“They are like nothing to come out of Beirut in many years. It was what the city was missing – and only knew it was missing when it found it...”
When you first hear them, you think they have been at it for six million decades. It is hard to believe that they only joined forces a handful of years ago with the sole goal of having some serious fun, and accidentally cranked up the Lebanese indie music scene. For Mashrou’ Leila, it was a jam, bam, thank you ma’am kind of affair. Without even trying, they became an overnight sensation. They are like nothing to come out of Beirut in many years. It was what the city was missing – and only knew it was missing when it found it. “I think it was good timing,” says frontman and one-seventh of Mashrou’ Leila Hamed Sinno, when asked about the factors that propelled the group to fame.
“I think success is much more than making good music. When we were first writing music, we were doing it for imagined audiences at AUB,” he says, referring to his and his band mates’ alma mater. “We never thought what we did would resonate with audiences in the Middle East and Europe, so I can’t pretend that we have some checklist of things to do. There was no plan. It just took off,” he explains, before adding, “I’m fairly sure that 98 percent of it is not stuff that we’ve done. I mean we wrote our music and everything else was not us. It was people listening to the music and sharing it.”
Strumming their pain
In 2008, Sinno answered an open call addressed to students looking to vent through music the natural stress induced by university as well as Lebanon’s supernatural political instability. And since then, he’s been lending his voice to Mashrou’ Leila’s music in addition to penning the songs’ lyrics. After the seven-piece ensemble performed at the la Fete de la Musique street festival in the summer of that year, people started blogging and raving about the noise the young band has made. A few gigs in public piazzas as well as more clubby venues later, Mashrou’ Leila was handed an additional ego boost, scooping in 2009 the Lebanese Modern Music Contest jury prize and public vote organized by a local radio station. The winter of that year saw the release of their debut self-titled album at a steel factory in the Beirut suburb of Burj Hammoud where 1200 fans flocked to cheer for the emerging troupe.
Having amassed an impressive following, with performances at sold-out venues at home, in Cairo, and in Amman, and taking Europe in their stride by featuring at Serbia’s the Exit Festival, Amsterdam’s Paradiso Club, and Paris’s La Maroquinerie Theater, Mashrou’ Leila cannot conceal their shock at the breakneck sequence of events. “It is always surprising and continuously overwhelming, because things haven’t started to fizzle down yet,” remarks Sinno, his angelic face masking his imposing voice. The string of surprises the band was dealt included being picked in July 2010 to headline the Byblos International Festival, as offering a Lebanese band a headlining post in the festival was without precedent. There was also the not so small matter of being called the voice of the generation by a local paper after their Byblos act. “We also got such incredible emails after we played in Cairo where people commented on how much they identified with our sound and content and that was very gratifying,” beams Sinno, who like fellow band members is under 25 years of age.
Stage a protest
“At the beginning, we couldn’t find Arabic music that we could relate to, so to have that thrown back at us positively is a really big deal,” Sinno goes on to say. By carving a niche in a sea of empty romantic ballads and monotonously catchy tunes, the music of Sinno, violinist Haig Papazian, keyboardist Omaya Malaeb, guitarists Andre Chedid and Firas Abou Fakher, drummer Carl Gerges, and bassist Ibrahim Badr, struck a chord. Mashrou’ Leila, which is meant as an overnight project over anything else, delighted audiences for being a musical experiment, saluting several genres without conforming to any of them.
Straddling Arabic and Western influences, the group mixed rock with pop, folk with electro and pepped it up with Arabic Tarab, while the music spoke Lebanese Arabic. “We were exploring different genres, because the seven of us listen to very different things, as we are not like each other, which is great actually,” Sinno notes. “I suppose the most accurate technical definition of our music would be indie, because we aren’t signed to anyone and we do it independently and maybe contextually we fall under alternative.”
Sounding off
Mashrou’ Leila also rocked the boat with the thorny topics and themes it touched on, ones that are conveniently ignored in mainstream Arabic music. Figuring heavily on the first album, which was recorded when the band members were wrapping up their undergraduate studies, are issues that plague Lebanese society such as materialism and religion. The nine-track album was lauded for songs such as “Obwa”, a commentary on Lebanon’s volatile security and political situation, “Fasateen”, which addresses the issue of marriage, and “Shem-el Yasmine”, the band’s take on homosexuality. Yet it is not the aim of Mashrou’ Leila to stir controversy with its songs, the band insists. “I don’t think we can call the album controversial, as it was more evidently about shared issues that 19 and 20-year-olds talk about; at that age, you’re thinking about sexuality and politics while you’re trying to find ideology,” Sinno argues.
In 2011, “El Hal Romancy”, the band’s second album, came to fruition. Mostly concentrating on interior spaces, it exhibited a clear progression in the group’s musical style and content and it was recorded in a room the group had built using the money they made from the first album. “Pushing the envelope is not our main concern. I feel part of the way we are maturing is that we are not as reactionary as we were when we started. We are more evidently influenced by pop in the stuff we are writing now,” according to Sinno.
The third album, which is currently in the works, will likely have the same setup as album number two, where the independent musicians also had to design the CD artwork themselves, produce copies, and find distributors. “In the third album, we will use the body as a metaphor or reference point for other interactions,” he adds, which is why the songwriter can be seen ravishing anthropology books these days. “They are a great source of inspiration,” he says.
Read the full interview in the latest issue of Oasis (in stores and online)
No comments:
Post a Comment