 |
Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 12 - 18 October 2000 Issue No. 503 
|
||
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
|
||
|
Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 12 - 18 October 2000 Issue No. 503
|
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
|
||
The Midas touch
By Tarek Atia
Unlike many Arab singers, Hakim's concerts abroad are not marketed to expatriate Arab communities. They're more general-interest, because foreigners in general love his music.
That's a very telling thing about Hakim. He's got something that most Egyptian and Arab pop stars don't: a clear commercial vision that's international in scope, which he's unfurling step by step. This summer Hakim made some pretty bold moves, most notably his now-pervasive MobiNil ad -- certainly a first for the Arab world. Releasing a song for an ad before releasing the album is a tactic that was previously known only in the West, and only very recently at that. When English pop group the Verve made a similar deal with Reebok, many a music commentator made disapproving remarks about the unadulterated commercialisation of art. As if pop music wasn't already a purely consumer phenomenon.
Anyone who could still doubt Hakim's popularity after the MobiNil ad had only to consider his first concert in Marina, where he was billed at the mega-hyped summer festival on the seaside. Hakim's promoters turned the appearance into an all-out publicity fest.
Then there's the Hakim fashion line. Not many people know about that, because for now, Hakim is keeping it low-key. But since the summer began, Hakim shirts and jeans for men and women have been available at several malls around Cairo, and according to Hakim, they're doing well -- without a single piastre spent on advertising. So well, in fact, that new items are in store and should be on the shelves sooner than you can say "ifrid". Ifrid, of course, is one of Hakim's' most popular tunes: Ifrid masalan masalan yanni inni khasimtak yowm ... (What if, let's say, maybe, I decided not to speak to you for a day). It's also soon to be the name of Hakim's cologne for men. That's right, Hakim is also going into the scent business. The women's version will be called Nar Nar (Fire Fire), another Hakim classic. He shows me a picture of the bottle's prototype, shaped like a silver microphone. Contrary to what many would think, it looks pretty chic.
photo: Sherif Sonbol
I met the singer at his tenth-floor duplex penthouse in Nasr City. At the door I was greeted by a nearly life-size cardboard cut-out of the man himself and Hakim's 4-year-old son Ahmed running around the house, trying to destroy everything in sight. His 2-year-old daughter Mariam was more calmly observing the antics. For the first hour or so of the interview, Hakim was practically on the phone the whole time; he seemed to be closing deals with all and sundry.
His light brown eyes may betray a slightly jaded demeanour, but Hakim, sporting a diamond-studded watch and a sleeveless vest, is still an easy-going guy. His dress sense is a little '80s, but it all seems to work for him -- in fact, you can't imagine how else someone like Hakim might dress. A quick survey of the house reveals a taste in decor that runs toward the overtly fancy: marble floors, everything gilded, lots of salons and Chinese vases. One of the lamp sets are in the shape of pineapples.
Hakim tells me about his reluctance to speak to journalists, recalling what he judges to be the funniest rumour he's ever read about himself: his elevator broke down and he hired four men to take him up and down the ten flights of stairs to his home every day. "How do you react to something like that? I just ignore it," he says.
But I'm not interested in tall tales of rumoured excess. The first subject I broach with Hakim is the MobiNil ad: how it came about, and how he feels now that everyone in the country (including a two-year-old girl I spotted in the club one day) is singing Alo, alo!
"It wasn't in my mind to do ads," he says. "I went to MobiNil to ask them to sponsor some charity concerts. They offered me the ad. In two or three days they had done the storyboard. I was still thinking about it when [ad mogul] Tarek Nour got up and kissed me and said, 'Khalas, you've agreed.' So I agreed. They wanted to use, Bayni wa baynak khatwa wa noss (There's a step and a half between you and me). I suggested Yahoo, one of the songs from the yet-to-be-released tape. They agreed instantly."
Hakim flashes back to a studio session with Riyad Al-Hamshari, who wrote the song. They were recording the song (some seven or eight months prior to the MobiNil deal) and after a few takes Hakim predicted, "You know what guys, MobiNil is going to use this song in their ads." It was hardly a radical idea; many of Hakim's other songs have been used in ads. Despite generous offers, however, he himself had never appeared in an ad.
He sees the experiment as a success, for both him and MobiNil. "People thought it was an ad for the tape. My tape sold what it would have sold in six months in three days," he says. Regarding the speedy sales of the tape, Hakim boasts that "distributors who had ordered the tape got heart attacks when the company could not fulfil demand fast enough. I was visiting people I didn't even know in the hospital."
Still, I asked, him, didn't the ad take some attention away from the tape, make people sick of the song even before it was released 20 days later? "No," he says, "but that might happen with the video clip." Hakim and his producers are apprehensive about filming the video since people will inevitably compare it with the ad, which has high production values, not to mention a good storyline -- Hakim is late for a concert, he buys a mobile phone and pre-paid calling card, and sings the first lines of the song into the phone as he rushes toward the venue and onto the stage.
So what's up with all this business-oriented thinking, I ask Hakim. "I've always been interested in business," he says. "I don't consider it shameful to use my name in business, to benefit from it."
Thrown into the mix are Hakim's investment in a CD-making factory and his future plans for services and products that will aid the music industry in general. As Hakim expounds on making products that "both customers and those in the industry are looking for," he morphs into the typical "symbolic analyst" economists say will succeed in the modern economy.
For now Hakim is filling those shoes ably. He's finally managed to get out of the long-term contract he had with Sonar, the company that first discovered him. Recently, the two sides have been at odds and Hakim is actually in the midst of legal proceedings against the company. Sonar had given him the right to distribute his latest tape abroad, he says, but then the company went ahead and distributed it abroad themselves.
Meanwhile, he's signed a three-album deal with Rotana, in Egypt, and media giant Universal, in the United States, as well as his first film deal. He plans more of the same "pop shaabi" style, with changes in the instrumentation and distribution of the music. "It's not just about composition and lyrics, it's more about the overall combination of instruments," he explains.
Hakim predicts that in the next ten years, the world is going to see an upswing in the popularity of African music, especially that of North Africa and Egypt. As evidence of this he points to all the foreign companies -- Sony and EMI, to name a few -- coming into Egypt and buying up the best pop stars. "They're not doing it for the local market. What, do you think, they enjoy getting ripped off?" he scoffs, referring to the vast market of bootlegged tapes in the Arab world. "They're definitely looking for material to export. Why else would they come here?"
Don't be surprised then, if in a few years time, Hakim becomes, for lack of a better description, the Arab Ricky Martin.
© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved
