Unless you’ve been in a cave somewhere, you’d have noticed Sabrina Carpenter get weirded out by a zaghrouta. On April 11, the pop star made her long-awaited Coachella debut, dubbed as “Sabrinawood.” In the middle of the set, during a quieter moment, this high-pitched trill comes up from the crowd. She pauses, asks what it is. Someone says it’s part of their culture. She asks if it’s “yodelling,” then calls it “weird.” That’s the moment that took over the internet within hours. Suddenly, the whole performance gets reduced to a clip, and the reactions start rolling in: dismissive, ignorant, xenophobic… You name it.
What she was hearing was a zaghrouta, a sharp, high-pitched trilling sound made by rapidly moving the tongue while vocalizing, usually to express joy or celebration. It’s been around for centuries across the Middle East and North Africa, tied to weddings, births, and big communal moments. It’s joy, basically. A sound people recognize instantly across the region, even if it shifts slightly from place to place.
I honestly believe the reaction came from being unseasoned and uncultured rather than an anti-Arab or Arab hate agenda. And honestly, the reaction says less about her as an individual and more about what she represents. She’s kind of a textbook example of the average American who just… hasn’t been exposed to much outside their own bubble. If you’re an American who didn’t grow up in a multicultural space, if your education system and media mostly center the US, you’re just not going to have that context. American media rarely looks outward unless it’s flattening things into stereotypes, calling the entire region the Middle East, not even capable of differentiating the Gulf from the Amazigh region from African Arabs.
That doesn’t make the reaction okay. You don’t get to dismiss a culture as “weird” just because you don’t understand it (especially when the people making that sound are literally your fans, showing up for you).
But at the same time, the scale of the backlash brings up another question—what exactly are we expecting here? Because we keep projecting this idea that the West should understand us, see us, validate us… when in reality, most of them are operating within a pretty limited cultural framework to begin with.
Growing up with the idea that the Western future is brighter and more stable, and with the myth of “The American Dream,” we learned their histories and ideologies, measuring ourselves against their standards.
But they’re not raised to know us like that. And they don’t need to be, because the system was never built for that kind of exchange. They appropriate what they like, bits and pieces from our cultures and our neighbors’, and fold it into their own, without ever really understanding where it comes from.
So, expecting recognition, or even basic awareness, starts to feel a little misplaced. Not because we don’t deserve it, but because they were never taught to give it in the first place.
Meanwhile, there are entire countries in our region being bombed, displaced, erased in real time, and a lot of the same celebrities we expect cultural sensitivity from either stay silent or pick and choose when to speak. That part barely gets the same level of outrage. Ironically, her own set even featured Susan Sarandon, one of the few people in Hollywood who’s actually been consistent about speaking on Palestine, even when it cost her. But that nuance got completely lost in the noise.
So it kind of circles back to the question: why are we still waiting for acknowledgment from people who’ve shown us, over and over, that they’re not really paying attention? Why do we need them to understand the zaghrouta for it to feel valid in the first place?