Despite the insurmountable problems musicians living in Beirut face, they continue to produce and perform music against all odds. This selection of ten video clips features some of the talented contributors in the Norient City Sounds: Beirut edition but also other formidable musicians, rappers, singers, and comedians whose distinct energies and musical affinities attempt to cope with an increasingly difficult city, one that doubly inspires and dismays.
Music: Kid Fourteen
Video: Jackson Allers
Track: «Nobody Came, Nobody Wants To (Artist/Director Cut)» (Lebanon, 2020)
Khodor Ellaik’s solo project Kid Fourteen has been a fixture of Beirut’s music venues for years, with several albums now under his belt. His irreverent persona on stage is captured in this video clip from 2020 for this memorable noise-synth-pop number «Nobody Came, Nobody Wants To», awash with his characteristic melancholy voice.
Music: Sandy Chamoun
Video: Alaa Mansour
Track: «Nas el Wahel» (Lebanon, 2022)
«Nas el Wahel», which translates as «People of the Mud», is Sandy Chamoun’s second track from her trilogy entitled fata17oct. Drawing directly from the furor of the October 17 protests in 2019, Chamoun’s track features her ominous, lingering voice and is overlaid with percussive beats and electronic glitches. Artist and filmmaker Alaa Mansour’s hallucinatory video inhabits the song and its multiple meanings, steering clear from formulaic representations of the streets. Listen to Sandy Chamoun’s mixtape here.
Music: Mayssa Jallad and Khaled Allaf
Video: Ely Dagher
Track: «Madina min Baeed» (Lebanon, 2022)
«Madina min Baeed» (The City from Afar) is Mayssa Jallad’s first collaboration with Syrian musician Khaled Allaf, released earlier this year. Collaborating with filmmaker Ely Dagher, the video portrays the body of Mayssa Jallad as an allegory for the city of Beirut, seen whole at a remove but looking closer, it slowly breaks apart to reveal the city’s «layers and layers of destruction & death». Read Mayssa Jallad’s text on the practice of singing in the midst of the October 17 protests here.
Music: Postcards
Video: Lujain Jo
Track: «Sea Change» (Lebanon, 2021)
Released in 2021, «Sea Change» by Postcards, a well-known indie rock outfit from Beirut, is a fitting track to introduce new listeners to its music. The video, shot by film director and video journalist Lujain Jo, who produced countless enthralling videos of the October 17 protests, lays bare the dreamlike sceneries of the band’s lyricist and lead singer Julia Sabra.
Music: Marc Codsi
Video: Sarah Huneidi
Track: «Fugue 1» (Lebanon, 2021)
This heart-rending track by Marc Codsi from 2021 is accompanied by Sarah Huneidi’s visuals that trouble our gaze of Beirut by wistfully moving from one shot to the other, never really focusing or stopping on any element, never seeing it in its place.
Music: Liliane Chlela
Video: Polarys Collective
Track: «2022» (Lebanon, 2020)
Shifting gears with a video clip for Liliane Chlela’s future-looking «2022» from 2020. Made during the confinement of the COVID-19 global lockdown, the video is set in a world dominated by robots and aliens. One robot in particular tinkers with several machines and technologies to the frenetic beats of Chlela’s track. It was possibly easier to imagine the arrival of aliens and the domination of robots prior to the events that unfolded in 2020. This video gives us a glimpse of what worlds one could imagine during this period of isolation. Chlela likes to open musical pathways for her listeners, evident in her mixtape for the Norient City Sounds: Beirut, listen to it here.
Music: Jerusalem in My Heart
Video: Erin Weisgerber
Track: «Qalouli» (Lebanon, 2021)
Visuality has always played an important role in Jerusalem in My Heart’s musical performances and this video, devised as a triptych of desert landscapes and habitats, plays to the rhythms of the music with its stops, glitches, and rings, almost as if they were composed together.
Music: Safa
Video: Sabine Saba
Track: «Ouda and the Strikers at Najd» (Lebanon, 2022)
«Ouda and the Strikers at Najd» is the title track of Safa’s highly anticipated debut album Ibtihalat, out on the UIQ label in the spring of 2022. Covering a wide range of musical and percussive traditions spanning North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, Safa attempts in his compositions to imagine the manifold potentialities of the musics that exist in these territories. The animation, shot by filmmaker and animator Sabine Saba, fuses various architectural elements and motifs from the regions Safa is interested in to create a visual experience as delirious as the music itself.
Music: El Rass (produced by Nasam)
Video: Jamal Awar
Track: «Jullanar» (Lebanon, 2022)
Arguably one of the best rappers in the Arabic-speaking world, El Rass released a full album Ard el Khawf (The Land of Fear) earlier in 2022 from which this track is pulled. Awar’s video blends footage from old Egyptian films, animal documentaries, and other absurd situations in which El Rass becomes an unwitting protagonist.
Music: Khansa and Lil Shadz
Video: Aline Ouais
Track: «KHOD» (Lebanon, 2022)
This track, which parodies Arab rap music videos, quickly went viral for its unapologetic and witty lyrics and for featuring Lebanese queer stand-up comedian Shaden Fakih who is famous for being unsparing towards her opponents: religious and political figures. While the video is funny and incredibly catchy – referencing events, chants, and curses towards the political class one could hear during the October 17 uprising – the message it carries is dead serious.
