I missed my chance to participate in the full flowering of the cassette era in the Arab world. When I started spending my summers in Damascus in the early 2000s, I bought CDs—lots of them, of whatever my friends were listening to or whatever I heard in the music videos that played during women’s hours at the gym. I did notice that my purchases were all much less expensive than comparable CDs would have been in the United States. The disc jackets seemed to be printed on thinner paper, often with slightly blurred images and text. It took me a while to realize that the CDs I purchased in music shops were most likely pirated copies. And it took me even longer to understand how the pop music songs I listened to fit into the broader soundscape of Damascus, where tapes, CDs, and (later) MP3s of Fairuz songs seemed to...
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