familiarity with Arabic music made occupying a hybrid Arabic and electro-blues sonic space feel forced and insincere. Here, aspiration and ambition met their limits at the doorstep of what one collaborator saw as performing a disingenuous Arabness. The fact that such a contrived move was attached to a high-stakes corporate sponsorship further soured the situation.
After the end of his formal contract with Red Bull, Mansour continued the project of incorporating local sonic and linguistic influences into his sound. In the years between their 2016 EP release and the 2019 Outdoors performance, The Wanton Bishops evolved into a solo project supported by a revolving cast of local musicians. At the Outdoors show, The Bishops’ frontman took every opportunity to showcase his knowledge of Arabic music, inserting short maqam-based improvisatory instrumental breaks into older songs, and performing longer expositions on his synthesiser in lieu of extended introductions or solos.
During one such extended introduction, Mansour slowly explored the melodic space of maqam Nahawand on C – which is analogous to C harmonic minor – introducing progressively more complex phrases as he went.Footnote 20 One and a half minutes into this unmetered introduction, Mansour made eye contact with the drummer as he brought the phrase sequentially downward into a pseudo-qafla,Footnote 21 cueing a derbakkeh (goblet drum) sample playing a fast Maqsum. Footnote 22 Getting into the groove, Mansour gestured at some belly dancing with his arms, shimmying his hips a few times as he sauntered over to his synthesiser for a sprawling and fevered Taqsim-likeFootnote 23 improvisation to the opening motifs of the Bishops’ song ‘Hitman’. Emphasising the drum sample, the trap set played the role of riqq, filling in the drum rhythm on the hi-hat and cymbals while keeping time with straight quarter note snare hits. The guitar and bass augmented this rhythm, the former strumming chords on the upbeats and the latter outlining Maqsum’s basic 4/4 rhythm using the tonic and fourth as dums and takks, respectively.Footnote 24 While those familiar with the band’s music would have known to expect it, when Mansour finally raised his head to sing into the microphone, his English verse felt shockingly out of place. The Wanton Bishops’ set was full of such moments, marking what can be viewed as both a success and a failure of their project to seamlessly incorporate ‘Lebanese’ influences into their music.
Later in the show, Mansour switched his synthesiser out for the ‘ud that had been resting behind him. ‘This is a new one for you’, he announced as he plugged the audio into the ‘ud’s pickup, ‘we’re trying to define Lebanese rock and roll. This one is called “Habibi”’. Despite the ambitious intention, ‘Habibi’ sounded more like The Wanton Bishops’ earlier, garage-blues music than an outgrowth of its more recent sound. Unlike their Outdoors rendition of ‘Hitman’, which incorporated Arabic tonality and rhythmic structures, the sonic markers of the band’s ‘more Lebanese’ sound here were the metallic twang of Mansour’s ‘ud and the refrain of ya Habibi (‘oh, my love’) that punctuated the song’s chorus.
For Nader Mansour and his Wanton Bishops, it seemed that the ‘Lebanese-ness’ of a rock song could be defined by the sound of the ‘ud – although not necessarily its conventional use – and the presence of a lyrically-cliché Arabic-language refrain. While such claims of Lebanese-ness, and their implications about the necessity of defining local genres, are intriguing, The Wanton Bishops’ execution betrayed the fraught and forced corporate and socio-cultural circumstances in which their approach to music-making arose. Mansour’s ‘ud performance was musically nonsensical as a marker of ‘Lebanese-ness’ in rock, as it featured in this purportedly genre-defining effort primarily for its distinctive timbre while repeating the song’s main finger-picked melodic phrases. This fingerpicking is telling, as it represents a departure from conventional ‘ud performance, which mandates that the ‘oud’s strings be plucked with a plectrum (risha) rather than strummed or finger-picked like a guitar might be.
Listening to ‘Habibi’ with an understanding of the conditions in which Mansour began his journey towards this new sound adds depth to my own interpretation of the performance many years after the fact. At the time, however, once the excitement and novelty of the live performance had waned, Mansour’s ambitious attempt to ‘define’ a local genre was largely remarkable for its failures at capturing something that came across as truly local in sound. In many ways, this failure is more telling than a resounding success might have been. Both in this particular context and more broadly, failure is a useful case study in that it reveals much about the possibilities and limitations that mediate alternative music’s aesthetics and practice in Lebanon. Mansour’s performative attempt to define Lebanese rock and roll felt contrived and awkward. Aesthetically – through both sound and performance – the track was riddled with auto-orientalism and regional clichés. Moreover, the performance occurred at the American University of Beirut, the region’s premier Anglophone university, which is attended largely by young upper-middle-class Lebanese people. This population overlaps more broadly with alternative music’s audiences, the majority of whom grew up in Lebanon’s major cities, primarily speaking English or French in their daily lives. They enjoy a level of social, cultural, and economic mobility rarely paralleled by their primarily or solely Arabic-speaking peers. This mobility is often arrived at through the process of what I call being ‘raised for export’, in which members of my, Mansour, and Hamdan’s generation were raised in cultural and linguistic microcosms of the United States or Europe, taught to think, feel, and belong in English or French rather than Arabic as a way of ensuring that the then and there of our better futures involved a turn away from Lebanon and towards the Euro-American lives our parents had prepared us for.
Although I rarely broached the subject, the question of being ‘Lebanese enough’ came up in almost all of the conversations I had with musicians, producers, promoters, and organisers in Lebanon’s alternative music world. Many expressed confusion, discomfort, and anxiety about their music’s representative capacity. If they were in some ways the arbiters of Lebanese-ness in sound, were they somehow failing their communities by making music that was not unambiguously ‘Arab’? Here, as with Zeid Hamdan, while there was ‘big money on the table’, the stakes of collaboration were not solely economic. Nor were the doubts that they inspired and cast on musicians primarily about artistic integrity. Rather, cases like the Wanton Bishops’ highlight the urgency and importance of understanding the mapping that alternative musicians do as an aspirational mode of orientation towards themselves and their place in Lebanon.Footnote 25
For many whom I spoke to in The Wanton Bishops’ audience, Mansour’s shimmying gestures at belly dance, as well as his signal to conventional Arab instrumentation and vocal stylings, represented a broader culture to which they felt a lack of affinity or from which they felt alienated. On display at Outdoors, that night was an aspirational performance about who and what a local artist might be and sound like. Although inspired and perhaps coerced by Red Bull’s marketing strategy, Mansour’s performance is more productively read as an attempt to navigate the constant pressure to be ‘more Lebanese’ or ‘more Arab’ that many of my interlocutors discussed facing from funders, producers, family, audiences, and peers alike.
While The Wanton Bishops’ project of defining something both uniquely theirs and uniquely Lebanese was affected, as a speculative project, it was both productive and instructive. On display on stage that night, and more largely in the case of The Wanton Bishops’ collaboration with Red Bull, was the archipelago of representational paradigms brought to bear on alternative musicians and their music. In Lebanon and abroad, these musicians often bear the burden of representing an authentic Arab- or Lebanese-ness and in both cases are found wanting. At home, outside of a small but devoted fanbase, alternative musicians are understood as alien from the genealogies of local music-making. Similarly, on Euro-American tours, they are asked to cater to the casual orientalist tastes of their audiences, whose expectations make no room for English-language pop-rock/folk music. Making a cartographic foray into the unknown, Mansour was caught between the Scylla of Arabness and the Charybdis of Lebanon’s outward-facing cosmopolitanism.Footnote 26
The Wanton Bishops’ shifting musical style makes audible the cultural politics and aesthetic and ideological orientations which delineated the conditions of possibility that framed music-making under Red Bull. The stakes of this undertaking were larger than individual financial success or wider circulation. The band’s unprecedented relationship with Red Bull was an opportunity to sonically render the terrain of possibility for Lebanon’s alternative music and its makers, marking the boundaries of acceptability and legibility by experimenting with and pushing the known limits of what it could mean to make alternative music in Lebanon. Here, Lebanese-ness was at the crux of the intervention attempted by and through music. In part, as the Wanton Bishops and Soundclash demonstrate, this fixation on a narrow understanding of what it means to be Lebanese or Arab in sound is a product of Red Bull’s Orientalising vision of what this can and should mean. The question of fitting or being enough is, however, also an implicit preoccupation of those who were ‘raised for export’, for whom the ability to imagine and aspire towards a future in Lebanon necessitates a radical re-orientation of their senses of self in relation to their understanding of home. In the Wanton Bishops’ case, this aspirational re-orientation took the form of a contrived and overly cliché attempt to pioneer a style of Lebanese alternative music which had little to do with the experiences and desires of those making and consuming it.
3 Safar sees the possibility elsewhere
Whereas the amounts of money implicated in Red Bull’s relationship with artists like Zeid Hamdan and The Wanton Bishops ranged in the tens of thousands, most musicians I spoke to estimated that Red Bull’s funding packages averaged in the range of $5,000–8,000 a year. Often the funds offered covered the costs of producing and circulating an album, airfare from Lebanon to Europe for a tour, or venue costs for a local concert. In most cases, artists received this cash in exchange for promising to feature a Red Bull cooler on their stage and to be seen on social media carrying Red Bull cans. Mayssa Jallad and Elie Abdelnour, the duo behind Beirut’s alternative synth-pop band Safar, are two such artists. In a conversation over several cups of coffee, the duo told me about their significant but considerably more banal relationship with the brand.
Although today Safar’s sound relies heavily on synthesised bass and looped guitar, Jallad and Abdelnour told me that they used to write for a much larger musical outfit. Their first EP, recorded with Fadi Tabbal at his Tunefork Studios, was recorded and performed live as a full band with a trap set and upright bass. The marked shift in their sound, they told me, was a matter of circumstance:
Mayssa Jallad (MJ): we were sponsored by Red Bull. But they didn’t give us enough money to fly out four people. So I think we intentionally thought about the second EP as something that could be played by three. And we took the idea of looping further…Elie looping his guitar, like an extra layer, and just layering in general. So yeah, that’s why I think the second EP started being more like Fadi [Tabbal] and Elie and I.
Elie Abdelnour (EA): because we had written the first EP as a four piece. But we needed to take these songs and perform them as a trio.
Nour El Rayes (NR): Because of Red Bull? Because of the money?
EA: Yeah, because we’d landed a few shows in Europe and we had to come up with a solution…but then the writing changed. That’s what Mayssa was saying. (Interview with author, 20 May 2019)
While the shift in aesthetics was not directly mandated by Red Bull, the band’s new sound was at least in part a direct result of the financial constraints that they faced as an independent band preparing for a tour, and the possibilities that Red Bull’s limited sponsorship afforded them. Much like The Wanton Bishops, Safar found themselves faced with aesthetic consequences that counterweighed the opportunities opened up by their alignment with Red Bull. Unlike The Wanton Bishops, however, Safar were not willing to go all-in in exchange for the promise of ‘making it’. ‘I don’t know if it’s a blessing in disguise or if we missed our shot or whatever’, Jallad told me, ‘but [Red Bull Lebanon’s cultural manager] Sam Wahhab called me right before I left for America, and he said “hey, I got you a gig opening for Ellie Goulding in Dubai”:
I was like, “sorry Sam, but…I’m moving to America for my Masters.” He said, “that’s too bad!” So opening for Ellie Goulding, she’s a super pop artist…it would have maybe gotten us some huge opportunities. But in what direction were these opportunities? Who were we going to meet if we opened for Ellie Goulding? We don’t know. I can’t answer that question. But [to Elie] would you do it now, if you could?
EA: I would do it…but just for the sake of playing for all those people, of opening for Ellie Goulding…but the repercussions, and to see who might talk to us after? I don’t want that. (Interview with author, 20 May 2019)
Despite the promise of opportunity and a larger audience base, when faced – like The Wanton Bishops were – with the choice of dropping everything to pursue the possibility of fame, or instead pursuing their own immediate needs and interests, Safar didn’t hesitate in choosing the latter. The band’s case sheds light on both the ways that Red Bull’s cultural directors have been able to shape the conditions of possibility in which artists create and operate in small markets like Lebanon, and artists’ tactical engagement with the brand. Their refusal of what was unquestionably a major opportunity for commercial success by opening for a high-profile English artist is remarkable in its seeming banality. For Jallad and Abdelnour, the stakes of their refusal were not financial or ethical. Theirs was in many ways a choice not to navigate the terrain that had been rendered visible and audible by peers who had worked more closely with the brand. Rather than exploring the space of possibility afforded by corporate collaboration, they chose instead to chart other terrains by pursuing different opportunities.
4 Leveraging Red Bull’s wings
These three cases reveal the many valences of the cultural work of corporations like Red Bull and highlight the different ways that artists have oriented themselves within and in relation to these corporate frameworks. In his almost decade-and-a-half entanglement with the brand, Zeid Hamdan established a relationship of strategic and symbiotic exchange, framing his interactions and boundaries as being defined by the ethics of music-making. The Wanton Bishops bought in wholesale, adapting their sound and image in tandem with Red Bull’s vision for what a band from Lebanon should sound like. Finally, Safar’s aesthetic adaptation to the conditions of possibility created by Red Bull’s limited funding coupled with their subsequent refusal to prioritise mainstream success over personal ambition speaks clearly to the ways that artists have been able to strategically engage with the brand on their own terms.
These artists turned to Red Bull as a method of seizing the capacity to aspire – an aspirational cartography through which they rendered visible and audible the ethical, material, and aesthetic parameters with which they could explore, reach for, and make sense of spaces of possibility. Crucially, these cartographic forays mapped out elements of the landscape of alternative musical practice through the labour of imagining possibility, tactically engaging corporate interests, and having the audacity to dream big. These undertakings were illuminating also in their various failures and refusals to participate in dominant modes of mapping, paving alternative paths towards aspiring otherwise.
Together, the cases outlined in this article underscore a need to conceive of private sponsorship and an understanding of the ‘alternative’ as culturally situated. In Lebanon, where state infrastructures are virtually absent, corporate initiatives play an outsized role in shaping the possibilities for expressive cultures. Looking beyond reductive binaries of resistance or co-optation, this study demonstrates the conceptual utility of aspirational cartography as an analytic lens for exploring the diverse, situated ways musicians and artists map personal and collective paths while negotiating complex fields of power, identity, and belonging.
Although focused on alternative musicians in Lebanon, the framework of aspirational cartography offers a flexible analytical tool for examining how artists in other precarious contexts leverage corporate ties or development initiatives as part of wider projects of self-making, world-building, and orienting towards futurity. Foregrounding aspiration reorients frameworks for understanding the complex ethical calculations and calibrations of selfhood that underpin navigations of institutional power. Methodologically, mapping artists’ orientation towards and engagement with institutions – whether corporate, state, or other – as part of aspirational cartographic practices also meaningfully works towards re-thinking critiques of neoliberal capitalism and relations between culture and economics. Ultimately, this study argues for the conceptual utility of aspirational cartography as an analytic framework bridging questions of aesthetics, political economy, ethics, and futurity. Its approach, using artistic practices as an entry point for excavating structures of power and possibility, offers new avenues for analysing the diverse ways cultural producers map and orient themselves amid complex sociocultural terrain.
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