User:Elias Ziade/sandbox/4

Interview with hamed sinno AL empire. heba fisher   dana ballout (rpdocued by kerning cultures)

happy but solitary childhood, was an easily contented and calm boy

once hit puberty became prone to bouts of depression that continued up until highschool

Growing up was fan of Britney Spears, Michael Jackson and was the first album that he bought was Michael Jackson's history double sided cassette. licked Tina Turner

Mom half Jordanian, we were in grandma's mom in Amman there was a tina turner concert playing on TV, Dad commneted that Tina Tuner is very sexy didnt know what that word meant so i asked and he expalined it in a way i didnt understand. retained that sexy is something good and he wanted to become tina

We dodnt come from musical house, didnt learn instruments but he was always exposed to music growing up, his dad was on the jazz committee for the Baalbek international festival. Earliest memories was walking in on my parents dancing on our balcony listening to a barry wight vinyl there was so much music it seemed natural

when was your experience at singing :

my mom bought a l;itte cassett recorder when i was kid, is stiole my mom's mix cassettes and recorded over them my parents didn't encourage me especially around puberty they tried to shut me up alot. my voice was doing strange things.

what was your relationship like with your parents?

complicated... my father and i had a v tense relationship, it continued until my 20 s we started to mend things a year before you died. he is a very complicated and tortured man so our relationship was not pleasant and i wasn't exactly an easy teenager, i was prone to bouts of depression and melodrama and got in trouble so often. I was very stressed, easily angered person. My mom is the opposite shes' a complete rock star, she's very supportive and always has been and i think, sort of seeing her, deal with my father growing, forged a sort of solidarity between me and her and my siblings. That is still very much there., we see our mom as a comrade.

If you look back at childhood, is tehre a one particular memory that alwas comes back to you?

Its not a happy memory tbh whenever i think about my childhood the first thing i remember fights with my father or getting bullied at school, people carrying and charging against a tree. or ppl cornering me slapping and putting gum in my hair. I had an Afro. so i ended up with bald patches from cutting my hair off. He remember people making fun of him signing which is for some reason cathartic in hidnsight and it feels cathartic to, 15 years later make a carrer as a gay musician which is nice.

Fuck the haters (interviewer then him)

What was the ammunition that those bullies used against you?

all these people knew that he was gay before i did which was so strange, its' not like i was denying it, i just didn't know. People could see it. he really good at science and my English was better than theirs. My arabic was terrible, that was something they always made fun of me about. Uhm, that was it. Kids were very creative. (sang in halwys)

How did you persevere, whree were your save havens

when i was a child it was always books, i used ot skip class, was rude to teachers and cuss, pranks on teachers,. would skip school and go read that weren't from curriculum,. he read philosophy cos he needed justification for believing that everyone was wrong. books were the escape until he discovered alcohol. I also did ahve a solid group of girl friends from my very first group and we are still family. in college it was music even when i was a kid. I get bullied and went home and listened to pearl jan and nirvana and grunge and felt it was music for people who are ostracised like me and i found ocmmunity through that

If you would place a time and location how mashou leila was born, how would it be?

It as AUB's westhall it had a music room in the basement. It was my firs tyear at design school and a few people from the architcture school above us posted a flyer starting a music workshop in arch and design dept. and i edned up in that room with 50 other people jamming and we wanted to produce something competely original., it had to be in arabic. and that same sort of workshop eventually filtered down to 7 musicians we gave ourselves a name and started a college band and for same reason that colleage band took off before we even left college,. we were famous arguably. but iwas completely surreal to think it startged as a college band and is now, at 31 my career.

what is the relatinship like btw you and bandmates

its complicated at this point we have beeen together for 10 years and things have been crazy, we have been through a lot of shit laterly, not the kind of things any relationship can endure. it is compliacated. we are both in same trench, we are family, working for somehting bigger but you don't always like togehter, its sometimes beautiful and sometimes annoying, profoundly

When uyou startted mashou leila was there a mission and identity back then? did you feel you had a fully formed ID

We wre in art shcool it means wre are the most pretentious people you could possibly imagine and the reason we wanted ot make musicn in arabic, you know u and i dont listen to arabic music and its because the schools we went to and... we belonged to ... classes.... lebanon is very much ... post colonial,,,elite of the contry are "westernized" but aslo fif you turn on the radio there's very little in arabic music culture that deals with anything its vacuous and redundant and basic. i guess we wanted to fill that gap we wanted ot make music that would reflect ppl like us and waht we are going through and what we are thinking about. we were also naive to think that music could change things. tjat it could make the world a better placve.

what in particular did you want your musicn to change.

Ima big proponent, even now of representation,  wjem o was trying to wrap my head around my sexuality it made me feel like i was alone. A monster, the sign of a monster is being alone and no one else is around its like that,. represntation when i started ot come what was very important even in dumb places like will and grace but also in oscar wilde and david bowie and curt cobain wearing a dress and rabih alameddin especially, the autheor,thse things meant a lot to me it meant that i was not alone and i learned ot accept tjhings about myself. when it comes to political convictions, you and i are form a country where, sectarianism and elitisim rule everything its a neoliberal corruppt gobernment and society and when you see what actually holds the country together is working it becomes very esy to think that you are the only not agreeing with these politics? ...operating., i think it matters to put that in muysic and art. it gives people artefacts ot build a community change things, theres a reason why ehen a copuntry gets its independece the firs thing they do is make a flag and writyean anthem .. you need artto create signs and symbols around to say this is acommunity

Coming out publicly ...I dont remember this was something that you taked about frequenty when the band fist started

I had come out two years before the band then the band happened, they kjnew i was gay and its not like there was a frank ocean moment coming out .like having a stam,ent, cos beirut is really small, people know who i was its just no one ever said anything in the press eventhough the second or third convert we played had shem el yasmin in it. which is a love song about the first giuy i fell in love iwht. and i remember the first deemo we recorded. that we sent for that radio competiotion shem el yasmin was there, the press didnt say anything about it until we got really big, A big part of it is that arab press didnt wanan deal with it and they still kinda dont.

the only press who calls out my sexuality is arab press call us satanists

How did the band take it internally di dht eband talk about because you were labeled as the first openly gay muslim band of the middle east

yeah we did have a discussion about bcs even then, death threats started in 2011 2012 so they did have to be a discussion bcs it affects everyone but we sorta agreed that u know we kinda had my back bcs it would have been easier for them if i had lied and did things easily but they respected that i didnt want to and honeslty no one thought that things would get as bad as they have over the years. to be completely honest i cant say that if i knew what i know now abot hte price id have to pay for being honest about my sexulaity then i would still do it. id l;ike to beleive that i wouldand easy to say when you have and as matter of fact i have to deal with death threasts and intimidation and being accused of witchcraft and satanism i cant honestly say that i would necessarily do it again and its made me much more sympathetic of the people who dont wanna come out publicly or even in their... its horrible, its not fair, and its stupied its 2019.

how do you deal with death threats they must be terrifying

i dont i... there' nothing i can do about. Id like to believe its just talk and im 100 Percent sure it is not just talk and when it happens we will see what happens. uhm yeah we ask for a lot of security at our shows, we ignore alot of things, in the past week, the scale of things has been so bad that we actually had to report to police in lebanon, but im not .. of our security apparatus im not sure they are going to do anything abiyt it

can you tell me about mashou leilas first song, who wrote it etc

the first album and the very first song we wrote, we were very young and we werent thinkjing as songwritiers, we were thinking as musicians there;s avery big distinction, as a songwriter you put the lyrics furst as a mysician you put your own performance first. WE would go around in a circle until we had once central theme, like a l;ine and wed go around in circle, each one of playing this line with his instrument its almost like a vulgar diplay of musical virtuosity (llok i can play passing notes that i can shove in and mess with the timing)

Our fist song was raksit leila and andre our former guitarsit came up with chords for that thing and we would keep playing it and looping it. and i had to write the lyrics so i took from this surrealist writng exercise that i had just learned about in clalss in art history before and i would write a sentence, fold the paper and just keep writing whatever comes to my mind. and eventully tried to rationalise it so id did that, wrote nonesnense and then people started reading all sorts of things into it which was hilarious bbut you know the song real;ly measn nothing... hehehe '''it was song intended to mean nothing and peopel would read so much into any text, the insistence on meaning and signigicances.... amazing.'''

Where did yuou learn arabic?

in hisghschool we never spoke arabiuc, i never spoke a rabic at home, my mom is an english professor. she grew up btw rome germany and morocco so her arabic was not that great. english was always the language i think in and its the language i started writing in and eventually tried to translate back in arabic and that why i learned arabic thorugjh writing songs and translating, i spend all my time with a bunch of tabs on my laptop, one of them is almaany, com one is google translate arabic is sych a beatiful rich language that is so loaded that any word can mean a million things and it makes so easy to be poetic i think

AT what point you realized who i thing we have something here

i think when we won a radio competeition the first year we started and we were supposed to get a record deal out of it but the label went backrupt and we never actually recorded that album with them but at the time the idea of getting a record deal that was 2008-9 and we hadnt relaly wised up to the music industry a the time a record deal was synonymos with makng it,. we started taking things more seriously we made our first album we graduaded from colleage, getting requests ot play in jordan egypt and syria which we never did bcs of the war and in april 2012 we werent making any monrey out of the band but we decided wre to try to that properly was to quit our jobs and see what happesn and we would the bamd full tim e for a year and if that werre to work out we would keep doing it and it did work out we started writg more we recorded an album, and none of us looked back

when did yo urealized you became famous

this is weird, when i met someone at a bar in beirut and they accused me of basterdizing the arabci language and tell me i shold not be making music and this guy was a complete stranger and that was so angry so upset and 3 hours later registering that a stranger i never met .. music wide and that was very weird

he cared for all the wrong reasosn. I had a very rough week for example about polemics surrounding the band in lebanon and i was at wholefoods trying to deal with how sad i was by buying keto friendly ice cream ,,..i get  stalked by these two really really really sweet womwn, which said the nicest thing to me baout the band, this really foes help ... counter the amout of hate the band gets.

Blasphemy thing (djin playing in background)

we live in a context whre, i mean again, saying free speach or saying women equality is considered and this is nt to say its just he arab world this region is just as bad with that right and it clearly the experiment of the civil rights movment and what it has brought us to really kinda failed and bcs.. we still dealing with kkk and income inequality and rape culture, so clearly this region didnt get it right either., but if are gonna be honst, you can say somthing here, rbut in you cant say anyting in arab word without it being treated as blasphemt or withot you being seen as a political radical and threatening national safety. whe i sing a song saying women should ahve rights and we shouyld ahve civl marriage, these things aren tactually radical they are basic

You perfomance and voice, did you take voice lessoons

no, but i traimedmyself and stupid online tutirial, i would say self trained.

before you go on stage.there s a presence as soon as you steop on platform ., how you prepare for performance and voice, your voince is an instrumen

i warm up, i had to figure it out bcs of recurrent laryngitis, you cannt prepare for presence on stage. the stage is av ery weird palce to be, im avery comfortablesinging to 1000 much more comfortable than ebing in stage playing for 300 ppl, and i would neve r in my life be abvloe to stand ina dinner party and start singing.

On stage its not a social fucntion, im not hame don stage, im tehre to be something that happens on stage, you get 2 hours fo being not yourself. the less the audieence the more it feels like a social itneraction and gets frightening bcs then the ppls judgement sna reaction become closer to your actual person than your persona

I still get anxiety the days before concert and it only goes once im on stasge. for a few years i tried to deal with that by drinking before getting on stage and imade a mes of myself repeateldy in dont udnerstand how i still have a carrer. The first ime i played in dc in litrrerly went on a half hour monolgoye yelling ath the entire audience for letting bernie lose the primaries no one was there for that,. when i got sober i learned that anxiety means you actulaly care about what you're doing

and that axiety is alot opf energy you can chanel nd channel it and turn in on stage by sjumpingh and dancing

What about whay your wear

i sweat a lot like most arabs so i weat black to hide makes him look thinner. anytjing that helps yo get in a role for social acting,. you dont wanna feel like yourself you wear things taht are unfathomable, outrageous, unsocial. thre' snothjing i wear on stage that id wear on abruncg

weight, she ran into him in gym

people actuall y have the nerve to tell each other about weight, I do it too, all the time, i donly do it when i mean it and see someone who looks amazing

in college i pucked up a very bad eating disorder no one talks about men eating disorder. Horrible disproprtionately common in the gay male community bcs these absurd body expectation we have. i got a realy bad eating disoder in colelge and was in hospital and the only reason it happend is that i wasnt trying to react at pppl telling me what my body is bcs i was trying to look good for a man who broke my heart and sometimes obsessing about your body maks you feel like you are in control of things. eating disorders make you feel like yore un control and that very dangerous

next steps

NY now moved in here3 m ago writing, working on solo stuff

were touring arounf the us in sept

the crasiest thing a fan told you to do

It was kind offnensice i was signiong authographs in berit and someone asked me to sit on her face and and i was so iffended