Flair Magazine Quickly reaching over 500k views after releasing their debut music video, El Khat Feen, a little over a month ago, the young Egyptian band “Greene” seems to be heading for the win! We sat with them to talk about their newfound success and creative process.
When and how did you come to the decision to start a band?
We were sitting in Starbucks sometime in November 2016. We were dreaming about starting a band and we started brainstorming songs and concepts that we were already inspired by. From the beginning, we decided that we wanted to stand out more with our character than our skills. Skills can develop by time but character is more important. ‘Young and wise’ is our recurring motif. It refers to young people who embrace life and choose to be active, hopeful thinkers. Most people believe that there is a general tendency for people who think considerably to get depressed, but we believe you can still be hopeful without having to be in denial of your unfortunate surroundings.
This is also how we decided to start the music camp in Beit El Wadi. We wanted to reproduce this same character in our campers, and create a favorable environment where musicians can thrive. We had around 30 campers attend in the summer, and it was amazing! We didn’t think it would turn out to be such a success, but people loved it! It looks like we’re going to make it an annual thing. After camp is when we started our actual work as a band.
Can you tell us about the meaning behind your band name and logo?
Maher has a theory that colors in titles are easily remembered and he chose green. That’s it! We agreed for some reason and we added the ‘e’ at the end to make it easier to search for on the Internet. As for our logo, you know how when you see lips and a tongue you think of Rolling Stones, for example? We wanted something catchy like that. At first, we were thinking trees or avocados or anything green, and then we decided on the counterintuitive milkshake with wings. Julia Sabry designed it for us.
How was the experience of shooting your first video? What is the concept behind it?
As we wrote our song, El Khat Feen, we could actually visualize exactly how we wanted our video to play out. The concept, we took from a friend of ours, who studies philosophy at the American University in Cairo. The idea behind our song started with a discussion. We were talking to him about how we wanted to write a song about defining between good and evil, and he said, “draw a line”. That’s how the idea was born and talked with Maged Attala and Seif Shawkat, our 18-year-old producers, and they were very involved in our thought process for the video and ended up doing an amazing job. We shot at various locations in Cairo to capture the atmosphere of the whole city and make our art relevant, not separate from what’s happening in Egypt. We actually rented the equipment for a day, so we were in a hurry all day, but it was fun and adventurous. One time we ended up borrowing electricity from a nearby bakery for good lighting, for example.
How would you describe your music?
A hybrid of two worlds, as in electronic music combined with other common genres, or future bass/EDM, which is what modern music is starting to become. You have to mix it with a certain program, and we’re still trying to figure out how to make it work in our future live shows without compromising it. It will be really interesting to see how our concerts will look like because no one else around us in the music scene is doing the same thing. We’re imagining that each member will end up multitasking and playing more than one instrument.
What are you working on now?
We’re working on six songs in the time frame of six months. Three of them will be accompanied with a video. We start by deciding on the general concepts we want to discuss with our listeners and then we start the writing process and convert them into lyrics.
How did it feel to get so many views so quickly?
It was definitely surprising. We weren’t sure how people would react to a different type of music than they’re used to hearing in Egypt. Honestly, we’re more excited about the interaction that jumpstarted with our viewers. People began messaging us about the concept behind the video and discussing it in our comments, so it’s exciting that we’re already achieving our goal to get people to start thinking.
By Sarah Guirguis
