In early 1970s Lebanon, a young singer from a hill town north of Beirut was on the rise. Before the civil war of 1975, the capital was the thriving artistic center of the Arab world, where folk dance traditions were reaching new heights. There, Dunya Younes was a rising star, appearing in musicals and collaborating with mainstays of Lebanese music such as Zaki Nassif and Wadih el Safi. You can still hear his signature song, Waynak Ya Jar, about having morning coffee with your neighbor, on Lebanese radio today.
Younes later became known far beyond the Middle East, or at least her voice after being used on one of the most influential experimental albums of the 1980s. But to her fans she was known as “the Lebanese mountain singer “. And she had no idea.
In the late 1970s, British producer Brian Eno walked into a London record store and picked up a copy of Music in the World of Islam 1, The Human Voice, the first compilation in a 1976 series by musicologists Jean Jenkins and Poul Rovsing Olsen. . Includes the Abu Zeluf theme of a “Dunya Yunis”. A transfixed Eno took the LP to New York, and it became a touchstone for My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which he and Talking Heads’ David Byrne released in 1981 on Eno’s label, EG Records
Dunya Younes in the 1970s when she recorded the song Abu Zeluf. Photography: PR
The album is a technological feat of hypnotic tape collage, made before samplers were widely used, that inspired everyone from Public Enemy and Kate Bush to Moby and Burial. There was no lead vocals: over dense thickets of dance beats, he spliced the sound of American preachers and politicians hit on the radio with evocative Arabic performances of Music in the World of Islam.
This was even before the problematic term “world music” was coined. At the time, Eno and Byrne’s rhythmic funk, Afrobeat and electronica were groundbreaking, if flawed. The complex subplot of appropriation, copyright and moral ambiguity behind World of Islam would make for a very special ethnographic episode of Poirot. The song Abu Zeluf was used in two songs, Regiment and The Carrier. The liner notes contained a faint whiff of exoticism: “Dunya Yusin [sic]Lebanese mountain singer”.
No one knows where this exact iteration came from, Eno says, though on the cover of the original compilation, musicologists credit Younes as a “girl from a northern mountain town.” Eno and Byrne were unaware that she was an established singer. “I assumed she was someone who had accidentally walked into a recording studio one day and gone back to the mountains and was never seen again,” Eno says. For all they knew she was dead, and they had never heard what they did.
But 41 years later, Younes is very much alive and on a group video call with her daughter, Rayanne Assaf, from Kfarhbab, north of Beirut. The other windows feature Eno, in Norfolk, and Byrne, in Denver. It is, as Eno says, “quite surreal.”
“An unusual story,” agrees Assaf, who plays for his mother. “Better late than never.”
Assaf, who has a doctorate in international law, had been researching her mother’s archive, but one recording escaped her notice. Younes’ career ended in 1972 at a session called by the famous Iraqi oud player Munir Bashir in which he was auditioning for a festival in Europe. According to Poul Rovsing Olsen’s diaries, Bashir had invited him and he was allowed to record. In the end, Younes was selected for the festival, but never went. She had fallen in love with an army officer and started a family instead.
His songs found their way, via Olsen, to Music in the World of Islam, published by the Tangent label – whose owner Mike Steyn died in 1999 – and, subsequently, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts . Eno and Byrne were careful to erase all the samples they used, even as hip-hop began to establish a new paradigm for sound theft and other white artists, such as Malcolm McLaren, passed songs from the African continent as to own
Dunya Younes today… ‘It’s not like what we did. It’s something else. Photography: PR
“It wasn’t easy,” says Byrne. They were banned from using the voice of an evangelist performing an exorcism, delaying the release of the album. His estate “had a moral objection to his voice being used in this context,” says Byrne. After Bush of Ghosts came out, they also removed the Qu’ran track, following a blasphemy complaint from the Islamic Council of Britain.
Eno says they had taken out Abu Zeluf with Tangent and thought it was over. “We also paid them some money, £100 in fact! Not much, but we had to insist on it. They [Tangent] We are happy to see your album mentioned in our album. We assumed that somehow this would be passed on to Dunya, if anyone knew where she was.”
Olsen might have, but he died in 1982. Neither he nor Steyn, it transpired, had made a deal with Younes for his records or even informed him of his release. “We were told that all these permits had been granted and later we found out that they weren’t,” says Byrne.
An academic paper published in 2006 tried to find out why, but only concluded that there were “entwined complicities” at play. He also claimed that Eno sent a letter to a Danish station in 1987, asking about Younes’ recordings: the station responded by explaining that Tangent made “a very bad deal”. But Eno doesn’t remember the correspondence.
It wasn’t until recently, Eno insists, that the couple realized their due diligence had not been done before them. In 2017, writer Bernard Batrouni tracked down Younes through mutual family friends. Younes had not heard of Byrne and Eno; listened to both albums in disbelief. “What a surprise to hear your voice and have no idea how it happened,” says Byrne.
“It was,” she nods.
“No one took his authorization,” Assaf agreed. “He made this decision to end his music career and his voice continued on its way without his permission.”
A family representative contacted Eno and Byrne a year later, and the musicians immediately wrote a letter of apology, they say. They pulled Regiment and The Carrier from streaming platforms, tricky in itself, as Bush of Ghosts had been released, over the years, on six labels. Eventually, they reached an out-of-court mutual understanding, says Assaf, who acknowledged his mother’s contribution, and the songs were restored.
Eno and Byrne in 2022… “Culture always absorbs ideas from other places,” says Eno. Composition: PR/Shervin Lainez
She has remained friendly, they all agree, and Younes is “happy” that, through Eno and Byrne’s experiments, “her voice spread Lebanese culture.”
“It’s rare to hear a combination of Arab-Lebanese music and Western music,” continues Assaf. “My mother tells me that you feel it’s a new kind of music, you don’t just hear how a composer puts two parts together.”
“Do you like ours better?” Eno asks hopefully.
Apparently not: “She tells me: ‘It’s not like what we did, it’s something else. I don’t like this!’”
Still, Younes understands the spirit. There is the legal aspect of this story, says Assaf, but also “the artistic dimension” was “crucial” for his mother. “She thinks Brian and David are real artists.”
Would they taste similar music the same way now?
“I would probably make a few phone calls and find out where the material is actually coming from,” laughs Eno.
He may have been joking, but even 41 years ago, Rolling Stone’s Jon Pareles noted that Bush of Ghosts “raises stubborn questions about context, manipulation, and cultural imperialism,” questions that still resonate today. What do you think of these reviews?
Eno is still puzzled. “I find that quite difficult. Culture is always about absorbing ideas from other places. It really depends, I think, on respect and how prepared you are to admit that you took that thing from somewhere else, that it wasn’t yours idea alone. We had great respect. If you want to be a purist about cultural imperialism, [I] would be reduced to eleventh-century English popular music as a source.”
“In many parts of the world, it’s Western music that tends to dominate,” offers Byrne, who founded his label Luaka Bop, which deals mainly with non-Western reissues, in 1988. “I remember the first time I going to Brazil, I was surprised to see that I didn’t hear sambas anywhere. That, to me, is cultural imperialism.”
Let’s go back to this unusual story. It’s a neat end to a four-decade-long mystery, and bittersweet, in a way, that Younes’ promising career somehow lived on.
“It’s true that his voice went far, but he was in good hands,” says Assaf.
“We’re very lucky,” says Byrne. “It could have turned out very differently.”
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