Chapter 05
Radio, Civil War and Beirut's Recorded Century
5 min
Beirut became a production centre by connecting larger markets
Lebanon's radio, press, theatres, universities and record companies made Beirut an important Arab media city during the twentieth century. Musicians arrived from Syria, Palestine, Iraq, Egypt and beyond; Lebanese artists recorded for regional listeners and often developed careers through Cairo as well as Beirut.
Labels including Baidaphon, founded by a Lebanese family before the modern state existed, linked shellac production and distribution across the Arab world. Later, Voice of Beirut and Voix de l'Orient captured popular, classical and theatrical repertories. A label address reveals infrastructure while a performer's own history supplies the fuller geography.
Records compressed long forms, assigned catalogue titles and made a voice repeatable far from its first room. The three-minute disc side was an arranger as surely as any musician.
Muhyiddin Ba'yun makes that infrastructure audible. The Beirut singer and buzuq player recorded for Baidaphon from the early 1920s; his two-sided Taqsim Sikah, cut around 1928, lets a plectrum, fixed frets and silence carry a complete modal argument. Early Beirut recording was already instrumental invention, not merely a preface to later stars.
Radio Lebanon created common time across difference
State and private broadcasting scheduled news, drama, classical Arabic music, popular song and live performance. Fairuz's morning association grew inside this repeated daily architecture. Listeners who disagreed politically could still know the same introduction.
Broadcasting also reinforced hierarchy. A singer with access to Beirut studios gained national reach; rural and refugee repertories could remain locally intense and archivally faint. Studio Arabic sometimes displaced dialect detail.
The most revealing radio-tape credit includes programme, singer, ensemble and date. These details turn golden-age nostalgia into a usable catalogue.
The civil war broke the city's map into dangerous listening zones
Checkpoints, shelling, displacement and sectarian division altered where musicians could rehearse and who could attend. East and West Beirut developed different media environments; cassettes and partisan broadcasts carried political songs. Clubs closed, moved or operated under risk.
Some stars avoided explicit alignment and became symbols of an undivided country; others addressed the war directly. Ziad Rahbani's plays and songs exposed class, militia language and absurdity. Humour became his method for hearing how ideology enters ordinary speech.
Issam Hajali's Mouasalat Ila Jacad El Ard was recorded in Paris after he fled Lebanon and circulated in 1977 on fewer than a hundred self-produced cassettes. Acoustic guitar, jazz harmony, Arabic song and political exile meet without sounding like a polished war chronicle. Ziad Rahbani's 1978 theatre recording Bennesbeh Labokra Chou? catches another register: dialogue, songs and dark comedy inside a city learning the language of prolonged conflict.
The war ended through political settlement, but missing people, destroyed neighbourhoods and sectarian structures remained. Postwar nightlife grew amid reconstruction money, pirate radio and unresolved loss; Soapkills would later turn that ground into a new production language.
Cassette archives preserve what official memory may avoid
Commercial cassettes, militia releases, live theatre recordings and family tapes document the war and reconstruction. Sound quality varies, credits disappear and copied covers mutate. Their instability makes preservation urgent and verification difficult.
Digitising a tape should include both sides, spoken introductions, case, handwriting and provenance from the owner. Cutting only the song removes clues about audience and circulation.
The Umam Documentation and Research archive and other Lebanese initiatives show why cultural memory needs independent institutions. A state archive alone cannot contain every faction, camp or neighbourhood.
Women singers expose the limits of composer-led catalogues
Lebanese music histories often organise an era around male composers, playwrights and bandleaders even when a woman's voice is the sound audiences remember. Fairuz, Sabah, Salwa El Katrib and Samira Tawfik each moved through different stage, radio, film and regional circuits. Cataloguing their recordings as authored performances restores the choices listeners actually heard.
This changes the questions asked of an archive. Which take was released? Who arranged the orchestra? Which dialect did the singer choose, and for which audience? Did a film version alter the song's form? A label scan, broadcast credit and complete performance can answer more than a retrospective list of famous names.
The same care belongs to chorus singers and session musicians whose names disappeared from sleeves. Restoring a credit is not administrative decoration. It can redraw the network through which a sound travelled between Beirut, Cairo, Damascus and Gulf studios.
Soapkills made ruined Beirut electronic without making it picturesque
Yasmine Hamdan and Zeid Hamdan formed Soapkills in the late 1990s. Minimal electronic beats, bass, samples and intimate Arabic voice created a postwar sound that differed sharply from both pan-Arab pop and Rahbani orchestration.
Herzan and Ya Habibi Taala are useful selections. Affordable production and Beirut club knowledge let the duo redesign how an Arabic vocal line could sit against programmed space, a more precise achievement than the familiar East meets West label.
The city's damage often became international marketing around Lebanese artists. Hear the tracks before turning concrete, nightlife and war into aesthetic scenery.
The 2020 port explosion changed every description of central Beirut
On 4 August 2020, ammonium nitrate stored at Beirut's port exploded, killing more than two hundred people, injuring thousands and devastating neighbourhoods, studios, venues and homes. Musicians lost instruments and spaces; benefit projects and memorial works followed.
The explosion occurred amid economic collapse, mass protest and political impunity. A song about Beirut after 2020 cannot be interpreted as urban melancholy alone. Material loss and anger are present even when not named in every lyric.
Current venue guides age quickly under these conditions. Confirm that a room is open, that artists are paid and that an old calendar has not been copied into a travel page.
Surviving records can preserve disagreement
A civil-war song may have multiple dates, factional titles or unattributed singers. Competing identifications belong beside the surviving sleeve, tape or broadcast instead of being replaced by invented certainty.
This is equally true for early Fairuz recordings reissued under changing album names. Digital releases often assign a modern compilation year to much older material. Original recording context matters whenever it survives; a later reissue remains a reissue.
Lebanon's recorded century is unusually rich and unusually vulnerable. Precise uncertainty is more useful than a polished false timeline.
