R&B & Soul

Soul, funk and contemporary R&B from Arab artists, sung in Arabic, English and French.

Contemporary R&B is one of the newer arrivals in the region and one of the fastest-growing. It came in largely through hip hop, which is why so many of these artists share producers with rappers and move between singing and rapping on the same record, and why the Arabic-English code-switching is often the hook rather than a compromise.

There is older material under this term as well. Session bands in Cairo and Beirut were playing funk and soul in the 1970s, on film soundtracks and in hotel ballrooms, and those records have had a second life through reissues and sampling.

What holds the archive together is the vocal: melisma, phrasing and the maqam-trained voice applied to a groove that came from somewhere else entirely.