LITERARY | Lebanon: Rocking Beirut: A Night Out with Mashrou’ Leila
DECEMBER 2010 | LITERARY | LEBANON | MICHELLE CHAHINE
Truck bombs. Explosions. A popular Prime Minister and a dozen young, anti-Syrian politicians and journalists assassinated. A million Lebanese took to the streets of Beirut in response, ushering the withdrawal of Syrian forces after two decades of occupation. There were random explosions and bombs detonated near restaurants, shopping centers and residential areas, echoing tales from Baghdad. Then the month-long war erupted between Israel and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, followed by rebuilding, civil unrest, and, finally, a week-long civil war in the streets of the capitol.
Against this backdrop: homework, due dates, the stresses of college. After an assassination, the American University of Beirut (AUB) closed for a day or two. It closed throughout the Israel-Hezbollah War. But most of the time, life went on. Students studied, spent nights in their art studios or the library “overnighting” before deadlines, and partied on weekends and weekdays, in Beirut fashion. And some of these students started an alternative Arabic pop rock band, Mashrou’ Leila.
“We had all the bombings,” says Haig Papazian, Mashrou’ Leila’s violinist. “There was a lot of work at university. We were all stressed. So we thought, why don’t we start this music workshop to just vent for a while?”
The rapid popularity of Mashrou’ Leila, set up by AUB students in early 2008, has surprised the band, as well as their fans and observers in Lebanon and the wider region. But they still have a long way to go.
(Image above: Haig Papazian on stage. By Lynn El Bizri.)
Mashrou’ Leila means “An Overnight Project,” according to the band’s official Facebook page, but the band members themselves enjoy the play on words. The word Leila is either a popular Arabic name for a woman, or it means, simply, “tonight.” The page also describes the band as “an experiment,” its members “feeding on its lack of genre.”
Mashrou’ Leila’s music is a mixture of rock, pop, jazz, Latin, and Oriental melodies. The lyrics, written in Arabic, are poetry-meets-good-old-fashioned venting. There are echoes the musical eclecticism of Beirut, which mixes Near Eastern, Mediterranean, and Western cultures.
This past summer, the group had its breakthrough concert at the annual Byblos International Festival in Northern Lebanon, playing on the same stage as the popular British band The Gorillaz.
Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri sat in the front row at the concert, along with five thousand cheering Lebanese fans. Five thousand may seem like a small number in comparison to American concerts, but for a country with a population of 4 million, that’s about as big as it gets. The largest concerts, led by world-renown European DJs like Tiesto, reach crowds of 16,000, but this is no common occurrence.
The band of students started as an unofficial music workshop. Papazian and Omaya Malaeb, keyboardist, were both architecture students at AUB at the time. They hung posters around the Department of Architecture and Design, inviting anyone interested in playing music to join them for jam sessions.
The workshop brought together seven AUB students in their early twenties. Three other architecture students joined: Andre Chedid and Firas Abou Fakher, both on guitar, Carl Gerges, on drums, as well as a graphic design student, Hamed Sinno, the vocalist and primary lyricist. Gerges then brought in Ibrahim Badr, the band’s bassist, an AUB engineering student.
After hearing them play informally, their friends encouraged them to perform for an audience. They put on a small show as opening act for a larger concert on campus. They were the only group to write original music.
“Since we’re all designers (except for our bassist) we thought, let’s try to create new music the same way we create new designs,” says Papazian.
It was the first time the audience, AUB students, heard the septet play. According to Papazian, everyone related to the music and identified with the lyrics, delivered in Arabic. The evidence? A standing ovation.
People started telling their friends. The band’s first milestone was performing in the annual “Fete de la Musique,” a music festival supported by the Beirut municipality. Their second milestone was winning a competition organized by a local radio station and record labels. The prize was supposed to be a record deal, which they did not get, according to Badr.
Currently a graduate student at MIT, Badr, the bassist, flies back and forth two or three times a year for concerts. Badr talks like an engineer, strategic and focused: he wants to “get signed” by a record company with a recording contract. He is clearly frustrated by the lack of support from local or regional record labels and by the lack of public or private endowments for the arts in the Middle East.
Even though they worked with a local record label for the release of their first album, that relationship later fell through. The seven students and now young professionals have to do everything on their own: they plan their concerts, design the stages, record their own music (they are working on an EP now) and distribute it. They arrived on iTunes in the beginning of November last year, eleven months after the release of their first album. Before that, the only way for people outside of Lebanon to access their music was by downloading a pirated version online—which the band encouraged.
“In Lebanon, we don’t have a distribution label,” explains Badr. “So it’s basically us. Most of our sales happen through Café Younis, [a hip café in Hamra, the neighborhood of Beirut around AUB]. Our album is not even distributed in Lebanon. It’s distributed in Beirut, in Hamra.”
“It’s not about selling CDs. It’s about spreading the music. I don’t mind if people download it for free,” says Papazian. He reveals his designer sensibilities, adding, “To be able to be known you kind of have to spread your music. You know, your music is like your portfolio. You put it out there so people know that this is what you do.”
(Image to be added soonest: Hamed Sinno ive. Photo by Lynn El Bizri.)
The band aimed to go on tour this past summer outside of Lebanon, but the shows were cancelled. They had no booking agent or representative to help them coordinate events. Instead, the group toured extensively inside Lebanon, becoming the first Lebanese alternative band to play shows in various cities and towns across the country. Badr describes a concert they had in Soor (Tyre), a large city in the south.
“We got big crowds. The first night was strange. People didn’t understand what we were doing. They’d make fun. By the third night, they were singing along. People aren’t used to it, but I think they can be. They just need to get used to it.”
Now that they have a booking agent, both Badr and Papazian are optimistic about a tour outside of Lebanon next summer. They would like to go to Amman, Jordan, Egypt, and Dubai. It isn’t easy, they point out, nor is it cheap, to move seven musicians and their instruments. This October, they were invited to perform at the opening ceremony of the Doha Tribeca Film Festival in Qatar.
“That was really cool,” says Papazian. “It’s a completely different kind of crowd that invited us to play in this huge festival. It’s good to know that a lot of people in different parts of the Arab world have heard of the music and still identify with a lot of things that we say because they’ve experienced similar things as well in their countries. Someone who is living in Egypt still can identify with these issues when it comes to security, sex or in general love stories.”
People in Lebanon, the surrounding region, and the world learn about the band from friends. Word of moth is still the primary way for them to spread their music, with help from social networks such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Their Facebook Pagehas over 11,200 fans, which is significant for a Lebanese alternative band with Arabic lyrics. They neither fall into the typical Western, English-speaking pop rock band model nor do they fit the norm of most Arabic “musicians” today, whom Papazian calls, “Women with plastic faces and giant…[long pause] features.”
“Most of the stuff you have right now is the pop music,” explains Papazian. “The things you get on TV, the music videos, everything is so plastic, fantastic. Talks about this really perfect world that doesn’t exist.” He is referring to popular stars in the Arab world, performers rather than singers or musicians, that make Britney Spears and Lady Gaga look like conservative dressers or serious composers.
The members of Mashrou’ Leila join from distinctly different musical backgrounds, ranging from progressive rock to oriental jazz to classical Arabic music, tarab.
“Everyone is trying to add their something,” explains Papazian. “It’s this mixture that kind of makes the music what it is. And I like the fact that it sounds familiar. When you hear it, it’s a music that gets stuck in your mind. It’s not generic duj, duj, duj… there is something, whether it’s the vocal line or the main melody line of the music, it makes you remember things, but you don’t know what it is, you know? Because you feel like it belongs to a place or a time that you’ve been to. Personally I like music that makes you feel like it comes from somewhere. Because music has become too universal, especially right now with electronic music that’s all only tse, tse, tse…
“The old days, they kind of had really good music, but they don’t relate to stuff we’re living right now. They sing poetry. They sing things that are so abstract at this point,” says Papazian, referring to famous Arabic musicians like Oum Koutloum or Fairouz, the equivalents of Judy Garland or a female Frank Sinatra.
“That’s why a lot of people our age, they turn to rock music from the States and Europe when they’re kids, like Nirvana, Guns and Roses, and even new stuff. You know, you’re 18, you’re 19, you’re 20, and you want to listen to something in your language, but it’s not there. They’re not talking about things that you can relate to. So that’s why we wanted to invent these stories, these experiences.”
Papazian uses the first track of their first album, released last December in a huge underground concert at a steel factory in Beirut, as an example of the modern Arab experiences the band is trying to put into music. The song, “Fasateen,” or “Dresses,” begins: (translation)
Remember when you told me
That you were going to marry me
Without money and without a house
Remember that you loved me
Even though I wasn’t from your religion
The song is about a boy and a girl from two different religious sects who are in love. In the beginning, nothing matters, but they’re eventually confronted by the hard realities of Lebanese society and their families.
“You’re pressured all the time to go out with people from your religion, people from your socio-economic status, and these things really affect our lives as youth,” says Papazian. “I mean it’s not normal for you not to be able to go out with two thirds of the population of Lebanon because you have to go out with only people from your religious sect. It’s kind of stupid.
“I mean there is no civil marriage in our country and a lot of people end up eloping [in Cyprus], and they end up kind of banned from society. Their families stop talking to them. A lot of my friends have had similar issues. After they just run away with their lover, when they come back, they’re like sinners. You know, they cannot exist. It’s like they’ve committed a crime that is equivalent to murder, which is a bit absurd.”
Another popular Mashrou’ Leila song is “Shim El Yasmini,” or “Smell the Jasmin.” A “Yasmini” is a vine that grows everywhere in Lebanon. The song begins like many love songs on the Twilight Saga Movie Soundtracks by bands such as Collective Soul or Florence and the Machine. Only, the words are in Arabic, from one boy to his lover, another boy.
“Regardless if the listener is a homosexual or not, and they listen to the song, they really feel something because it’s very emotional,” explained Papazian. “Most of the people I know, our age, even people in their 30s and 40s, they listen to the music, to this song, and they really identify with it because it’s the first time that someone is singing about a relationship in Arabic, in a very real, down-to-earth way where everything isn’t perfect. And it’s very contextual, it’s very Beirut-y, it’s very sad and it’s very true.”
This song does seem to be a favorite among Mashrou’ Leila’s online community. There are frequent requests on their YouTube page for an official music video. Across their YouTube and Facebook pages, fans from all over the Arab and wider world ask them to visit their countries—including Egypt, Canada, the US, Italy, Tunisia, and Dubai—or asking how to purchase their albums—from France to the UK, to US.
In Novemeber, one YouTube fan wrote: ‘Great work! Hope you’ll never have to quit! You got some seriously valuable stuff in there!!! Proud to be part of that culture! Thank you…”
Papazian describes their fans as supporters, but also as people who in some ways depend on them.
“In the beginning we were doing this for ourselves, for us to vent. Now that we see that a lot of people are identifying with the music and following us,” said Papazian. “It’s like a cause they’ve adopted. They’re spreading it to all their friends, to all their social networks. And, we can’t stop at this point. Even though we don’t talk about one specific cause. We just talk about our experiences and they’re real. And that’s what matters to these people.
“And like a very small gesture like the one that Hamed did during Byblos where he waved the [rainbow] flag in front of the Prime Minister, it made a difference to a lot of people to know that at least there are other people who are not afraid, who are trying to do something.”
Homosexuality, associated with the rainbow flag, has long been prohibited in Lebanon.
“It just happened,” Papazian explains. “It wasn’t thought of. It just happened on the spot. But maybe it would have had bad consequences…Just the fact that the flag was there, it created a lot of feedback for example from Lebanon and a lot of places in the Arab world, that something like this is happening.
Badr, was wearing a t-shirt that said “I want to be Leila” at one of their concerts. On Mashrou’ Leila’s social networking sites, fans have written “I am Leila” and “We are all Leila.”
Late last summer one online fan wrote on their Facebook page, “hello we wanna see you in some concert in sour city south Lebanon please thanks w mashro3kon mashro3na.” Mashrou’kon mashrou’na: your project is our project.
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(Photo below: Tanya T’albousi.)
