Dana Salah · portrait
Issam Alnajjar was born in Amman on May 12, 2003. He was seventeen when "Hadal Ahbek" — I'll Keep Loving You — found its audience across the Arab world. The song's melody was quiet and devastating: an Arabic-language ballad that sounded like something a generation had been waiting for without knowing it. It reached Wassim Slaiby, the Lebanese-Canadian music executive who manages The Weeknd. Slaiby had just launched Universal Arabic Music — the first dedicated Arabic-language imprint of Universal Music Group — and Issam became its first signed artist.
He was not yet old enough to vote. He was the first artist signed to a major label built specifically for the Arabic-speaking world, by the man who helped shape one of the biggest pop careers of the last decade. That is not a small thing to absorb about a seventeen-year-old from Amman.