Yasmine Hamdan: The Modern Face of Arabic Music
A Beefeater restaurant in Maidstone does not seem the natural place to find Yasmine Hamdan. Here, ahead of her performance on Later with Jools Holland, she sits behind a coffee, a slight, moon-eyed woman shrouded in scarves and a flounce of black hair, talking with a beautifully extravagant intensity that makes the chain-pub decor look rather plain.
Since she emerged in Beirut in the late 1990s as part of the electro duo Soapkills, Hamdan, now 36, has been garnering a reputation as the modern face of Arabic music. Over the course of five albums, she has established a distinctive sound focused around her deliciously smoky voice, mingling old Arabic song with her own compositions, and embracing unexpected musical experimentation – notably working with producers Marc Collin and Mirwaïs (who also produced several Madonna albums) as well as US duo Coco Rosie. More recently, she has contributed a song to Jim Jarmusch’s latest film, Only Lovers Left Alive, in which she will also appear.
This month sees the release of her sixth record, Ya Nass, an album that offers both older work and recent songs, introducing her music, she hopes, to a broader international audience and propelling her out of the much-loathed “world music” category. “Ya Nass,” she explains of the title, “is this beautiful Kuwaiti song from the 60s that I readapt. Literally, it means, ‘Hey people! Yo!'” She smiles. “It’s like an invitation to a conversation; it addresses a crowd. It has some humour, and it’s not political, but it’s layered with what has been happening in the Arab world.”
Hamdan lived in Kuwait at the end of the 80s. “It was the country where music and everything artistic was flourishing,” she recalls. “I was listening without even wanting to,” she says. “Music was played everywhere. They’re close to India, to Asia, to the Arabic world, and so the music is a mixture. Some of the songs are polyphonic rhythms and very atonal melodies and when I sing them now they can become really quite pop.”
Her childhood was “nomadic”. The civil war in her native Lebanon meant that Hamdan’s father, a civil engineer, fled with his wife and three daughters, taking them to Abu Dhabi, Greece and Kuwait, for several years at a time. The family returned to Beirut just as Hamdan was reaching adolescence. She had been, she remembers, “a very shy kid” for whom the dream of being a singer was a “secret fantasy”. Back in a city that, despite being her home, was completely unfamiliar, she felt a great sense of possibility. “When we came back to Lebanon, I didn’t really feel I belonged. I was trying to reconnect to the city and the people, and eventually started searching for people who would inspire me.”
She met Zeid Hamdan (no relation) and the pair formed Soapkills. “Zeid came from a very Francophonic family,” she says, “and I came more from an Arabophonic society.” She began singing with him simply because she thought: “Why not?” But it became more serious when she took the decision to sing in Arabic. “Then it was no longer just about me singing as a teenager in a band,” she says. “It was about having a vision that would be bigger than me.”
This was the beginning of the 1990s in Lebanon and the civil war was drawing to a close. “It was a very strange period,” she says. “It was like a moment of reincarnation for Beirut: the city had been devastated by 15 years of war. It felt a very exciting moment to be part of. We were teenagers, we felt we could change things, initiate stuff.”
But they had little knowledge of how the music industry worked, and everything they did, every song recorded, every concert played had an improvisational feel. “We sang in bars – the first bars opening, and the first festivals happening,” she says. “There was really something new happening, and we did some crazy concerts in Damascus, in Jordan, it was surreal, it was almost like a psychedelic adventure.”
While she hesitates to describe her motivation back then as political, she concedes she was “a very angry teenager, very confrontational – and because I’m a woman, maybe I felt I had to put in more effort, because I never wanted to censor myself or have any kind of limits about what I want to say, or how I want to dress, or what I want to sing.”
To sing in Arabic at a time when most of her contemporaries were embracing western pop was part of that confrontation. “I felt that the Arabic language was a raw material that could be shaped, freely,” she says, dragging her fists through the air as if molding her words. “This was something that was thrilling to me. When I started I didn’t know how to sing in Arabic – it’s a very complex and sophisticated music full of codes and modes and quarter-tones. But I had the emotion and the desire, I had the drive to take these older influences and take them on adventures.”
Her adventures were not limited to traditional forms of Arabic music, though. She talks of having a crush on Radiohead and the Cocteau Twins, of mingling the Lebanese lullabies sung to her by her great-aunt with new and experimental rhythms. She isn’t too worried if western audiences can’t understand the lyrics. “I don’t care about understanding that,” she says. “Unless it’s Leonard Cohen’s poetry. It’s about the emotion [in songs]. I don’t want to know what they’re talking about. They’re making me dream – and that’s enough for me.”
Today, she lives in Paris with her husband, a film-maker. She tours frequently, and often returns to the Arabic-speaking world, and increasingly relishes the mingling of Arabic dialects in her songwriting — Lebanese with those of Kuwait, Palestine, Egypt and the Bedouin community. “You know,” she says, “I am rebuilding my narrative through this music. I always had this crisis: where do I come from? I was never an insider, never an outsider, I was always in the middle. But it means I never have borders in my head.”
Laura Barton
The Guardian