Get it loud, get it strong

“Life… you know.” Yasmine Hamdan’s soft voice, with a slight, seductive rasp, trickles down a phone line from Paris, explaining with suitably Gallic ambiguity why her first solo album took so many years to emerge. Four, to be precise. You can practically feel the shoulders gathering to a shrug as she says it. The Lebanese singer, whose accent is a pleasing combination of Arabic insistence and French suggestion, has certainly seen enough of it in her 33 years to know its distractions. 

 

Brought up between Greece, Kuwait and Lebanon, she began her musical career in Beirut with the now legendary band Soap Kills, whose downbeat, urban folk formed the blueprint for the now burgeoning Lebanese underground scene. After a decade failing to gain mainstream attention in her hometown, or indeed home region, she moved to France to embark on a new project with Afghan producer Mirwais, the man whose Daft Punk-ish vibe helped keep Madonna relevant in the late 1990s. Emerging as YAS, the duo unleashed its take on Euro electro-pop this summer with the album Arabology, a collection of polished, synthed-up glam disco, all delivered via Yasmine’s smoky Arabic vocal. 

 

Hence, the move to Paris, the collaboration with one of the world’s biggest producers and the change of direction. With Arabology now out, the international element has also begun to include the necessary evil of promotion. Beginning with the Byblos Festival in her native Lebanon, followed by pan-European dates and, latterly, concert and media dates in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, where she somewhat absurdly contracted a cold, Yasmine has returned to Paris to plot the release of second single “Yaspop”. It’s another danceable slab of what one music journalist has described as “electro-kasbah pop”, and ought to help the stunning singer remain in the heads of European clubbers for the rest of the year.

 

Yasmine Hamdan: It is bit of both, to be honest. I definitely like the challenges of a new direction and a fresh collaboration. With Soap Kills, we were doing everything on our own, and it was very new, very fresh and very different – and although it was exciting, we felt on our own a lot. We did it for nearly ten years in a culture and environment that wasn’t used to that style of music, who had been brought up on Lebanese pop music, so we felt we had taken it as a far as it could go. Coming to Paris was a chance to try something else, to expand my music and enlarge my world, but also do something innovative and new in Arabic. But Soap Kills was big; we’ve not been a band for six years now, but I still get e-mails from people about us. 

 

YH: It’s tough, actually. Although Algerian, Tunisian and Moroccan music is heard a lot here, there is a kind of discrimination in the music world where you have to sound like the country you’re from. Our music isn’t remotely Middle Eastern, but if you’re an Arab doing so-called “Western” music, they don’t listen. But my identity is carried in the language; I could sing in English or in French, but this reflects my identity, and it’s a very personal connection to my culture.

 

YH: Yeah, and to be honest I get completely fed up with answering questions about my origins. It’s like writers here can’t get the Arab thing out of their heads for a second. They clearly see it as exotic, taboo or even somehow shocking that I should be making this kind of music, and every time I talk about the feelings in the song, or the humour in the lyrics, they keep coming back to Islam, as if that was the central angle of my work. Once, when being asked for the millionth time by one well-respected French journalist about my music’s compatibility with my religion, I just told her straight, “Your questions are absurd… if I was Christian, my religion wouldn’t have come up once.” It’s very frustrating. Maybe I have to take some responsibility for not making myself clear… I don’t know.

 

YH: No, but that’s the point – I’m not trying to hide it. The lyrics are predominantly in Arabic, and I’m an Arab, but with my clothes, my look and my attitude, my identity is found through the lyrics. I want to be able to say that I’m an Arab, no matter what I wear, what I say or how I act – or the kind of music I make. So the language is important for me. I get a lot of pleasure out of my Arab identity – but I also know I go against it.

 

YH: I started with the original title, and changed it to “A Man”, which has the double meaning of saying “Oh my God” in Arabic. After a lot of scenarios and stories, I eventually came up with an idea of the different dialects of the Arab world – I have a friend who is Palestinian, and I love his accent. I thought of the Ella Fitzgerald song “Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off”, and the difference in pronunciations – you say tomato, etc. The word ‘bandoora’ versus ‘banadoora’ is a famous difference between the Lebanese and Palestinian accents, and the word was used at Beirut’s checkpoints during the civil war to determine who is which nationality. A lot of arrests and even executions happened because of this. The divide still exists, so, it’s a song that has some humour, but is also full of layers. 

 

YH: Both, of course. That’s why it was so tough. It is thrilling to make electro-pop music for an Arab audience, but it’s also absurd to have to come to Paris to have my voice heard. But being here, I had to write for non-Arab speakers – it has to work for them too because of our location and also the music – and it was very challenging to create lyrics that can be sung with the right feeling to convey the emotional message. I had to find a middle way in the melody. 

 

YH: Honestly, I don’t really know. Mirwais is off doing his own thing now, although whatever happens with YAS he will continue to produce for me. The new single “Yaspop” is out now, and I have already started to work on stuff alone. 

 

YH: Well, whatever I do I’d love to think that I can open people’s ears to new music and new ideas. But that’s not a calculation; it’s something I have a passion for – I jump, and if I break my neck, I just get up again. I like the unpredictable things. I like experimenting. My trouble is I want to move too fast.  

 

For a full version of this article, see NOX41.

 

 

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