Yasmine Hamdan's Arab Signature on World Music
By Emiliya Strahilova/Arab America Contributing Writer
It’s hard and unfair to label music nowadays, artists are taking influences from endless and diverse sources, and yet, one thing is clear – what is on the surface is not what is under the ground. Yasmine Hamdan is popular but certainly not part of the mainstream. Her career started in Lebanon in the 90s when she became the feminine part of the trailblazing duo Soapkills, which was the first ever indie-electro project in the Middle East. From then on, she kept amplifying her impact on modern music both stylistically and geographically.
Yasmine is born in Beirut but grew up in several different countries including Greece and UAE. She travels extensively and currently resides in France. Maybe on the road, she learned how to master various Arabic dialects and incorporate them into her songs, besides, she is fluent in five languages!
The band that turned Yasmine Hamdan into an underground icon Soapkills, was a phenomenon in the Arab world. It mixed classical old Arab sound with electronic beats and it was named after the vision of post-civil war Lebanon. Yasmine recorded three albums with her partner from the duo Zeid Hamdan and toured to other countries, then moved on and relocated to Paris where she met producer and musician Mirwaiz with whom she formed Y.A.S. Under that name, the two recorded an album called Arabology in 2009.
Yasmine collaborates with distinct musicians of different nationalities, she writes music and finds a way to blend the ingredients of everyone’s unique character and build the compositions of her work. This is how a few years after Y.A.S. the idea of a solo act emerged. With the help of brilliant Marc Collin, famous from the French sensation Nouvelle Vague, she began working on her first own record. In 2013 Ya Nass became reality and was widely commented on internationally. In this album, Arab folk elements are more prominent and can be felt to interplay between Middle Eastern tradition and pure pop and electronic elements.
Last year, Yasmine Hamdan released another solo album Al Jamilat or The Beautiful Ones, dedicated to women and their voyage through life. Al Jamilat is inspired by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish and his poem about tenderness, femininity, and imperfection. Yasmine doesn’t want to sound feminist with this endeavor because she refuses to be put in a box. In an interview she gave for The National she explained how easy is to become opportunistic and convey populistic ideas for the sake of music and she’d rather stay away from this tendency. She admits she is against the masses in many cases but doesn’t want to make this her battle as she’s an artist first and refuses to do the media’s job.
About womanhood, Yasmine says: “I always felt like a minority in the world. Women are a minority in the same way gay people are. You know, those who are fighting, activists, civil rights defenders, there’s a lot of us. I’ve always viewed myself as part of a bigger, global group of fighters. But I express myself musically, and my expression has always been free. I’ve always fought against any form of censorship.”
Yasmine’s music is often tagged as trip-hop, electro-pop, folk but it can be simply considered World as this includes a broad spectrum of artists, styles, and variations. The Lebanese born singer is welcomed all over the globe and despite performing in Arabic, her music is appreciated in places where nobody really understands the lyrics. She got invited to numerous festivals and witnessed how people are touched by her melodies and arrangements and didn’t need to know what they were exactly about, they interpreted as they wanted to. This is the power of music that goes far and crosses borders.
Yasmine Hamdan is also related to the cinema via two avenues: first, she got married to the successful Palestinian film director Elia Suleiman who is the talent behind several of her music videos. Second, on the side, Yasmine made her debut as an actress in the vampire movie Only Lovers Left Alive. The film had few nominations and won recognition in the list of 100 Greatest Films Since 2000.
Regarding her role, Yasmine spells out: “I like to take elements, sounds, textures, from something more traditional, and completely remove them out of their nature, the zone where they stand because I’m bored when everything is where it belongs. So I take them and have fun without following many codes and see what happens.”. This is the approach she counts on in creating her music too, so there are still plenty of intriguing surprises yet to come.
