Karim Mohsen Put Out Seven Songs at Once. 'Ibn El Nas' Is Winning

Karim Mohsen put seven lyric videos on YouTube in about three hours on the evening of 8 October, Cairo time, one for each song on his new album. By the next morning his listeners had picked one. 'Ibn El Nas', the title track, had 35,131 views 14 hours after its premiere. The runner-up, 'Baalen El Ensehab', had 17,635, and 'Magnoon Da', at the bottom, had 6,003. Of the roughly 103,600 views the seven had between them, the title track had a third. It was not first in line, either: 'Amar' went up about an hour earlier and has 11,705.

The album, also called 'Ibn El Nas', is on streaming services as well: seven songs, 25 minutes and 46 seconds, released under his own name. His channel has 241,000 subscribers. A year ago his nine-song 'Yadi El Kasfa' came out on 2 October, with its videos following one by one into late November, and that album shows how far apart the songs on one record can end up. Its biggest, 'Mesh Mestabyaa', now has 1,018,250 views; its smallest, a bonus track, has 104,228.

'Ibn El Nas' meaning: a decent man, proved right

'Ibn el nas' is everyday Egyptian Arabic. Word for word it is 'son of the people'; in use it means a decent man from a decent family, someone who was brought up properly. In this song, the decent man is the singer. It opens on a chance meeting with an ex who looks the worse for wear, and he feels how much his absence has hurt. Then, for a second, he remembers what was said on the way out, that he was not what was wanted, and he settles in to watch what he is owed come back to him.

The chorus is the payback. Its first line, “جالي فتح في الكلام” (came over and started the talking), is also the subtitle on the video. The ex has come back talking about the old days and missing the attention, after going off and trying other people, and the line with the title says what that showed: “بانت قيمة ابن الناس”, the worth of a decent man became plain. The second verse gets harder. Go and count the differences, it says; you lived well and were looked after, and what goes around comes around, so taste the same pain while I get over you. The ending shuts the door. There is nothing to go back to, the good times were few, and what he will remember is that he left hurt.

A guitar, a sax-like hook and a flat line

Our listening software heard the song open on guitar, acoustic and slide, before a solo line comes in at 0:15 that the sound classifier takes for a saxophone. That line is the song's real hook. It is the section that comes back most, at 0:15, 2:06 and 4:15, and the credits say the instrumental interludes were composed by Karim Mohsen himself, while the words and the melody of the song are by Mostafa Essam. His voice enters at 28.5 seconds. The chorus runs twice in a row from 1:09 and again from 3:02, and the last seconds go to violin and cello.

What the song does not do is rise. Every sung passage sits between 0.58 and 0.68 on our loudness scale, chorus and verse alike, with no build and no drop. The drama is all in the words.

Seven songs, one night

Three things work for it. His listeners put it first out of seven within a night, though being the title track, with its subtitle on the video, may have helped. Its key phrase is praise Egyptians already use every day. And it is a lyric video, like most of his biggest songs. Against it: releasing seven songs at once splits the audience, and the other six took nearly twice as many views between them as the winner. A lyric video, words over the album photo, gives YouTube little to show a stranger. And the sound is careful; nothing in it would stop someone who is not already listening.

His singles this year give the scale. 'Ashan Aradeeh', from 28 May, has 710,728 views; 'El Seka Khadra', from 24 September, has 183,726 in its first fifteen days. We keep a running list of first-day reviews, from Chile to Japan. Our call, to be checked on 9 November: by then 'Ibn El Nas' will have passed 500,000 views on YouTube, a month after release, and will still be the album's most-viewed song.