Ya Nass
Yasmine Hamdan
Crammed Discs
Yasmine Hamdan's new release echoes the singer's wanderings through cultures and styles, with pop, electronic and Arab classics.
"Because of the Lebanese civil war, I had a scattered childhood," says Hamdan, who now lives in Paris with her husband, the filmmaker Elia Suleiman. "I had to build my own connections to each country we moved to. It's interesting to be at once an insider and outsider. It's a way of learning how to find your way freely, without the need of conforming or belonging. But it can sometimes also be alienating - not belonging to one place can be a burden, it can feel lonely. In a way music saved me from this."
Hamdan's nomadic life resonates with that of many among her generation who were displaced by war or conflict and are searching for narratives that reflect their multicultural upbringings - somewhere between stale political propaganda and the clichés of pop culture. She began offering alternatives in 1998 in her early 20s with the band Soapkills, where, along with musician and composer Zeid Hamdan (no relation), she sang folksy Arabic melodies over rock and electronic beats, voicing the fears and hopes of the post-war generation.
Over the years, Hamdan has explored the world, working with producers (Mirwais), dancers (Yalda Younes), musicians (CocoRosie) and filmmakers (Elia Suleiman, Jim Jarmusch), deepening her knowledge of Arabic songs and exploring myriad sounds and styles, inspired by wildly diverse musicians - Umm Kulthum, Portishead or Siouxsie and the Banshees. She has mesmerised crowds with her sultry, lingering voice, playing with different dialects, inventing puns and suggestive tales of love and attraction. With her thick black mane and self-assured good looks, she is the ultimate Arabic temptress, an image she likes to manipulate, confronting clichés of women in the Arab world and the excessively overdone visual culture of contemporary Arab divas.
Restless, constantly seeking new ideas, she has just launched her third solo album, Ya Nass, with Nouvelle Vague leader Marc Collin and is touring in Europe, the Middle East and the US until next year. She also appears in Jim Jarmusch's next movie, Only Lovers Left Alive, where she performs the song Hal in Tangiers.
Ya Nass is a soft, emotional and playful album, going from the bare folk of acoustic guitar to enveloping synths, from intimate songs to hymns of political protest. Hamdan's voice is a deep, gentle whisper, layering with atmospheric synths, moody guitars and accelerated beats.
"Ya Nass is a like an invitation, a call to a single person or a crowd," explains Hamdan. "It could be an echo of the movements that are taking place in the Arab world.
"At first when the revolutions started I felt very stimulated and free, I felt that the youth had at last begun to have a voice. But I also know that these things take time and that the situation in the region is complicated."
The songs are intimate and metaphorical, calls for lost lovers, reminiscences of long nights and tender moments. Some of them are taken from the Arabic repertoire, such as Abdel Wahab's La Mouch or Ommar el Zenni's Bali Tantanat, which deals with fraught political rhetoric, and Beirut, a nostalgic postcard of the lazy capital, its arak drinkers and card players. Enta Fen, Again has been described as an homage to Umm Kulthum; Khayyam pays tribute to the poet's quatrains. "I like to see these classics as material that I can shape freely," says the singer, "experimenting with second voices, different structures and melodies that are more pop or Indian-tinted, mixing new influences and the Arabic modalities. I'm interested in this dialogue between tradition and modernity."
After meeting Jim Jarmusch at a festival, Hamdan was asked to write a song for Only Lovers Left Alive, a humorous story of vampires and love. She wrote Hal, in which a woman complains about a vampirising love affair, and shot a scene in Tangiers, where she sang live in front of a crowd.
Hamdan was born in 1976 as the civil war started to shatter Lebanon. Her father, who came from a leftist Arab Nationalist background, introduced her to the great singers of the region.
The family soon fled to Kuwait, Greece and Abu Dhabi, where they went from hotel to hotel, living precariously. On the radio or through her family and friends, Hamdan discovered the songs of Umm Kulthum, Fairuz and also The Cure, Madonna, Prince and traditional folk songs.
In 1991, after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, her family moved back to Lebanon, where Hamdan enrolled in psychology studies and felt alienated by the complicated post-war social codes. She met and fell in love with musician Zeid Hamdan and became mesmerised by the melancholic voice of Syrian singer Asmahan and the love songs of Abdel Wahab, which inspired her to revive the legacy of Arabic singers. She began singing endearing Arabic songs over the trip-hop and rock rhythms Zeid Hamdan was creating. "It was the end of the civil war and things were very strange back then," she remembers. "It was a particular period, everything was new, and possible, there was so much hope and yet the war was still present." Soapkills became iconic for this new generation. It was, by many accounts, the first Middle Eastern band to mix western and Arabic styles in the region. "I wanted us to be considered an Arabic band, but free, new, different," says the singer.
A pioneer in Lebanon's indie music scene, Soapkills inspired many bands in the decades that followed, including the folk phenomenon Mashrou' Leila.
While Hamdan sang falsely naive tales about public buses, corn on the cob and long-lost love, the content of their music was deeply provocative in the post-war context.
"We described Beirut in its insolence," explains Zeid Hamdan, who has since started several influential bands such as the New Government and Zeid and the Wings, and supports the local scene under the Lebanese Underground umbrella.
"In its wild ways of rebuilding, its post-colonial slavery, the general machismo, Soapkills was the reflection of a modern Lebanon. We showed musicians that we were allowed to play."
But Yasmine suffocated in Beirut, where the horizons were limited and where the ailing infrastructure constantly posed problems, forcing artists to do everything on their own. She moved alone to Paris in 2002 with a suitcase full of old Arabic music tapes.
There, she struggled, going back and forth between Paris and Beirut, finishing her studies in psychology, but mingling with other artists allowed her to explore new horizons.
In 2002, Elia Suleiman chose two Soapkills songs for his award-winning movie Divine Intervention. She married him a few years later.
Through Suleiman, she met Mirwais, a producer of Afghan origins who had worked with Madonna and proposed to mix Yasmine's luscious vocals with cold, stomping electro-pop music. They released the album Arabology in 2009 under the name Y.A.S., where Hamdan morphed into a sexy sci-fi heroine singing about eroticism, the spectre of war and corrupt politicians.
"I came out of my comfort zone," she says, "and this experience opened my mind and ears. I wanted the Arab world to listen so I proposed songs in different Arabic dialects, played on puns and references to different events in our collective culture."
That is truly Hamdan's signature: to defy established artistic, cultural and intellectual boundaries, bouncing from pop to rock to electro to folk, reaproppriating the great tradition of Arabic love songs, moving fluidly from one dialect to another, penetrating pop culture with threatening political commentary. "I don't think of music geographically," says Hamdan. "It's not because I am an Arab that I have to record a lute or sing on any kind of local instrumentation - unless I desire it, of course. A lot of Arabic composers such as Mohammed Abdel Wahab mixed sounds and instruments from all over the world. It's important to be able to propose new ways and new sounds, without being stigmatised, censored or put aside. There should be no borders, race, colours or ethnical considerations when it comes to music and creativity."
thereview@thenational.ae
Shirine Saad is a New York-based editor and writer.
Mobile phone packages comparison
Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”
The White Lotus: Season three
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The National's picks
4.35pm: Tilal Al Khalediah
5.10pm: Continous
5.45pm: Raging Torrent
6.20pm: West Acre
7pm: Flood Zone
7.40pm: Straight No Chaser
8.15pm: Romantic Warrior
8.50pm: Calandogan
9.30pm: Forever Young
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'The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey'
Rating: 3/5
Directors: Ramin Bahrani, Debbie Allen, Hanelle Culpepper, Guillermo Navarro
Writers: Walter Mosley
Stars: Samuel L Jackson, Dominique Fishback, Walton Goggins
The smuggler
Eldarir had arrived at JFK in January 2020 with three suitcases, containing goods he valued at $300, when he was directed to a search area.
Officers found 41 gold artefacts among the bags, including amulets from a funerary set which prepared the deceased for the afterlife.
Also found was a cartouche of a Ptolemaic king on a relief that was originally part of a royal building or temple.
The largest single group of items found in Eldarir’s cases were 400 shabtis, or figurines.
Khouli conviction
Khouli smuggled items into the US by making false declarations to customs about the country of origin and value of the items.
According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he provided “false provenances which stated that [two] Egyptian antiquities were part of a collection assembled by Khouli's father in Israel in the 1960s” when in fact “Khouli acquired the Egyptian antiquities from other dealers”.
He was sentenced to one year of probation, six months of home confinement and 200 hours of community service in 2012 after admitting buying and smuggling Egyptian antiquities, including coffins, funerary boats and limestone figures.
For sale
A number of other items said to come from the collection of Ezeldeen Taha Eldarir are currently or recently for sale.
Their provenance is described in near identical terms as the British Museum shabti: bought from Salahaddin Sirmali, "authenticated and appraised" by Hossen Rashed, then imported to the US in 1948.
- An Egyptian Mummy mask dating from 700BC-30BC, is on offer for £11,807 ($15,275) online by a seller in Mexico
- A coffin lid dating back to 664BC-332BC was offered for sale by a Colorado-based art dealer, with a starting price of $65,000
- A shabti that was on sale through a Chicago-based coin dealer, dating from 1567BC-1085BC, is up for $1,950
Pearls on a Branch: Oral Tales
Najlaa Khoury, Archipelago Books
COMPANY PROFILE
Name: Kumulus Water
Started: 2021
Founders: Iheb Triki and Mohamed Ali Abid
Based: Tunisia
Sector: Water technology
Number of staff: 22
Investment raised: $4 million
Skewed figures
In the village of Mevagissey in southwest England the housing stock has doubled in the last century while the number of residents is half the historic high. The village's Neighbourhood Development Plan states that 26% of homes are holiday retreats. Prices are high, averaging around £300,000, £50,000 more than the Cornish average of £250,000. The local average wage is £15,458.
Mina Cup winners
Under 12 – Minerva Academy
Under 14 – Unam Pumas
Under 16 – Fursan Hispania
Under 18 – Madenat
COMPANY PROFILE
Name: Mamo Year it started: 2019 Founders: Imad Gharazeddine, Asim Janjua Based: Dubai, UAE Number of employees: 28 Sector: Financial services Investment: $9.5m Funding stage: Pre-Series A Investors: Global Ventures, GFC, 4DX Ventures, AlRajhi Partners, Olive Tree Capital, and prominent Silicon Valley investors. Chatham House Rule
A mark of Chatham House’s influence 100 years on since its founding, was Moscow’s formal declaration last month that it was an “undesirable
organisation”.
The depth of knowledge and academics that it drew on
following the Ukraine invasion had broadcast Mr Putin’s chicanery.
The institute is more used to accommodating world leaders,
with Nelson Mandela, Margaret Thatcher among those helping it provide
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Chatham House was formally founded as the Royal Institute of
International Affairs following the peace conferences of World War One. Its
founder, Lionel Curtis, wanted a more scientific examination of international affairs
with a transparent exchange of information and ideas.
That arena of debate and analysis was enhanced by the “Chatham
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NO OTHER LAND
Director: Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor, Hamdan Ballal
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2025 Fifa Club World Cup groups
Group A: Palmeiras, Porto, Al Ahly, Inter Miami.
Group B: Paris Saint-Germain, Atletico Madrid, Botafogo, Seattle.
Group C: Bayern Munich, Auckland City, Boca Juniors, Benfica.
Group D: Flamengo, ES Tunis, Chelsea, (Leon banned).
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Group G: Manchester City, Wydad, Al Ain, Juventus.
Group H: Real Madrid, Al Hilal, Pachuca, Salzburg.
The Book of Collateral Damage
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(Yale University Press)
Company profile
Name: Tharb
Started: December 2016
Founder: Eisa Alsubousi
Based: Abu Dhabi
Sector: Luxury leather goods
Initial investment: Dh150,000 from personal savings
Disclaimer
Director: Alfonso Cuaron
Stars: Cate Blanchett, Kevin Kline, Lesley Manville
Rating: 4/5
10 tips for entry-level job seekers
- Have an up-to-date, professional LinkedIn profile. If you don’t have a LinkedIn account, set one up today. Avoid poor-quality profile pictures with distracting backgrounds. Include a professional summary and begin to grow your network.
- Keep track of the job trends in your sector through the news. Apply for job alerts at your dream organisations and the types of jobs you want – LinkedIn uses AI to share similar relevant jobs based on your selections.
- Double check that you’ve highlighted relevant skills on your resume and LinkedIn profile.
- For most entry-level jobs, your resume will first be filtered by an applicant tracking system for keywords. Look closely at the description of the job you are applying for and mirror the language as much as possible (while being honest and accurate about your skills and experience).
- Keep your CV professional and in a simple format – make sure you tailor your cover letter and application to the company and role.
- Go online and look for details on job specifications for your target position. Make a list of skills required and set yourself some learning goals to tick off all the necessary skills one by one.
- Don’t be afraid to reach outside your immediate friends and family to other acquaintances and let them know you are looking for new opportunities.
- Make sure you’ve set your LinkedIn profile to signal that you are “open to opportunities”. Also be sure to use LinkedIn to search for people who are still actively hiring by searching for those that have the headline “I’m hiring” or “We’re hiring” in their profile.
- Prepare for online interviews using mock interview tools. Even before landing interviews, it can be useful to start practising.
- Be professional and patient. Always be professional with whoever you are interacting with throughout your search process, this will be remembered. You need to be patient, dedicated and not give up on your search. Candidates need to make sure they are following up appropriately for roles they have applied.
Arda Atalay, head of Mena private sector at LinkedIn Talent Solutions, Rudy Bier, managing partner of Kinetic Business Solutions and Ben Kinerman Daltrey, co-founder of KinFitz
UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
