"MRA" is EMEL's new release

Already an icon of the Tunisian revolution thanks to her protest songs, EMEL’s latest album sees her work with a completely female team to make one of the most unapologetically forthright and adventurous albums of the year. 

Emel Mathlouthi (aka EMEL) never wanted to call herself a feminist. Then she realized that she’d been one all along.

The Tunisian singer, composer and arranger has been making moves to do exactly that, both by challenging the norms of the male-dominated music industry and by writing protest songs that encourage a new way of being. Her guitar-led tune ‘Ya Tounes Ya Meskina’ (Poor Tunisia) and the formerly banned folk-hymnal ‘Kelmti Horra’ (My Word is Free) - which she sang to protestors on the Avenue Habib Bourguiba during Tunisia’s Arab Spring protests in 2011, and again at the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo - contain the sort of hope that is strengthened by timing, and indeed, by musicality.

“After the 70s and 80s there was a void in protest music in the Arab world [because] of the presence of dictators,” says EMEL, who has been based in New York City since 2014. “So, by the 90s the young Arabs were definitely tamed. When I started singing even Joan Baez songs in my early 20s, people were like, ‘How did you know about this? Where did you find your conscience?”’
“The problem is also that activist music is often a bit boring and simple”, she says.

EMEL grew up in Tunis, the daughter of an academic Marxist father who was “imprisoned for his opinions” during the 1990s regime of Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, then fired from his job (‘IDHA, a dramatic song about the world’s lack of empathy, is dedicated to him). She read Arabic literature alongside books by Dickens, Dostoevsky and Mark Twain, and listened to a vinyl collection that favoured classical music and Tunisian-Jewish music from between 1900-1950.

Her mother, an elementary school teacher, instilled a drive, a wish for self-betterment, in the young EMEL that - in tandem with a preternatural ability for singing, acting and songwriting - would stand her in good stead. She went on to front a heavy metal band called Idiom while (“sort of”) studying engineering at university: “I love the lyricism, drama and intensity of metal and its correlations with classical music. Just listen to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons'. It’s got a total metal feel.”

She says she came late to Arabic music, which she’d previously associated with clichés involving “the diva standing on stage who just has to sing beautifully and follow the rules set by the men who compose for her. I had been searching for something more freeing, which was why metal spoke to me. For years I was proud of being the only woman wherever I went.” She sighs. “The conditioning was bad.”

One day a bandmate played her Joan Baez’ version of 'The Boxer’, and her world tilted. She began writing protest songs, including the aforementioned viral hit ‘Kelmti Horra’, written with Tunisian poet Amine Al Ghozzi, who provided the lyrics. With these new songs she was mindful that a) she was being monitored, b) opportunities were limited and c) the songs’ sentiments had seen them banned on Tunisian TV and radio. In 2007 she slipped out of the country for a new life in France. She was on tour in Tunisia for the brief blooming of 2010’s Arab Spring: “I took the mic onstage and said, ‘we have to support these people because they are just asking for work and dignity.’”

“Being in France empowered me for sure,” she says. “But it wasn’t until I got to New York that I really started trusting myself as a producer, an artistic director. New York gives you wings; there’s no end to what you can try and experiment with there.

“I’ve always felt that I had to win people’s respect through my music. And with MRA I’ve created a sisterhood through banger music that will bring healing to everyone and break the cycle of male domination in a fun, nonnegative way.”

She flashes a grin. “It’s a new cool universe.”