It’s hard to pin down the beginning of this phenomenon, but Wegz did make it particularly popular in the late 2010s. After a song hit big, he’d wait a couple of months then unleash another with the same title plus a sneaky “2.” “Saleny 2” followed “Saleny,” “Dmoana Malha 2” followed “Dmoana Malha,” and so on. The saving grace was that the sequels veered so far from the originals that the only real thread between them was the title. It felt like a harmless, albeit cringeworthy, SEO gimmick — people Googling “Saleny” would easily find “Saleny 2.”
Abyusif committed the same sin, but less ironically, when he chased his timeless Arab rap classic “Amal” with a coyly remixed “Amal 2,” snagging 1.5M Spotify streams on the sequel – only about 100K less than the original. He later did the same with another hit of his, “3azra2eel” and its chaser “3azra2eel 2.”
Recently, Dystinct took this joke to an unfunny place when he dropped his latest single, “Ta3al.” While the track doesn’t share the exact name of a previous release by the Moroccan pop powerhouse, it nonetheless retraces his hit single “Yama” with discomforting precision.
“Yama” came out late last year and quickly became a regional and global earworm, fusing Dystinct’s globalized take on Moroccan pop with Levantine and Iraqi influences, from shapeshifting accents and pulsating half-dabke half-choubi beats, to nonsensical sweet-talk lyrics, and a radiant visual language anchored by sticky artwork of him in front of three vertical repetitions of the title word.
Describing Dystinct’s “Ta3al,” the first song he released since “Yama,” is basically repeating the last paragraph word for word. He’s pushed the “part 2” analogy to an unpardonable level, essentially franchising his own song as if it were an action movie or a fast-food joint.
Franchising is always a red flag in film. Only a handful of directors delivered sequels that genuinely felt like another chapter in an unfinished story. In most cases, however, franchising is just a lazy way to milk a sure thing – no different from overstretching a hit TV series with a Joy-Loves-Rachel plot twist that no one asked for.
More Iraqi than Levantine in its references, “Ta3al” might not share its title with “Yama,” but it nonetheless shares its name with the monster 2018 Iraqi pop hit by Ali Jassim, Mahmoud Al Turki, and Mustafa Al Abdullah – a collaboration that racked up hundreds of millions of views and remains one of the most viewed Arabic music videos of the last decade. Could Dystinct’s “Ta3al” be an attempt at double-franchising – nodding to both his own “Yama” and that modern Iraqi classic?
In our time of artificial abundance, scarcity is a gem. Chasing an outstandingly beautiful work of art with a sequel only risks diluting the original’s impact. And what made “Yama” feel fresh – that wild cultural mash-up and kinetic energy – feels muted in “Ta3al,” like a sequel that forgot why anyone cared in the first place.
