Hiba Tawaji has won her part of the knockout stages (epreuve ultime) in France’s The Voice – the last of the previously taped segments of the show – and has advanced to the finals of the show, the live shows.
Starting next week, Hiba along with 3 other candidates in her team, will perform a song of their choice to the public live after which audiences will get a chance to vote for all candidates, making sure one of them proceeds to the following week in the progress while the coach chooses who of the other candidates remains and one is eliminated.
If the hype is to be believed, Tawaji has a good chance at advancing in the live shows. Her performances are reportedly among the most watched of the show (her audition has over 1 million hits on YouTube and over 600,000 on TF1’s website, well ahead of all auditions of the show).
In the knockout stage, Tawaji performed Christina Aguilera’s signature song “Fighter.” She did well, but was criticized for her song choice as the coaches felt it didn’t suit her quite well. It’s telling, in my opinion, when an artist as good as Hiba Tawaji has trouble with song selection. It goes to show how far our artists are sheltered, maybe even left without artistic freedom, in their careers.
Either way, French audiences were very receptive of the song.
He is a lead journalist in France.
This is a video of the performance courtesy of my blog’s Facebook page (click).
It is worth noting that part of Mika’s team for the live shows includes an Israeli, named Sharon Lalom. For the upcoming live shows, Hiba Tawaji will be battling it out with Sharon for people’s votes and Mika’s favor. She may end up finding herself in a picture with her, in the same television frame as her or whatnot. Let us do our best as Lebanese not to fall into the traps of accusing her of treason for participating.
This is our chance to show that, at a simple ultimately useless talent show, we can take the higher road and “resist” by actually winning, showing that the talents of our country are great enough on their own merit and can kick anyone’s ass, Israeli or not.
Is it me or are Lebanese women on a roll these couple of days? Rima Karaki is now making headlines around the world for shutting up an Islamist (link), and Hiba Tawaji just presented another side of Lebanese women and artists during her battle on France’s The Voice.
On Françoise Hardy’s classic “Mon Ami La Rose” (YouTube link), Hiba battled 41 year old year Nög in an oriental remix of the very-subdued song, allowing her to show a different side of her voice. Nög, Hiba’s challenger, gave her a run for her money. He was absolutely excellent. The level of competition between him and Hiba has showed that there’s no such thing as someone “professional” competing against “amateurs.” They are all professionals who know what they’re doing, and at 41 Nög probably has a lot of experience under his belt that helped him almost beat the Lebanese contestant.
Ultimately, Mika chose Hiba and Nög was taken by Zazie, another coach.
French audiences were also quite receptive to Hiba’s performance:
This is a video of the performance:
Let me know if the video is removed and I’ll find another version. You can also check the video on LBC’s news page (link).
The Point Behind Following Hiba On France’s The Voice:
I saw a lot of people wonder what’s the point behind the interest in Hiba’s path on France’s The Voice and how it reflects on Lebanon or us as people. It’s a certain thing that Tawaji on The Voice ultimately boosts her career as a priority and reflects little on us. But there’s more to it than that, even if it’s a little gullible to think so.
By being “la Libanaise,” she is giving the French a face of the country that they don’t usually see. It’s not much for sure, and it may be part of our collective hopeless thinking of improving our reputation bit by bit at all means possible. Either way, as a country we’ve gotten interested in so many useless things that I honestly don’t get the point in going up in a fit about this just because people are getting excited about a Lebanese being on it.
Good luck to Hiba on the rest of the show. She’s not in the finals just yet, but next time she’s live she will be up for people voting.
Hiba Tawaji just blew everyone away at France’s The Voice, as was expected. She started off singing Michel Legrand’s “Les Moulins De Mon Coeur” before going into her own Lebanese version of the song “La Bidayi Wala Nihayi” prompting all four judges to turn for her.
Hiba then continued singing effortlessly before ending her performance with a high note that got all 4 judges to give her a standing ovation, as well as have the audience attending the taping rise to their feet to applause her.
She ended up choosing Mika as her coach for the rest of the show.
French audiences were also extremely receptive of her. “Libanaise” and “Hiba” both trended on Twitter worldwide. The following is a sample of the tweets that I screenshot as people gushed about her performance:
Even the head of Universal Music France was blown away by her:
I saw a lot of Lebanese people wonder how it makes sense for someone as accomplished as Hiba Tawaji to end up on a French talent show.
I think someone as talented and as vocally adept as Tawaji is limited by the scope of what she can do in a country like Lebanon. Her talent can easily find a place in an international scene, with France being the easiest stepping stone as The Voice has proven to be receptive for Lebanese talents as Hiba Tawaji is the fourth Lebanese in four seasons to participate.
Sure, participating in a talent show doesn’t necessarily translate to instant success, nor does it mean she is sure to win the show. But if there’s any Lebanese that can have a shot at reaching the finals (the best outcome so far was Anthony Touma reaching the semi-finals in season 2), it’s her – and her audition only serves to prove that point: out of all 4 Lebanese, she was the best by far.
Moreover, Hiba Tawaji has been around for several years now, and her state of success, albeit impressive, is easily dwarfed by much less talented but more busted female singers in the country, which means that she is quite under-appreciated here for the level of art she is presenting.
Naturally, there will also be those who tell us that there are more important things to worry about. Of course there are more important things that Lebanese should be preoccupied with. At times like these when our army soldiers are bravely dying to let us watch such TV shows safely in the confines of our homes, and when there’s little to be optimistic about at the state of the country actually, such a moment can serve to unwind. And that’s not really a bad thing.
The French are referring to Hiba as “la Libanaise.” She represents us and is doing so extremely well. As such, Hiba Tawaji has made us all proud today and best of luck to her progression on the show.
Disclaimer: I was provided with concert tickets by MixFM for my personal use; this, however, came after a friend and I had already purchased tickets for the concert, albeit lower-priced ones.
The “it” concert of the summer, which was almost threatened to be canceled at some point as our security situation degenerated, is Ellie Goulding coming for her Halcyon Days tour. Personal taste in music aside, the concert is to be a summer highlight, with it generally being an oddity for someone who’s actually “in” right now to come to Lebanon for a concert.
The ads promoting the event have been extremely tacky so far, however. Between telling us that Ellie is brave for venturing here and asking us to show the world how Beirut is truly like, I don’t know what’s sadder: the fact that coming to Lebanon is now an achievement in itself or that that rhetoric has become advertising prone or that the entire joie de vivre in Lebanon point of pride is actually still used.
In spite of that, I figured I’d come up with a few reasons why I want to go to Ellie Goulding’s concert.
1) The song “My Blood” is gorgeous, and the acoustic live version is even better than the recorded version.
2) Goulding’s song “I Know You Care” was used as the UK’s Song for Syria in order to raise money to help the children of the war-torn country.
3) She covers indie acts often and does a good job at it. Her cover of Kodaline’s “All I Want” is brilliant, as is her cover of Alt-J’s “Tessellate.”
4) Goulding writes most of her songs and with several hits under her belt, many of which were unexpected given them being an oddity with the sounds popular at radio, she has proven not to be a one hit wonder. Her album, Halcyon, cannot be summarized by “Burn,” but has many great songs on it.
5) She’s a great live performer with a voice that stands out among her peers, as well as an awesome accent to boot.
There’s a multitude of ways that movie adaptations of books can go. They can span from an absolute abomination that gets fans of the novel rallied up against the atrocity they see on screen or it can be a very faithful representation that preserves the subject matter in the best of ways. The Fault of Stars is the latter.
Hazel Grace could be your every day 16 year old girl. Her time is filled with reality TV series, while obsessing and re-reading her favorite novel. Except she walks around with nasal cannula connected to a tank of oxygen that she carries around wherever she goes. Hazel Grace has terminal thyroid cancer with lung metastasis. The cancer is held at bay with a wonder drug in clinical trials – but it’s just that: barely held there, capable of getting her fragile body to collapse at any given moment.
At the request of her mother, Hazel goes to Cancer Support meetings carried out at the litteral heart of Jesus. She hates them. You see, Hazel Grace is not your average fictive cancer patient who relishes in the idea of telling her cancer story over and over again, while identifying with those who share her disease. No, she seeks normality in any way she could find. A Cancer Support meeting, however, is where she stumbles on Augustus Waters, an 18 year old boy with a limp. Augustus had been free of osteosarcoma, a form of bone cancer, for 14 months now. Full of positivity and always upbeat to Hazel’s constant demure, Augustus sets out on changing her entire perspective on life… even about the significance of a cigarette between one’s teeth.
As I said yesterday, it’s easy to dismiss The Fault In Our Stars as a tale for hormonal teenage girls. But this movie is anything but. It’s gut-wrenching, exceedingly tough to watch at times for an average viewer who has never been exposed to the atrocities of cancer that are represented in the most real of ways on screen. Sure, there are some inescapable cliches here and there, but the people I watched the movie with – not hormonal teenage girls, for the record – all found the movie exceedingly tough to watch. It’s not the kind of tough that makes you feel run over by a truck once the credits roll; It’s the kind of tough that – for a moment – gives you a perspective over how lucky you are to be sitting in that cinema chair, not with a nasal cannula as your main way of breathing.
The Fault In Our Stars is bolstered by a pair of great lead performances that elevate it to what it is. Shailene Woodley, on a cinematic roll with “The Spectacular Now” and “Divergent,” is an absolute wonder to watch on screen. Not many young actresses can pull off the role of Hazel Grace the way that she does. The nuances with which she infuses her character are A-rate. The camera lingers just a little longer for a lot of moments on Hazel Grace’s face – those moments help you encompass the scope of the emotion span that Woodley’s character is going through. They also help you make sense of how it is to be those characters, living those lives.
On the other side of the cinematic lead is Ansel Elgort, whose first major role came in the atrocity of a movie called “Carrie” and who also shared screen time as Woodley’s on-screen brother in “Divergent,” is a reveal. While most of us knew Woodley had the cinematic chops to carry on the role with an Academy Award nomination under her belt already for her role in “The Descendants,” I – for one – never thought Elgort would pull off Augustus Waters as well as he did. He spans the entire shades of his character throughout the movie effortlessly, from positivity to fragility, from strength to weakness. He balances Woodley’s act in the best of ways.
The movie wouldn’t be as it is without the decent screenplay that it has. Those who are wary the movie might have ruined the book need not be afraid as John Green had a lot to do with the screenplay at hand. Another entity that could easily be overlooked for The Fault In Our Stars is the stunning soundtrack it bolsters. I personally can’t get enough of some of the songs there – so make sure you give it a listen.
At the end of the day, The Fault In Our Stars is a movie about human fortitude. It’s a rare thing to have such a theme embodied on screen and this movie does a great job at it. Is it for all tastes? Probably not. But it’s also not as easy to dismiss as many would like to. The Fault In Our Stars the kind of movies that stem power from them being truthful, realistic and – ultimately – human. Go watch it. Okay?
A Separate State of Mind | A Blog by Elie Fares 