Camilla’s view
The desert air had chilled to a biting six degrees Celsius at midnight, but that didn’t stop more than 110,000 people lining up at the main stage. In front of a screen that felt like the size of an NFL pitch, one of the most famous rappers in music history stared down at the crowd. “My name is Salim Shadi, and you’ve all made me so at home I’m going to buy a house and move to motherf*ckin’ Riyadh!”
MDLBeast, the burgeoning Saudi music and creative conglomerate, started up in 2019 aiming to revolutionize the public entertainment space in the kingdom. Finding a way to enable youth culture to pivot what was happening privately (or outside the country) into the public sphere was going to be a long and not always easy process. But surely no-one back then imagined within five years they’d get Eminem saying that. Or that 100,000 young Saudis, most of whom hadn’t even been born when he made his debut, would be reciting the lyrics from his early hits along with him, word for word. Or that some of these youths would be dressed as if backstage at London Fashion Week; boys in full-length fur coats and fedoras stood shoulder-to-shoulder with girls in skintight catsuits.
What had been an ambitious attempt at putting on an annual music festival in Saudi Arabia has, in the last few months, really gathered pace. Stars like Calvin Harris and David Guetta have been headlining across the region now for years, but Balad Beast, which took place in the UNESCO World Heritage area of Jeddah in January, attracted a more underground set of names like Michael Kiwanuka, Lost Frequencies, and Gunna.
And in late April, at the Soundstorm site north of Riyadh, the two-day “A Thousand And One” was held, aiming to blend dance music with art, culture, and “immersive storytelling.”
Visitors attending a MDLBeast event now find a very different event than even just a couple of years back. One that looks and feels a lot like any music festival, anywhere in the world — give or take the mocktail bars and signs for Heineken 0.0.
“With our fifth edition, definitely it’s been a piece of cake because we’re getting actually agents and talents companies rosters to say, ‘Hey, can you book us?’ And that wasn’t the situation when we started,” CEO Ramadan Alharatani told Variety, with something of an understatement, as the first iterations of Soundstorm took place against the backdrop of the murder of Saudi columnist Jamal Khashoggi, followed by the pandemic.
Even this — a straight, positive interview with US entertainment industry bible Variety would have been unheard of recently. In previous years, attempts to invite music journalists from the West were more likely to see public rejections by the invitees looking to gain likes on social media than get people to actually cover the event. This year, culture mavens like Variety and Rolling Stone reviewed it like they would any festival.
How has the situation moved so fast? Perhaps there’s a lesson for other parts of the Saudi modernization drive. It’s not just about big deals, big names, and big money: Soundstorm’s acceptance needed a bottom-up, local, organically grown culture to break through. The MDLBeast conglomerate deserves credit. The headlines might still all be about the huge fees paid out to a Calvin Harris or Guns N’ Roses (appearing May 25) but the reality is much more about the local record labels and production houses that have been nurtured as part of the MDLBeast ecosystem.
The initial excitement at the slightly hackneyed big-name DJ sets has started to dissipate, for example. Instead it is increasingly local DJs who provide the buzz, melding Arabic beats to EDM. Saudi tech house duo Dish Dash draw huge crowds, female DJ trailblazer Cosmicat is headlining around the world, while big names from the Arabic diaspora like UK based Saudi DJ Nooriyah and Palestinian-American DJ Habibeats build big followings.
Despite the success of festivals, the kingdom’s club culture faces hurdles — from a ban on alcohol, which puts a natural ceiling on the number of fans willing to come rave in the desert, to navigating mixed-gender spaces in a traditionally conservative society.
The latter in particular is still a slow-burn. Even at the most recent Soundstorm, the dance tent had a slight air of aggression at times. Crowds of boisterous young men barreled through the dancefloor in what seemed a narcotically-enhanced conga line. Women-only spaces and elevated walkways were heavily promoted.
For the “A Thousand And One” event, the advertising materials made the gender gap clear: Alongside tickets for sale were huge banners saying “free entry for women.”
Camilla Wright is a media commentator and writer for global news and pop culture outlets, and publishes Britain’s biggest and best known newsletter.