Still, the occasional world music `flavor of the month’ surfaces. In March, it was Yasmine Hamdan. The catalyst? She has a song in the latest Jim Jarmusch movie, Only Lovers Left Alive. NPR waxed rhapsodic: She sings in Arabic! She uses spare techno production. She’s multilingual, but….did we mention she sings in Arabic?
Curiosity piqued, I found Yasmine on YouTube. She’s young. She’s sexy. A singer? Not so much. Her underwhelming vocals reinforce a sense of style over substance. She bares her midriff. She bumps. She grinds. One performance video shows her working a crowd in Berlin. There are surely ethnic Arabs in that city, yet everyone in the crowd looks German.
You needn’t be Edward Said to catch a whiff of `orientalism’ in Yasmine’s success. Ages before we saw burkas, our ancestors gawked at Little Egypt’s sideshow shimmy. Yasmine can thank her for an `oriental’ stereotype she’s shrewdly updated.
There are doubtless more Yasmines waiting in the `world music’ wings. Thankfully, anyone with curiosity and a computer can find authentic voices of other cultures who will never become world music darlings but who have huge followings at home.
A personal favorite is Glykeria of Greece. YouTube lets us follow her from small TV studio tavernas in the 1970s to recent stadium spectacles. She was never less than supremely confident in her power as a singer or her soul connection to the rembetika tradition. (Rembetika has been likened to blues for both feeling and subject matter.) Glykeria’s voice has grown raspier over time yet, if anything, stronger. The bigger stages have brought her orchestral accompaniment in lieu of small groups, and there’s been a loss of subtlety to large-scale theater. But Glykeria was born for that: She’s an artist able to fill stadiums with her voice alone, a force of nature.
