“This Music is Westernized” - Absurd Allegations about Musicians from Beirut RESPONDENT: Mohammad Abdel Wahab is bullshit. I saw him performing live last year, and it was just weak. INTERVIEWER: Mohammad Abdel Wahab died in 1991! RESPONDENT: Never mind, all Lebanese composers of Arabic music are bullshit anyway. INTERVIEWER: But Mohammed Abdel Wahab was an important composer and musician from Egypt! (Interview, 2005) Lebanese indie rockers, free improvisers, rappers, death-metal artists, and electro-acoustic musicians combine styles and sounds from transnational niche music styles with field recordings and media samples from local, regional, and transnational contexts. Their music aims to sound personal, and turns away from the persistent “ethnocentric” focus on what is considered “traditional” in the Arab World, the Middle East, or the Levant. Within their daily work with local and international journalists, curators and funders however, these musicians are often being criticized for being “Westernized.” This ongoing focus on otherness and diversity forces them to constantly prove their cultural identity, and their local embeddedness. The musicians do so with parody, focussing on war, violence, and trash culture. The aim of this paper is not to highlight the successes and failures of their artistic strategies, but to show that this criticism from cultural markets is, at its core, absurd. Discussing key references from “Lebanese music” (1950s), belly dance culture (1960s), psychedelic rock (1970s), and the noises of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) the papers follows a theoretical approach by musicologist Robert Walser (2003), who encourages us to examine each piece of music in time and space. In doing so the research highlights a variety of hidden and open, local and regional, and musical and non-musical spheres of influence in contemporary music. Mapping these links further uncovers fundamental challenges within Lebanon: broken links across generations, and broken transfers of knowledge.