Together alone

Hanna Gargour is in a playful, almost mischievous mood. It’s probably the effects of repeated late-nights trying to complete production duties on an album of folk songs to celebrate Amman’s centenary, plus an element of relief that his Friday lunchtime involves a journalist from NOX and not a Circassian percussionist with cross-cultural performance anxiety. The 14 or so cups of freshly-brewed coffee that he is pouring into his mouth to keep his brain functioning on what is meant to be his day off are also contributing to an impish sense of fun. He has a new single, and can’t wait for us to hear it – even if his motives for doing so aren’t necessarily artistic.

The 30-year-old singer, songwriter and producer clicks the mouse on the desk of his home studio, the smaller of three converted rooms in his old Sweifieh apartment, and his latest song, “You and Me Together” appears as a collection of tracks and graphs on a 42-inch flatscreen monitor. They instantly flicker to life. “Catchy, isn’t it?” he asks rhetorically, as the undeniably radio-friendly pop-reggae song jauntily trips out of the oversized speakers.

It’s upbeat, it’s whimsical, it’s slightly syrupy – it’s the kind of song a less celebrated Caribbean Island would use on a tourist promotion video. It’s also a complete departure from the mainstream, MTV rock of last year’s “All The Time In The World”, an anthemic Nickelback-ish romp with Dave Grohl-style multiple character video, which more closely mirrors his CD collection – rows of shelves filled with classic rock like early Genesis and Queen, to psy-rock acts from the 1990s like Phish, his personal, borderline obsessive favourite, and grunge-tinged acts like Catherine Wheel. There is, though, he insists, a definite streak of pure Hanna in the new composition, notably the Jamaican accent that characterises the rap part; it’s off-beat, self-deprecating and perhaps even a joke at the audience themselves – it seems to suggest that if you genuinely like it, you might not be quite getting where he’s coming from.

Hanna finally concedes the point, albeit in his own inimitable fashion. “Listen, as hard as I try – and, trust me, I will try – to produce songs as offensively awful as ‘My Humps’, I just don’t think I could. I mean I could strive for that, because if that’s what the market wants, that’s what I will try to give to them. But I’m just not convinced I could ever stoop that low. Have you heard that song that goes, ‘This beat is sick, I wanna ride on your disco stick’? I mean, come on! That is so awful that I can barely describe it…”

 “I wanted the girl because she would shock,” he explains, “and not just any girl, but a slutty goth chick! And I chose the guy in the dishdash because that was my way of saying ‘Hey, I’m an Arab’, to both neutralise that shock value in the Middle East and, for the West, showing that Arabs have humour and personality. But, yeah, I was kind of hoping that one of the TV stations would ban it…”

For Jordan’s sake, we hope the adjustment is a perpetual one. It’s clear he feels a certain degree of responsibility for raising expectations of what local music can be. Or, for someone who asked “who is that?” when told he had a chance to sing with Majda Roumy at Jerash, perhaps what music produced locally should be. “It’s not really influencing music, but influencing people. When I was growing up, a band called Blind Melon affected me so much, I thought if I could affect just one person in the world to that degree, I would be happy.

“If not, I want to have as much fun as I possibly can. So, I can always carry on selling out. That is fun.”

For a full version of this article, see NOX39.