To say that you can smell danger and blood when you are listening to ‘You Rascal You’ by Hanni El Khatib is a euphemism. His guitar roars like a large motorcycle that does not want to start, and this song is a succession of violent discharges of bloody rumbles of distorted guitar. It may be punk-blues or whatever you make of it but it is not something that let you indifferent. It stabs you right in the stomach before you know it, bringing with it all the black-leathered-bad-boy image of some 50’s movies, think ‘Rebel without a cause’ or ‘The wild one’,… it even says ‘knife fight music’, on Hanni’s twitter account! The song is a jazz classic dating from 1932 and covered by everyone from Cab Calloway to Frankie Lymon, given Hanni’s penchant for 50s rock. that’s probably where he heard it.
Half-Palestinian and half-Filipino, Hanni El Khatib, who grew up in San Francisco, is now living in LA and says to be obsessed by pop cultures of the 50’s and 60’s and he cites Johnny Burnette, Sam Cooke, Johnny Cash as influences as well as well-crafted objects like classic cars and stiletto switchblades.
He could make you think of the Black Keys or the White Stripes, but his cover of the famous jazz standard is much rawer or more abrasive than anything Jack White has ever done. The song is the B-side of the 7” ‘Dead Wrong”, an original song that borrows even more to the 50’s with its doo-wop feeling running over a black and white video of a lost documentary of a vintage New-York scene.
Last week, he was opening for Florence and the Machines at the Wiltern theater here in LA, I did not go, but I am pretty sure I will have other occasions to see him play around
Watch him in this Wilcox Sessions video, which features a smoking hot pin-up girl: