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Sting in Cairo
to sing for Palestinian children
Click here to find out what happened at the concert
Cairo, April 24, 2001
Sting walks into the press conference at the Four Seasons Hotel in Cairo wearing a white galabiya and a red Palestinian kiffeyeh. "Salamu Alaikum," he says.
The Arab garb is no coincidence -- Sting is here to sing for Palestinian children. Ten per cent of all gate receipts from Wednesday's concert -- set to take place at the foot of the Great Pyramids of Giza -- are going to Medical Aid for Palestinians, a British charity helping Palestinian children.
Sting, whose Middle East tour has already taken him through Dubai and Jordan, sounded out his views on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict at the press conference the day before the big show. "I feel the future lies in the negotiating table. I'm not with bulldozers and tanks," he said, providing a vague reference to Israeli aggression against the Palestinians.
A reporter asks why he is not even more politically involved.
"I'm a singer," Sting says, "I don't want to be a politician."
Aren't you scared of courting controversy with a concert like this, where revenues will be donated to Palestinians, someone else asks the singer.
"You can't be criticized for doing something charitable for children," he says.
But despite the political undertones of the event, this concert is, of course, more about the music. And in that respect, Sting is also in a very unique situation vis a vis the Arab world.
 His current album -- and the headline of this tour -- is Brand New Day, a multi-platinum hit whose most popular song is Desert Rose, a duet with Algerian rai star Cheb Mami. The song has a very Eastern feel to it, even though it is clearly based on the standard Western pop formula. It is the prototypical example of East meets West that has inspired cheers from one side of the divide - those who champion this type of world culture as a successful meeting of civilizations -- and boos from the other, who see it more as a Western appropriation of Eastern elements, a continuation of the much maligned tradition of Orientalism.
In the end, though, it's a raging hit that's popular all over the world and has introduced millions to Arabic sounds. "When I first told US radio stations to play Desert Rose," Sting tells the press conference, "most said, 'We can't play this ... this guy is singing in Arabic...' But I insisted, and now Mami's voice is familiar to millions of people in the US."
Mami himself, when asked by cairolive.com to analyze the composition of the song, responds that "it's a meeting of two cultures."
Is he sure it's not just a Western song with a "touch" of Eastern sounds?
He smiles. "If it's just a touch, then it's a big touch."
Wednesday's concert also features Egyptian pop star Hakim, whose music has been making inroads into Western markets (Hakim will be playing at the Central Park Summer Stages concert in New York this summer), and up and coming Lebanese singer Elissa.
Click here to find out what happened at the concert
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