Loading ...Lebanese Rock Band Mashrou' Leila's Long-Awaited First US Tour Ended with Sweet Success
It’s about time Mashrou’ Leila made it to the United States. Despite their massive fan base throughout the Middle East, despite international praise for their advocacy of human rights, and despite selling out arenas and gracing the cover of Rolling Stone, the Lebanese rock band had never set foot on an American stage until two weeks ago. After playing shows in Boston, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, the band unsurprisingly sold out New York’s (Le) Poisson Rouge for their final US performance. “We’ve wanted to do this for a long time,” frontman Hamed Sinno shared on stage, “but, you know, there’s national security, and we’re brown people.”
Mashrou’ Leila have never been shy about taking political stances, and each of their three albums has injected social taboos into a moralistic media. Their genesis was an open invitation in 2008 to musicians on campus at the American University of Beirut looking to vent about college life and Lebanese politics. But by 2010, I was hearing their tracks played at bars in Jordan—their first album taught me all the Arabic curse words I didn’t learn in class. Sinno’s candid lyrics about civil rights made them no stranger to controversy, and the band have long been credited with storming through the conservative barricade present in the Arab music industry to bring previously hushed topics like homosexuality into the forefront. Blending dance beats and punk riffs with Haig Papazian’s classical violin in a way that never feels disjointed, the music provides the perfect foundation for Sinno’s vibrato. That voice reaches new depths when sung into a megaphone, as Sinno often did on their first album, a technique that made the band sound like they were recording from a protest.
Source: noisey.vice.com