Hamza Namira

Review by Maximiliano Valdebenito

The short: 

With 4.8 million subscribers on his YouTube channel and more than 274,385 monthly listeners on Spotify. Hailed as the "new Sayed Darwish" he is one of the most celebrated faces in modern Arabic music.

The long: 

Hamza Namira is an Egyptian composer, singer, and multi-instrumentalist, who has become a shining expression of the resilience and ambition of his homeland. Emerging as a major public figure after the Egyptian revolution, he uses his work to explore and engage with major social issues today. Hamza is acutely aware of his generation’s dilemmas, and addresses them in an emotive and inclusive way, weaving together traditional and folk music from Egypt, pop, rock, and jazz along the way. Hamza's work is mainly marked by a recurrent socio-political theme, leaving love songs aside a little to focus on themes of humanistic interest, such as hope, alienation, generational change, and oppression. On the other hand, he is interested in reviving Egypt's cultural heritage. He has been dubbed the "Voice of the Revolution", since his works gained prominence during the revolution of January 25, 2011, in which he personally participated, and was considered a symbolic figure of it.

To listen or not to listen:

Listen to "Dari Ya Alby" from their third album "Hateer Min Tany" is a song that through a melancholic rhythm talks about how difficult it is to leave your homeland and loved ones to go to another country and to remember everything due leave to make the difficult decision to leave.