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“Fairuz, why this great silence that has become such a riddle?”
This was the first question posed to the Lebanese icon in a 1983 radio interview on Sawt Lubnan (Voice of Lebanon). Tactfully, she responded: “What silence? I have nothing to say. I have a song. And those who tie speech to art should be satisfied with silence. I’ve carried my voice and come to the people, for my art, not to speak anything but what must be said and spoken”.
It is these sorts of thoughtful yet cryptic statements and a strategic neutrality that have allowed Fairuz to transcend the role of a mere performer, elevating her into the singular unifying voice of Lebanon, whose collaboration with the Rahbani Brothers has woven itself into the very fabric of the country’s national identity and soundtracked its turbulent history.
And it is for these reasons that the people of Lebanon and the Arab world have strong feelings whenever the music of Fairuz gets sampled.
A few months ago, Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, dropped his highly anticipated album Bully. It included “All the Love”, a track that prominently samples “Fayek Alaya” by Fairuz, a song from the 1963 musical play El Leil Wel Kandeel.
Some saw this as a cosign, a show of admiration, one GOAT recognising another. Others, however, were decidedly less thrilled and considered this mutilation of the music of Fairuz completely unacceptable.
This very debate had already played out just a year earlier in 2025, when Drake began teasing new tracks from his upcoming album, Iceman, via a series of lengthy cinematic streams. The third installment of the series featured an instrumental beat that sampled Fairuz’s “Wahdon”.
But between those who were for and those who were against sampling Fairuz, there were those who were more pragmatic and wondered whether these samples had been legally cleared, or if this was yet another case of a Western artist helping themselves to the music of an Arab artist without first consulting or compensating them.
This was certainly the case with perhaps the most well-known and infamous instance of Fairuz’s music being sampled. In 1992, Madonna sampled one of Fairuz’s Easter hymns, “El Yom ‘Ulliqa ‘Ala Khashaba”, in the title track of her provocative “Erotica” album without first seeking permission, and allegedly had to pay Fairuz $2.5 million in an out-of-court settlement.
What many people may not be aware of, however, is that even for artists looking to sample Fairuz legally, the process of clearing a Fairuz sample is not as straightforward as one might imagine. Believe me, I would know. I produced what might be the only legally-sanctioned Fairuz remix.
The year was 2018. Christmas Day. I had a day off from work, and for the first time in a while, I felt like making music. Music was something that I had been dabbling with ever since I was a teenager, except instead of taking piano or guitar lessons, I was trying to make instrumental hip hop and electronic music by using Adobe Audition and Virtual DJ improperly.
I got a particular kick out of sampling: making new music out of bits and pieces of old music. There’s a lot that one can appreciate about sample-based music. You might be into how creatively a producer can flip a familiar tune into something completely unrecognisable. Maybe a meticulously assembled audio collage full of unexpected juxtapositions is more your cup of tea. Or perhaps you might enjoy analysing the DNA of a track, hunting down the sources of its samples, and discovering new music that you would have never come across on your own.
In 2018, the laid-back and moody sound of “lofi hip hop” had been having a moment, thanks in large part to the popularity of endless YouTube streams designed to soundtrack rainy days and late-night study sessions. Although the type of music I typically enjoyed making had more in common with DJ Shadow or The Avalanches than “lofi hip hop radio – beats to relax/study to”, for some reason, I found myself drawn to the idea of applying the aesthetics of the lofi hip hop sound to Fairuz’s “Addeysh Kan Fi Nass”.
The song “Addeysh Kan Fi Nass”, written by Mansour and Assi Rahbani, to whom Fairuz was married, and composed by her and Assi’s son, Ziad Rahbani, was first heard live at the 1973 Baalbeck International Festival, as part of the musical variety show “Kassidat Hob”.
Fairuz sings of longing and loneliness, reminiscing about watching people wait for one another on a street corner under the rain, umbrellas in hand, lamenting the fact that, even on sunny days, no one had ever done the same for her.
Between the melancholic lyrics, the beautiful orchestration, and the rainy day vibes of it all, the combination just made sense. So I got to work, and after some time, I had come up with something of a remix. In my take on the track, carefully rearranged slices loop under sparse drums that drop in and out, as Fairuz’s voice pierces through, drenched in a woozy delay. I even added a layer of crackly rainfall under everything that could easily be mistaken for subtle vinyl hiss.
I uploaded the remix to my SoundCloud, and for the time being, that’s all it was: a personal project that I was just happy to have out there.
Fast forward to June 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic was in full swing, the world was in lockdown, and Saudi radio host and hip hop DJ Big Hass had just uploaded a lofi hip hop playlist of his own to YouTube, though this one had a regional twist to it. As its title would suggest, “Lofi beats by arab producers” was a two-and-a-half-hour playlist of mellow instrumental hip hop tracks by Arab producers, and my Fairuz remix was among them.
This inclusion would prove to be fortuitous, because it was through this playlist that Laura Wozniak, Head of Streaming at MDLBEAST Records, first came across my remix.
Based out of Saudi Arabia, MDLBEAST is a music entertainment company and creative platform that burst onto the scene in 2019 with Soundstorm, a three-day music festival held in Riyadh whose subsequent editions have brought some major global acts over to the region. MDLBEAST Records is MDLBEAST’s independent record label, which launched its first release in early 2021.
It was in May 2021 that Wozniak reached out to me with a proposal: what if MDLBEAST could get the Fairuz sample cleared and release this remix as an official Fairuz remix? I was intrigued.
“When I joined [MDLBEAST], Laura was talking about it like ‘look, I discovered this track’, and it really started as a passion project, as well as a challenge for her to kind of do something that she felt passionate about and wanted to do right”, says Edwin Harb, Senior Label Manager at MDLBEAST Records.
Wozniak’s passion was shared by the rest of the MDLBEAST team, who saw this as an opportunity to put their ethos of respecting the rights of artists to the ultimate test. “We wanted to set a precedent that even if you’re doing something like this, as big as clearing rights for a Fairuz track, we can do it, and we will do it, and we will do it right. And we will make sure that everyone’s compensated fairly. It was a challenge that we just decided to take on because we were, and we still are, very ambitious,” explains Harb.
I’ve never cleared a sample in my life, and I certainly hadn’t been planning on taking a shot at this one myself anytime soon, so I was on board. I gave MDLBEAST my blessings, and the challenge was officially on.
So, how exactly would one go about clearing a Fairuz sample?
In music copyright law, there are master rights and publishing rights. Master rights pertain to recordings, while publishing rights belong to the underlying composition.
If you were seeking permission to record a cover of a Fairuz song, you’d only need to clear the publishing rights, since you’re replaying the song yourself. However, in the case of sampling, both master and publishing rights would need to be cleared, since you’re going to be using a particular recording of a Fairuz song, not replaying the song yourself.
But before you can go ahead and ink a deal with the rights holders to clear those rights, there is an extra set of rights that must also be cleared when dealing with an artist of Fairuz’s stature, those being moral rights. Moral rights protect an artist’s right to preserve the integrity of their work and object to any manipulation of it that could negatively impact their honour or reputation.
Moral rights are intangible and cannot be signed away, but in this case, although Fairuz is still alive and well, her affairs are currently managed by her and the Rahbani Brothers’ heirs. So you’d have to get this approval from the heirs of Fairuz and Assi Rahbani, Rima Rahbani, and, before his passing in 2025, Ziad Rahbani, and the heirs of Mansour Rahbani, Marwan, Ghadi, and Oussama Rahbani, all of whom have historically been fiercely protective of the rights that they hold. Simple as that.
The requirement to clear moral rights is most certainly why you don’t hear all that many legally-sanctioned Fairuz remixes or tracks with beats that sample her music. But MDLBEAST heard something in my remix that gave them a glimmer of hope.
“We knew that this was something that had the potential to be accepted, because it preserved the integrity of the track, preserved the structure of the track in a lot of ways as well, the essence of it, the emotions behind it. So we had an opportunity to be able to go and present it to the original rights holders and get it cleared,” says Harb.
But tracking down the rights holders would prove to be difficult. Across her long and storied career, Fairuz’s discography was released through various record labels. At the time, these labels had multiple owners, and the rights that they had acquired from artists have since been dispersed across different heirs of those multiple owners, and in some cases, different companies.
Many of these individuals and companies have retroactively realised that certain deals that had been struck in the past weren’t entirely fair, and have made efforts to recoup their losses by “reclaiming” the rights to certain works, which in reality they have no actual legal authority over.
What complicated things further was that, in the case of my remix, the rights holders that needed to be approached would have to be the ones who could clear the rights to a specific version of “Addeysh Kan Fi Nass”, that being the live recording from the 1973 Baalbeck International Festival.
“We had to do a full map of the rights holders’ situation and then figure out the best approach to do that,” Harb recalls. “This in itself takes a lot of time because a lot of these people don’t even have emails, so you might imagine how difficult it is to get in touch with them and then have to explain to them and educate them on the digital music industry and how we would be using their rights”.
Their search eventually led them to Egyptian record label Sout El Hob, which also agreed that there was a good chance that my remix could actually get moral rights clearance. “I think from the first interaction we had with them, we knew that this wasn’t gonna be as difficult as we thought it was gonna be, or as impossible as we thought it was gonna be,” says Harb.
And with that, MDLBEAST got to work clearing both the master and publishing rights and the moral rights in parallel, making sure that they wouldn’t run into any issues when releasing the remix. But of course, the final word would be that of the Fairuz and Rahbani heirs, and the moment of truth had finally arrived. Would they grant my remix the elusive moral rights green light? The answer was yes.
An agreement was reached between MDLBEAST and me; I was compensated for my work, and in January 2022, “Adaysh Kan Fe Nas (Lo-fi remix)” was finally released worldwide as an official Fairuz remix. I was credited as a producer under my producer alias, “Elepheel”.
While clearing a Fairuz sample is no small feat, the challenge of navigating this labyrinth of scattered rights and dubious rights holders is by no means exclusive to her catalogue alone, as it is unfortunately also the case with the catalogues of countless other Arab artists from years past.
At the heart of this broader complexity is the legal practice known as “tanazol”, where writers and composers would sign work-for-hire agreements with record labels and give away all their publishing rights, many of which were never properly registered.
Decades later, much like the heirs and companies squabbling over fragments of Fairuz’s catalogue, relatives of those writers and composers have come out of the woodwork to demand compensation and claim questionable ownership over the rights to their works, only adding to the confusion.
It’s probably safe to assume that the majority of big Western artists who sample Arab artists are just putting their music out there without clearing any rights and hoping they don’t get caught. While it would be a cop-out to pin the blame for this lack of sample clearances squarely on the messy Arab music rights landscape, it is certainly a contributing factor to this issue, which affects not only Arab artists whose music gets sampled but also Arab artists looking to sample music from their own culture and go about doing so legally.
If you want to legally sample Fairuz, there are rules and procedures that must be followed; this is not up for debate. However, opinions will probably remain split around whether or not one should even sample Fairuz in the first place. I do not believe that these kinds of restrictions should be imposed on creative expression, because remixes and reinterpretations have been moving culture forward for centuries.
Some of Fairuz’s most beloved songs are, in a sense, “remixes”. “Ya Ana Ya Ana” is a rework of Mozart’s “Symphony No. 40 (First Movement)”. “Li Beirut” puts a new spin on Joaquín Rodrigo’s “Concierto De Aranjuez: II. Adagio”. “El Bint El Shalabiyya” is a different take on the Egyptian folk song “El Ouzoubiyya Talet Alayya”. This is by no means exclusive to her music alone.
If anything, this debate is a testament to the impact that Fairuz’s music has made on the people of Lebanon and the Arab world, and that is something no amount of remixes can ever take away.
