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From Yaz To Yas: Arabology Fleshes Out Dancefloor Dreams in a New Idiom

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Yas may derive its name from the rendering of singer and lyricist Yasmine Hamdan’s first name in Roman letters, but she and collaborator Mirwais Ahmadzai would undoubtedly delight in the obvious parallel American listeners are sure to draw to the storied New Wave group known as Yaz in North America. Although the music on Arabology ranges more widely than Yas’s near-namesake duo ever did, their fusion of the “Komputermusik” made famous by Kraftwerk with soulfully carnal vocals recalls Vince Clarke and Alison Moyet’s best work.

The difference, as the album’s title indicates, is that this record translates – and in a carefully pre-meditated way – that infectious pop sensibility into an Arabic idiom. Songs like “Get It Right”, “Mahi” and “Yaspop” have all the right moves for the dancefloor, but also remind us that the opportunities for someone like Yasmine to strut her stuff are largely confined to the experience of exile. The deft següe from harsh reality to liberatory fantasy that occurs in the powerful video for “Get It Right” reinforces this point. This is music for an Arab Diaspora missing the comforts of home, in a musical language it can only indulge publicly in hostile foreign lands.

As popular music scholar Simon Reynolds documents in his wonderful book Rip It Up and Start Again, the synthesizer-inclined acts that took root in the interstices of punk weren’t simply invested in aesthetic novelty, a sound freed once and for all from the shackles of rock, but in the transformative potential of pleasure that Michel Foucault made the focus of his late work. They pushed the cultural envelope, expressing sexualities previously deemed deviant in the pursuit of a liberation at once existential and sexual.

In invoking the legacy of what reactionary rockists in the United States derided as “Euro Fag” culture, Yas signals a willingness to take risks of their own. This record and its very visible front woman will surely incite the rage of those who reflexively defend tradition, taking comfort in the clearly defined place it assigns them within the social order, even when that location indexes their disempowerment. Not only does Arabology refuse Islamic propriety, it suggests that the foundation the Arab world should seek lies in the domain of the discotheque and iPod rather than the mosque and madrasa. From this perspective, Hamdan and Ahmadzai appear to be engaging in the same self-consciously nostalgic cultural politics that the American indie act Le Tigre undertook a decade ago.

The crucial difference is that whereas Kathleen Hanna and her bandmates sought to return us to an unfinished project of sexually inflected enlightenment, one cut short by the closely linked triumphs of Reagan and retro rock, Yas invite us to perceive the void where such a project might have developed had not the history of the Arab world taken a course inimical to social progress of that sort.

It makes sense that Hamdan hails from Lebanon, the nation where a cosmopolitan, progressive Arab multiculture was most firmly established and where its demise has been most depressing to witness. Her previous group Soapkills, which combined druggier electronic beats – think Portishead – with a more overtly “Oriental” sound, made music haunted by the Golden Age she and collaborator Zaid Hamdan (no relation), both born in 1976, could only experience through the recollection of their elders and the music they produced.

With its implicit coupling of pop and politics, Arabology signals that Yas has a bright future indeed. But there’s something disappointing about the fact that Yasmine Hamdan, a remarkable talent and a brave campaigner for Arab-speaking women’s freedom of expression, is only now being recognized in the West. We can only hope that the big push Yas has received from its major label – even The Wall Street Journal, not noted for its cutting-edge music criticism, has noticed – will lead to Soapkills getting the posthumous exposure in Europe and the United States that they so richly deserve.