Running head: MASHROU LEILA, AN ALTERNATIVE BAND?

Mashrou Leila: an alternative band ?

Saad Ben Elafdil
Al Akhawayn University
Special Topics in Communication: Alternative Media
Dr. Oumlil
12/18/2014

MASHROU LEILA: AN ALTERNATIVE BAND?

Abstract
This paper aims to study the case of the Lebanese band Mashrou Leila and
establish its alternative character on a scholarly basis. This will be attempted through the use
of scholarly definitions of alternative media, to which the case of Mashrou Leila will be
confronted, while also analyzing the methods used by the band to deliver their message,
which will be proven to be counter-hegemonic, and comparing these methods to those
classified by scholarly studies as the ones characterizing alternative media. A
contextualization of the bands creation and history will also be given, to study the situation
in which it appears and determine if it evolved in an environment that expresses the need for
a social change unwelcomed by the state and/or the gatekeepers of mainstream media. The
limitations, if any, to the bands alternative nature will also be addressed, discussed, and
countered if and when possible.

MASHROU LEILA: AN ALTERNATIVE BAND?

Introduction
Alternative media isnt a new form of communication. Indeed, there has been an
alternative perspective to media since there was a mainstream perspective to counter-balance
it. For the Roman Empire, Christians could be considered alternative media practitioners,
preaching against an axiom adopted by the mainstream gatekeepers. In the Arab Gulf,
Muslims started out as a repressed alternative community trying to disseminate an alternative
message to a mainly pagan community. However, alternative media has been more
importantly produced in countries where freedom of speech is more or less enforced, which
means the MENASA region has accumulated some lateness when it comes to practicing
alternative media.
However, in the Arab world, since previously authoritarian regimes have started
loosening their grip on their peoples, those started to express themselves more freely and
more counter-hegemonic ways. Alternative media witnessed a new dawn at the very end of
the 20th century, to finally go through a full-blown rise with the unfolding of the Arab Spring.
Engaged young alternative media practitioners obtained a new-found motivation to express
themselves more maturely, and to participate more intensely in the political and social life of
their countries and their regions. With the help of their modern culture and their Internet
education, they found a way to create alternative content and express their minds more freely.

Contextualization
Mashrou Leila in a five-member Lebanese alternative rock band. The band was
founded on 2008 in Beirut, Lebanon. In the beginning, the band was simply a music
workshop project at the American University of Beirut (http://www.mashrouleila.com).

MASHROU LEILA: AN ALTERNATIVE BAND?

The workshop was described as an opportunity to jam all-night and relieve the stress
caused by college studies and the unstable political situation of Lebanon in 2008.
Indeed, on May 7th 2008, Lebanons more than a year-long long political crisis
suddenly went out of hand, when the Lebanese government attempted to bring down
Hezbollahs local telecommunication network and replace the allegedly Hezbollah-tied
Beiruts Airport security chief, sparking an enflamed reaction from the group, who
considered this decision comparable to a declaration of war and threatened the government,
claiming that there will be severe repercussions. Street battles ensued, causing many to die
and be wounded, while Hezbollah gained control over most west-Beirut neighborhoods.
Following an army decision, the government revoked its decisions and the fighting ceased.
An agreement was later reached by rival Lebanese politicians, ending the 18-month long
political crisis that led to this new civil war.
Also, on May 7th 2008, protests rose all over Lebanon, provoked by the countrys
Union Federation, with civilians demanding higher wages and paralyzing Beiruts streets.
The violence started out during the protests, when government and opposition supporters
started fighting following Hezbollahs establishment of roadblocks.
Lebanons political situation has been very sensible for a long time now, but local
music and media rarely adopted any stance concerning this issue, as free speech wasnt
encouraged. This is why Mashrou Leilas content was highly acclaimed but also
controversial. The band addressed taboo subjects and adopted a strong position by phrasing
out the Lebanese peoples insecurities and concerns about several social and political issues.
The music industry qualifies the band as an alternative rock one, but are their
creations truly alternative? Given their relative success on the indie scene, one might doubt

MASHROU LEILA: AN ALTERNATIVE BAND?

that they are really alternative media practitioners, but comparing the bands characteristics to
scholarly definitions of alternative media proves otherwise.

Is it alternative?

As our main element of comparison, we will use the bands first album Mashrou
Leila, released in 2009.
Albert (1997) argued that alternative media is alternative because of the way the
institution producing it is organized. Indeed, an alternative media institution doesnt seek to
sell audiences and to maximize profit, and is actually structured in a way that counters
societys predominant institutional structures. Also, it seeks to create and promote new ways
of communicating a media that differs from the mainstream content.
In the case of Mashrou Leila, the band is indie by nature. It is relatively independent
from production labels and is not mitigated by content guidelines. Another album of the band,
named Raasuk and released in 2013, being crowd funded, illustrates how the bands main
focus is being able to deliver their content to their audience, rather than making the most
profit out of it. The songs of the band are also highly counter-hegemonic, but we will study
this perspective later in this paper.
According to Hamilton (2000), alternative medias aim should be to advocate social
change and enable alternative communication, which [] makes possible the articulation of
a social order different from and often opposed to the dominant (p. 362).
Mashrou Leilas songs clearly criticize the social and political situation of Lebanon,
and aim to create or cause change in this situation, through songs like Al Hajez (an

MASHROU LEILA: AN ALTERNATIVE BAND?

explicit song criticizing checkpoints near officials houses as opposed to the lack of security
in the rest of Beirut) in Mashrou Leila and Lil Watan in Raasuk (advocating social
and political change to save Lebanon from corrupted and self-interested leadership). The
band clearly states its position against the domination of the government, and tries to
disseminate their point of view to encourage the creation of a new social order in Lebanon.
On the other hand, scholars have argued that alternative media is valuable only when
[it] advocate[s] & work[s] for social change in the communities and the larger society and
needs to native to these communities it serves to do it effectively and sincerely (Kidd,
1999, p. 116).
As previously established, Mashrou Leila primarily aims to and works for social
change in the Arab community and most importantly in Lebanon. It is yet to be noted that all
members of Mashrou Leila are indeed Lebanese and that they all lived through the countrys
political crisis and instability, along with its inequalities and unbalanced social order. Thus,
the band is purely native to the community it serves.
In his argumentation, Branwyn (1997) also defines jamming in alternative media as:
using media in new and creative ways, jamming like musicians jam, making it up as
they go along. Jamming also refers to the scrambling of broadcast signals, as in the
interruption of a radio signal by electronic means The whole point of alternative
media is to jam the status quo with ideas and viewpoints not found in conventional
media and not subject to the tidal influences of commercial sponsorship and demographics
(p. 14).
In the case of Mashrou Leila, the band was ironically created one night during a jamsession. Their music has been often qualified as highly creative and new when compared to
the rest of Middle-Eastern music. Indeed, the fact their melodies rely heavily on a violin,

MASHROU LEILA: AN ALTERNATIVE BAND?

which is very rare in rock music, and that their lead singer sometimes uses a megaphone to
alter his voice on the fly, makes their music unusual to but appreciated by their regional
audience. On the other hand, they use a mainstream formula (rock music) to disperse ideas
that are highly counter-hegemonic to the Lebanese mainstream media channels, thus jamming
the status quo by their relative success.
This argument is also used by Wettergren (2003), who argues that alternative media
uses mass media as an arena for political struggle, and that by jamming mainstream
formulas, its practitioners stand a chance in that fight.
Moreover, by using Internet as a major platform to distribute their media, Mashrou
Leila illustrates the point made by Downing (2011), who argues that the Internet, and mostly
social media platforms, potentially constitutes a gateway for ordinary citizens and alternative
media practitioners alike to bypass mainstreams gatekeeping and regulations and share
alternative content and exercise their right to freedom of speech.
This gateway constitutes a new and free space to communicate alternatively,
especially for marginalized communities with deviant and non-traditional views (Gross,
2003, p. 260).
Some might still argue that music bands can hardly cause change in a political
environment, especially in one as unstable as Lebanons, as politics are textual and databased in nature. However, Sartwell (2010) argues that within the alternative media
environment, political systems are no more centrally textual than they are centrally systems
of imagery, architecture, music, styles of embodiment and movement, clothing and fibers,
furnishings, and graphic arts. Indeed, art and music have, can, and will create change in
society, and is actually an extremely important medium in achieving this goal.

MASHROU LEILA: AN ALTERNATIVE BAND?

Limitations
It is however easy to argue that Mashrou Leilas relative success deprives it of its
eventual alternative character. Indeed, alternative media is often branded by the mainstream
industry once it reaches a certain level of popularity. Whereas the indie term used to
qualify a scene of small-scale artistic projects, it has now a new-found consumer-base with
the popularization of the hipster movement, leaving its place for the re-coined term
underground. Mashrou Leila is qualified as being part of both, causing it to be a part of the
form of counter-culture that is turned into consumer-culture (Newman, 2009).
However, the often highly binary conception of the classification of media makes it
sometimes unfair to engaged alternative media practitioners who end up classified as
mainstream and commercial because of their success, regardless of their socially pro-active
and alternative content.
On the other hand, the fact that Mashrou Leila use the Web as a major channel to
distribute their media raises another set of questions regarding their alternative nature.
Indeed, it has been argued that Internets capacity to act as both an alternative and a mass
medium brings with it the tension of in-group and out-group communication", and that, when
it comes to constraints to access and barriers to participation, it rarely lives up to its
potential (Owens, & Palmer, 2003, p. 351).
However Mashrou Leila doesnt use the Web as its only channel to communicate.
Indeed, they organize periodically free live concerts in abandoned locations (a notable
example would be their concert in a steel factory in 2009).

MASHROU LEILA: AN ALTERNATIVE BAND?

Conclusion
Mashrou Leila is considered alternative when it comes to rock music, but by
contextualizing their media and by comparing and confronting their work to the definition of
alternative media produce by scholars of the field, we were able to establish to a certain
extent that the band is an alternative media practitioner. Indeed, it is institutionally organized
like alternative media institutions are supposed to be, it advocates social change for a
community that it is native to, and it uses alternative media strategies to deliver a counterhegemonic message using a mainstream formula and bringing both aesthetic and technical
changes to it.
However, some limitations apply to the bands alternative character, as its popularity
might decrease its credibility and indicates that it might become inclined towards a more
hegemonic message, as it can be pressured by mitigating circumstances and guidelines to
increase monetization.
Nonetheless, we can also consider that Mashrou Leila might be embracing a
mainstream formula voluntarily, to increase the potency and the spread of their alternative
message, engaging through the market and the state, making them nor hegemonic nor
counter-hegemonic, but rather transhegemonic media (Bailey, Commaerts, & Carpentier,
2008).

MASHROU LEILA: AN ALTERNATIVE BAND?

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References
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Albert, Michael. 1997. What Makes Alternative Media Alternative? Retrieved

from http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors3/alberttext.html

Bailey, Olga Guedes, Bart Commaerts and Nico Carpentier. Chapter 1: Four
Approaches to Alternative Media, in Understanding Alternative Media. Chapter 1,
pp. 3-34. Maidenhead, England: McGraw Hill Open University Press, 2008.

Branwyn, Gareth. 1997. "The Introduction: New Media Hackers." In Jamming the
Media: A Citizen's Guide: Reclaiming the Tools of Communication, 12-51. New
York: Chronicle Books.

Downing, John. (2001). Radical Media. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Gross, Larry. (2003). "The Gay Global Village in Cyberspace." In N. Couldry &
J. Curran (Eds.). Contesting Media Power. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefiled,
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Hamilton, James Alternative Media: Conceptual Difficulties, Critical

Possibilities, Journal of Communication Inquiry 24:4 (October 2000): 357-378.

Kidd, Dorothy. "The Value of Alternative Media." Peace Review 11, no. 1 (1999):
113-19.

Newman, Michael Z. 2009. "Indie Culture: In Pursuit of the Authentic

Autonomous Alternative." Cinema Journal 48 (3): 16-34.

Owens, L., & Palmer, K. (2003). "Making the News: Anarchist Counter-Public
Relations on the World Wide Web." In Critical Studies in Media Communication.
pp. 335-361.

Sartwell, Crispin (2010). Political Aesthetics. London: Cornell University Press

MASHROU LEILA: AN ALTERNATIVE BAND?

Wettergren, sa (2003) "Like Moths To A Flame - Culture Jamming and the

Global Spectacle" in Opel, Andy and Pompper, Donnalyn (eds.) Representing
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