Singer-songwriter Hamed Sinno put poetry into Amazon posts

Hamed Sinno encompasses a wealth of pop-culture guises. The Lebanese-American singer-songwriter is the sometime frontperson of Beirut alt-rockers Mashrou’ Leila, whose Arabic-language tracks are both poetic and polemical. Sinno is also an outspoken LGBT+ activist who has embraced a non-binary identity; a charismatic showman; a drolly self-professed “social-justice snowflake”; and an artist’s muse (in Alireza Shojaian’s portrait, “Hamed Sinno et un de ses frères”).

Currently, the 35-year-old (who uses the pronouns they/them) is artist-in-residence at Shubbak, the UK festival of contemporary Arabic culture, and about to make their solo debut with the album Poems of Consumption: a song cycle exploring the overspill between consumerism, mental health and the environment.

These timely themes have sharp significance for Sinno. “Over the past five years, I took time away from my career, went back to grad school, focused on different kinds of writing and forms of consumption,” they explain. “I found myself in New York dealing with extreme anxiety, but also spending money on stupid little things that were terrible for anxiety.”

Sinno discovered an unusual creative outlet within consumer excess. They began writing poetry inspired by random items (a pillbox, Lego, umbilical scissors) that they had ordered on Amazon, then posting this verse in the website’s product reviews section. For one purchase, a plastic mosque alarm clock, Sinno submitted a three-star rating and the elegiac lines “What is faith if not a product/What is purchase if not faith”.

It’s the closest I’ve come to the graffiti I did as a child,” Sinno grins. “You’re invading this public space where there’s a particular kind of discourse, and you make it very personal. You have people talking about the quality of the product or what it did for their skin, and then you have someone lamenting the fate of the universe on a very emotional level.”

Sinno’s Amazon posts are vividly woven through the lyrics of Poems of Consumption; their vocals are brooding and potent, torn between heartbreak and hedonism. Even the string-laced instrumental “Nero’s Lament” exudes intense intimacy. While Mashrou’ Leila’s material was never confined to a rigid genre, Sinno serves up an even broader blend here, arguably emboldened by their recent studies in digital music. “There’s ambient stuff, musical theatre, hardcore EDM, pop, dabke,” they say. The music creates dramatic atmospheres and dance-floor rhythms from consumer materials: ripped packaging, fluttering receipts and bubble wrap.

It also covers serious subjects but avoids preachiness. “It’s me writing about my feelings with consuming things, and being inside this system of ‘fast rewards’ that are replaced with anxiety about the environment and money,” Sinno says. “These things are quite personal; artistically, it’s been really validating. Because I’m starting over, I’ve allowed myself to do what I want. This isn’t about the Middle East, or my thoughts about capitalism. It’s really about how I’m dealing with things emotionally.”

Sinno has navigated various challenges since forming Mashrou’ Leila with fellow students at the American University of Beirut 15 years ago. “We learnt through trial and error,” they recall. “I wasn’t getting onstage like, ‘I’m going to channel Tina Turner’; it was a lot of being shy and putting my foot in my mouth repeatedly. You just do it enough times that something starts to make sense.”

Mashrou’ Leila earned a global fan base with their catchy, candid songs evoking gay life and denouncing oppressive authorities. The band also confronted conservative traditions across the Middle East and the limited scope of the western mainstream.

“There is generally a double burden that artists of colour have to carry around, particularly in the west for essentially white audiences: that your work matters, inasmuch as you can reflect on ‘your people’ for us,” Sinno says.

“In an interview, I’m speaking as myself; if a reporter wants to make that about some ridiculous mono-narrative about the Middle East, there’s little I can do except constantly push back,” Sinno says. “But then I took that burden into the studio with me. Writing had always been something I used to reconnect with myself and escape, not to try to process the perils of the entire Middle East and LGBT rights in the region, or the Arab Spring. I lost my relationship to writing for some time; it was really hard to get that back. And I don’t want to make that mistake again.”

As Mashrou’ Leila’s profile rose, the band also endured a backlash of bigotry, with appearances censored in countries including Jordan and Qatar. During a 2017 concert in Cairo, members of the crowd were arrested, taken away and tortured, including the young LGBTQ activist Sarah Hegazi, who in 2020 died by suicide. In 2019, Mashrou’ Leila were banned from Lebanon’s Byblos Festival following rightwing Christian protests.

The situation must have felt terrifying. “I was scared for my bandmates,” says Sinno. “I’d moved to the US right before the Beirut ban. But I grew up in Beirut; I know the kind of masculinity there, the violence and militancy of it — and that really does scare the hell out of me.”

Although Mashrou’ Leila released their fourth album The Beirut School in 2019, the group are now on hiatus. “It became difficult for us to keep working together. Everyone needed some time to pursue life and learn new things,” says Sinno. “There’s been something educational about working alone; I can hear myself in the work in a way that I’ve not really done before.”

When Sinno performs Poems of Consumption at London’s Barbican, it will mark their first onstage appearance in more than three years. The song cycle’s English lyrics in fact revert to the artist’s first language; Sinno was raised in an anglophone household, with a mother who was a professor of English. 

However, they haven’t relinquished Arabic, which underpins Sinno’s debut full-length opera. Westerly Breath combines “myth, monument and memoir” and will open next January at New York’s Metropolitan Museum, performed in the ancient Egyptian Temple of Dendur.

“The opera is very much about three of my voices in conversation with each other, about being an immigrant, about trying to rebuild a life from pieces,” Sinno says.

There is something gloriously defiant in the way they make diverse elements gel, but they don’t necessarily see it that way. “I’m not sure cohesion is my friend here,” says Sinno brightly. “There’s an intentional disjointedness that makes sense with the idea of something falling apart — and then coming back together towards the end.”

Hamed Sinno plays the Barbican, London on July 8, shubbak.co.uk