Music in the UAE: Arabic pop pops!
In the first installment of our eight-week summer series on music in the UAE, Saeed Saeed takes a look at Arabic pop. Arabic pop is one of the many subgenres of Arabic music, and like some other Arabic musical forms, it freely borrows, pilfers and recycles other forms of music from both the East and West. Like western pop, the Arabic version is also aimed at the masses. In the first of our eight-part series on music from the Arab world, we take a look at the genre's evolution. The origins Modern Arabic pop first emerged in Egypt around the mid-1950s when western music elements and formats started creeping into songs by classical Arab artists. Where in the 1940s songs by the legendary Egyptian songbird Um Kulthoum were measured in hours and movements, the first generation of pop artists such as Egypt's Abdel Halim Hafez adopted some of the jazz and cabaret elements similar to those used by his American counterpart Nat King Cole. The Egypt-based Italian singer and