Moon is Both Her Name and Her Profession

While America’s teens revived a New Moon with the release of the latest Twilight flick, apparently we Arabs are still stuck with the same old one.

Amar, Arabic for “moon” is yet another Lebanese young singer that enjoys dazzling look has returned with a new music video to kick off the release of her album “حلوة Helwa”, pretty of beautiful. Amar is one eye candy the Arab man has God to thank for, for whatever reason you do not like Haifa Wahby, you have Amar to look at. Very few Arab female singers can pull it of (see Elissa, Carol Samaha) but looks do not necessary secure good music of good album.

The Album Helwa is not all bad, in fact some songs are fine with cute. Nothing specially new, there with couple of good tracks “Aho Inta” “That’s You”, “Helwa” “Pretty”, “Bita’a Banat” womanizer”. But before releasing the album Amar released a single “Al’ataba Qizaz العتبة قزاز”, a famous song from the Egyptian folklore. The remake of the song wasn’t bad, it was pleasant enough.

When time came to make the music video Amar hired Fabien Duflis, a French director who does not speak Arabic which means he will not fully capture the gist of the song. For some reason, this French talent chose Turkey as a location, only to give us a Turkey. Amar’s song is lost in translation. The final music video for this Egyptian song remade by Amar was a disaster, as the music video was loaded with random nudity, shirtless studs playing with water, goth models, women in cop uniforms, S&M…etc. All nice, but none of this has anything with the song. At some point of the music video, I thought Evanescence would have a cameo. I have a feeling that the director spent more time scanning the male fashion ads Esquire magazine than time to understand the song. Many Arabic websites called for taking down this music video for its lack of taste and heavy dose of male nudity. I am sure Amar would be surprised had they not call to boycott her music video. I am glad to see them call out male nudity for change, but a terrible music video goes a long way.

You may disagree with me, but I hope we can agree that the music video has nothing to do with the lyrics. Moon does indeed gives us a closer look at her (…) (Check minute 3:53)