I wander downstairs to find Spring [1] channel surfing. I sit down next to her as she's flipping through channels when she stops on i-channel. [2]
“Oh, cool!” she says. They're playing Arabic music videos in a countdown type program (we caught the program at #15 in what I think was a top 20 countdown) and I was amazed. I was expecting any women in the videos to be at least wearing some form of headcovering, but no. In the fifteen videos we watched, all of them had women with no head covering (okay, there were one or two where the women wore some form of traditional head covering, but only for a part of the video). I found that amazing.
I also found the women quite hot but again, these are music videos—the women are supposed to be hot (or cute, which they were as well).
I'm not saying that all the videos were good. Not at all—some were quite bad I felt, but it was still interesting to watch them as some of them had rather jarring cross-cultural moments to them; an Arabic pop song segues into American rap (with obligatory African-American), another one segues from traditional Arabic dance (with women fully hidden behind form fitting outfits) into American country with boots, jeans and cowboy hats (including the women).
Fascinating.
Turn down the sound on most of them, and you would think you were watching videos from VH-1, or maybe from Spain, at least Europe.