“Wild Ones” by Myriam Fares & Flo Rida
Last summer American rapper Tramar Lacel Dillard a.k.a. Flo Rida reprised his 2011 hit with Sia, “Wild Ones” with Lebanese pop star Myriam Fares singing Arabic lyrics as a counterpoint to his English-language rapping. Since Fares is singing an Arabic melody, which has different harmonics than the Western, she does not reproduce the Sia melody line. But Flo Rida’s rap lyrics are the same.
I’ve noted before that in medieval Arabic poetry there is a genre that alternates an Arabic verse with one in another language, called mulamma`at, and this kind of collaboration echoes that technique.
Myriam Fares was born in the Lebanese southern coastal city of Sidon in 1983 and is from a Sunni Muslim Christian background (some prominent web sites on Arabic pop music say she is Sunni, but that appears to be an error). She was discovered through contest shows and became a star over the past seven years, now referred to as “Queen of the Stage.”
In addition to mulamma’at which was written by persians and had some verses in farsi and some in arabic there was also some muwashahat which had some verses in arabic (usually most of the poem) and some andalusian local dialect.
Myriam Fares is christian… never cared enough to check but her name is in the Aramaic version (arabic version is Mariam) which i more likely to be for a christian, so after reading your article i wanted to check and found a televised interview form july 2012 where she talked about her life (i didn’t know she had a tough childhood) and mentioned in passing telling her father she was “going to church”.
internets say she is Sunni; more research needed
Regardless. Sunni, Christian or Atheist. The collaboration with Flo Rida was: amazing.
She is Christian.
link to youtube.com