Mashrou3 Leila Fan Reports from Montreal

I was one of the lucky 800 or so who went to see mashrou' leila’s concert in montreal yesterday. Lucky because it was a fun intimate concert – and a great performance to say the least!!!

A few tweet material from the concert:

The band getting emotional about playing in north america for the first time- huge milestone!

That the concert was in the heart of the gay village here in montreal.

The cool crowd, mostly lebanese expats but with lots of their canadian / lgbt friends in the crowd too – and getting a lot of good local press.

The glimpse at the new album they just finished recording which seems to be a good one (they came specially to montreal to work with a top-notch lebasese producer who’s based here.)

Oreo for everyone and a lot of red bull for a superenergetic and very personal lead singer.

How he talked about how us expats get criticized sometimes when sharing our opinions about lebanon with people back home.

Hamed’s improv mocking Lebanese gossiping in ‘badde latlet’ – quote – “yaaay hayda bya3mel mo2abalet ma3 magazinet bi 2ol fiyyon enno gaaaaayyy”- translate – “yaaay this guy makes interviews in magazine where he says he’s gaaaaayyy”. By the way, loved the last article in tetu!

to the angry part: a lot of us fans were very disappointed about the red hot chili peppers incident last summer and how mashrou' leila canceled their opening set because RHCP were on their way to tel aviv next. We'd hope it was just an incident and not a strong political statement, because mos of us know from living abroad that cultural boycott is not the best solution to use against Israel. Music should unite not divide. And let’s face it, there is no place for extremist ideas like this in north america...

--text, photo from a friend in Montreal

Thank you Mika, You Made Us Proud of You!

He had to spend 5 years under the spotlight, live through the incredible success of Life in Cartoon Motion (2007), a Brit Award and a Grammy Award nomination, through a second album  (The Boy Who Knew Too Much, 2009), – all while being constantly questioned, sometimes even harassed by the media about his sexual orientation.

“Call me bisexual” is the middleground Mika set for for the most part of his early career, in an effort to tame down the growing pressure from the media which remained unsatisfied with the ambiguity. Such was the strategy he seemed to be taking as of 2009 starting with an interview in Netherlands' gay magazine “Gay&Night".

But now things have changed, and Mika is finally OUT. Openly gay.

Only a few weeks before the launch of his third album (The Origin of Love, coming Sept. 2012), he finally said it loud and clear in this interview with America’s Instinct Magazine:

“If you ask me am I gay, I say yeah. Are these songs about my relationship with a man? I say yeah. And it’s only through my music that I’ve found the strength to come to terms with my sexuality beyond the context of just my lyrics. This is my real life.”

What a relief for all his gay fans who secretly knew it all along! and this is particularly true for the Lebanese fans among us, cause we now have an international icon of Lebanese origin who's out and about and that we can be proud of!

      Watch Mika dedicate his song Origin of Love to “the man I love” (@min 01:18)... Touching indeed!

Summer Highlight III: The New Places

V-lovers come out! A new stencil's in town

Part of having a dynamic nightlife like Beirut’s, is having to live through even your favorite spot closing down. But then there’s also the new places, the new discoveries, the places that make you want to go out again just for the sake of trying something new, just to say you tried to wipe out some of that Beirut boredom routine.

Getting the chance to party in a place like the Linda Sursock Palace – even if this going to sound like the radio ad for a MixFM event – was no less than epic and memorable. Big kudos to Behind the Green Door, even if part of the credit has to go to Cotton Candy who were the first to do it a couple years ago. That would be my number one highlight of a ‘new place’, which naturally had to come from one of the players in the underground scene.

My number two would be the new clubs that focus on live music performances, that give more meat than Music Hall and more flavor than the live entertainment of the likes of Pier7: One is the Democratic Republic of Music (DRM) in Hamra, and the other one is the recently opened Angry Monkey in Gemmayze, both of which we should be thankful to for bringing back the LIVE.

Another highlight – or should I say coup-de-coeur – is the Coop d’Etat / Em Nazih complex on Pasteur street , which also houses rental rooms and spoken Lebanese Arabic classes for visiting foreigners. A cosy spot that shows you can still get a pretty crowd and a 5,000L beer.

Number four would be this cute new pubs area near the Samir Kassir memorial fountain at the Northern edge of downtown. It hosts a burger joint, a tapas bar, and a bunch of friendly little bars, all in a perfectly landscape-designed (and pedestrian!) area that gives it so much of a European feel that it makes you forget this is actually Beirut. They’re all unpretentious, and best of all they make me feel like downtown is a place for us again! (no offense to the tourists and the nouveaux riches of the solidere-town).

And then there’s the somewhat lowkey activity on the GiB scene, that barely makes it to number 5. Ghost Bar opened in Jdeide in the beginning of summer; it was dubbed “the new Acid” but it is actually more like a caricature of Acid in my mind – so not so much a summer highlight.

Finally most recently there was the opening of Le BOY in Saifi/Harbor area…It held the promise to be hot and happening (to me), until I found out it actually opened at the same location as former Milk – Le BIG disappointment! Even Barcelona’s Salvation didn’t get me to come! Vivian Shallop crowd if you read this, I promise to try it at some point to make up a fair opinion.

Summer Highlight I: The Sporting Parties

Yesterday Sept.21 was the official end of the summer. As I pick up the first autumn leaves on my balcony I look back at these past months and I can say that for me, they were a sequence of quiet and busy times (and blogging inactivity!), with a couple highlights.

Sure Summer 2011 Beirut Nightlife had a lot of highlights way overground: The new White, the new Pier 7, the revamped Sky Bar – and the list goes on –, the terrace parties were booming!

But for those of us who like it more underground, if there is one place that embodied best the alternative scene this summer, it has to be Sporting Club.

Coincidentally or not, many main actors in the scene threw at least 2 or 3 parties there sometimes at one week intervals - whether it be P.C., Behind the Green Door or Basement.

I obviously had to miss some of them but those I made it to were great for the most part, the outdoor location by the sea really helps make for a cool party when the crowd is fun, the music’s good, and the GiBs are putting it on.

It might not be too late yet, Basement is throwing “the last one” this coming Saturday! Will the weather permit one last crazy night?

« Les Préservatifs Sont Trop Chers ! » Ten Years Later

I walked out of the pharmacy that day with the eyes buried into my bill. The item I was staring at read: “Durex condoms – Pack of 3: 8,000 lira” (~5$).

“That’s nearly 2 bucks a piece”, I thought. And then a song popped up in my head. An old song from SoapKills, I remember the last one on their album Bater and their only one in French.

« Frères ! les préservatifs sont trop chers !

Moi j’suis jeune et j’ veux baiser »

(Translate : « Brothers ! The condoms are too expensive! Me I’m young, and I want to fcuk”)

The cover of unforgettable album Bater.
(Source: Amazon)

I froze for a minute as the song gave me quite an intense emotional flashback. It had marked me since the first time I'd heard it, with its daring lyrics and incredible composition. I was still under twenty back then. Always horny, often broke, and the condoms did seem too expensive at times.

It was 2001, a decade ago today – Damn!

That was the year when then hyperactive local electro pop band SoapKills released its third and highly acclaimed album, Bater. A memorable album named after a lovely village in the Chouf. SoapKills is no longer alive now, it was dismantled in 2005, but somehow it still lives on. It has become no less than a myth for many of us in the war generation…

Fortunately for Lebanon’s music scene, SoapKills co-founders Zeid Hamdan and Yasmine Hamdan both remain highly active on-stage as well as off- stage, each doing his own thing... but I can't help but think that gosh, weren’t they good together!

--by GiB#2

Frères - SoapKills (Bater, 2001)


Frères ! les préservatifs sont trop chers
Moi j’suis jeune et j’ veux baiser
Ma mère, ma sœur, mon frère, me disent de faire
Attention, clair
Mais moi j’veux pas m’laisser faire
Par la politique du cancer
Qui hausse les prix partout
« Des actes théâtraux dans une salle d’attente » *
L’attente, bruyante, fuyante
« Musique classique un hymne à la collectivité à 18h précises »

Frère, ne rate pas les combats
Qui auront lieu ici-bas
Dans les centres commerciaux
Pour adoucir les mœurs a scient *
Mais frères, La publicité réclame
Des actes théâtraux dans ma chambre
Des pièces de monnaie trainent flemme harem *

« Musique classique un hymne à la collectivité à 18h précises »

S’il pleut, couvre-toi.
Les préservatifs sont trop chers

P.S: couldn’t find the lyrics online but since I always thought they're so powerful and poetic, I thought I’d take a stab at them myself. The lines marked with a * are those where I’m still not too sure - if any fan out there can help perfect them, it would be greatly appreciated!