Arab culture still unseen by the West despite Umm Kulthum’s recognition by Rolling Stone

By promoting the narrative that black singers have now become the standard of excellence, the magazine hopes to mute discussion over happened in the past, what is happening in the present, and what may happen in the future. It is as if this offer of absolute stardom cancels everything out.

But the words sung by Billie Holiday — ranked fourth on the list — still echo strongly. In 1939, she released Strange Fruit. It was about the lynching of black people:

"Southern trees bear a strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees."

For a long time, this song was banned, and Holiday was arrested for singing it. Today, both the song and the singer are celebrated — but too late to have real impact. 

The same authorities that brutally detained Holiday, leading directly to her death,  as portrayed in a recent biopic about her, are still in power. The current empty glorification of Billie Holliday looks like a way of killing her anew, freezing her like a shiny stone statue, into empty glorification, devoid of any serious discussion of the legal faults of her time and her true importance as a cultural figure. 

It might be a novel mechanism but turning luminaries from excluded groups into stars and making them into quietened symbols of success actually amounts to exclusion. 

Their work is taken out of its proper context and its meaning is lost. Their songs no longer spark discussions about injustice, subsumed into anodyne collective memory. These songs are only revived to show they are no longer relevant. 

But that relevance remains. The trees from which black corpses once swung are now replaced with the policeman's knee squeezing George Floyd's neck to death, and his relentless baton.

The music market is used to prompt sympathy for issues without driving actual change. Whoever wants to tackle such issues must do so within the market's framework with a logic that simply commodifies the issue and transforms its owners and victims into consumers of the discourse via a mechanism that perpetuates the situation forever.
 
Beyoncé outranks Umm Kulthum despite appropriating her song

Umm Kulthum is the only Arab singer on the list, ranked at 61, between Kate Bush at 60 and George Michael at 62. While many people consider her inclusion at all as a special honour, her brother's grandson said that she deserved first place.

The magazine said that Umm Kulthum had no real equivalent among singers in the West, and quoted Bob Dylan who considered her to be a great singer.

It was lead singer of Led Zeppelin Robert Plant who said, "when I first heard the way [Umm Kulthum] would dance down through the scale to land on a beautiful note that I couldn't even imagine singing, it was huge: somebody had blown a hole in the wall of my understanding of vocals."
 

The magazine mentioned Beyoncé's appropriation of Umm Kulthum's "Enta Omri" to support her position, but it ranked Beyoncé at 8 on the list, more than 50 spots ahead of Umm Kulthum. 

This implies that this "greatness", as the magazine puts it, is only a kind of self-praise, and not an actual classification of Umm Kulthum's position in the Arabic music scene, and even less so on a global scale.

It seems that Rolling Stone is turning a blind eye to the Arab region and its songs from Umm Kulthum's death in 1975 onwards. It is as if Arabs are granted this single place on the list while otherwise being excluded from the history of song, as if their contribution ended with Umm Kulthum. This makes her ranking on the list more of a eulogy than a celebration.

Beyoncé's use of "Enta Omri" feels like appropriation. She uses it as if it never existed before. Seemingly, Beyoncé did not use someone else's song, but created it herself and internationalised it, helped by her supreme stature in the industry. In this way, Beyoncé shows how an advanced culture can impose and defend its own interpretations. 

Accordingly, Umm Kulthum is introduced to the West as the singer whose melody was revived by Beyoncé through a magazine that aspires to own the entire history of the artform. 

Some Lebanese people were angered by the exclusion of Fayrouz from the list. Many other nations also feel excluded. There are no Iraqi, Moroccan, or Gulf singers on the list. There is even no mention of stars that the West knows well, such as Abdel Halim, Sabah, Nazem Al-Ghazali, Talal Maddah, and Sabah Fakhri. 
 

Based on the popularity metric, it seems incomprehensible that Amr Diab, for example, is not mentioned, as a top pop star from the 1970s to this day. 

Jungkook and Billie Eilish inclusion shows experience not valued

The inclusion on the list of such recent names as Kpop idol Jungkook, born in 1997, and American singer Billie Eilish, born in 2001, also violates the standards claimed by its compilers. It seems the magazine is only concerned with fame, in line with the culture of the highly connected Generation Z.

The inclusion of Gen Z representatives on the list, at the expense of more established and diverse stars, shows the magazine does not care about experience as much as it cares about keeping up with the latest trends. 

Rolling Stone does not want to tell stories as much as it wants to document fleeting moments.

Established artists, with long stories of their own, can defend themselves and are difficult to appropriate. It does not matter that stars like Madonna and pop legends like Michael Jackson, who was an excellent singer and performer, are not highly ranked. That is so because they are harder to manipulate into the narrative that the magazine is pushing. 

Prioritising the stars of the moment aligns with the market's needs and its constant push towards consumerism. Because the current 'moment' has no danger and is always flowing and flying, it can always be erased and replaced with a new one, without any trace of its predecessor.

If Rolling Stone tempted us with the inclusion of some surprising names, its overall logic still exposes a tendency for totalitarian-like authority over the artform to favour, defend, and promote current trends over established histories.