Amr Diab blended East and West into what fans call Mediterranean music
In 1996 an Egyptian singer from Port Said released Nour El Ain, a song that mixed Middle Eastern rhythms with Western pop. It won him his first World Music Award and an audience far beyond the Arab world. Amr Diab has since been dubbed the King of Arabic Pop and the father of Mediterranean music.
Diab was born on 11 October 1961 in Port Said into a middle-class Muslim family with roots in the Nile Delta. He put out his first album, Ya Tareeq, in 1983, and three years later earned a music degree from the Cairo Academy of Arts. Through the late 1980s and early 1990s he released an album almost every year, building a loyal following across Egypt.
He also changed how Arabic pop looked. By 1992 he had become the first Egyptian and Middle Eastern artist to make slick, high-tech music videos, and he was the first Egyptian singer to appear in them at all. The ethnomusicologist Michael Frishkopf credits Nour El Ain with launching a new style blending Western and Egyptian beats. Diab writes much of his material, with more than 97 of his own songs to his name.
Film was a sideline that never quite took off. He played himself in El Afareet in 1989, and his 1992 musical Ice Cream in Gleam was later chosen by the UCLA film school as one of five best Egyptian musicals and screened there in 1999. His third film in 1993 paired him with Omar Sharif, but after it he concentrated on singing.
The hits kept coming. Tamally Maak, which also turned up in the Pixar film Coco, was named by Rolling Stone in April 2024 as the finest Arabic pop song so far this century. His 2014 album Shoft El Ayam made him the first Egyptian and Middle Eastern performer to reach number 1 on Billboard's World Albums chart. He holds a Guinness title as the best-selling Middle Eastern artist, and Sahran, out in February 2020, was album number 30.
Source: Amr Diab
