Is Westworld's opening theme inspired by an Arabic song ?

People who know me know my love for Westworld. The brain consuming story, the existential reflections, the acting performance, the original soundtrack,…*kissing the tip of my joined fingers like I just ate a delicious plate of spaghetti* When putting all the criteria on the table, I realize that Westworld had objectively all the ingredients for me to like it. For those who don’t know what Westworld is about, here’s how I used to tell the synopsis to my friends to incite them to watch the show.

Listen to this while reading what follows :

It’s the story of Dolores, a young lady living in the Western times. She wakes up one morning, greets her dad and goes to the village. Here she meets her old lover who came back from a long journey. They spend the rest of the day together and when she comes back home, she hears her dad being slaughtered by several cowboys. She tries to save him, but she got killed instead. The day after she wakes up in the morning, greets her Dad, and goes to the village... But while she's going throught her day, she starts to have feelings of déjà-vu ...

Then I say :

Westworld is actually the story of a western themed-park entirely populated by robots, where rich people can live cow-boy adventures. But times goes by, and some robots are starting to realize things ...

I was waiting for this TV Show to air as soon as I read about Jonathan Nolan’s desire to make it into a series, but now that I think about it, how the f did I hear about it in the first place? Like I remember reading the article about the upcoming project, and being like « omg yasss, I can’t wait ! » as I was already familiar with the original story, but why though? I didn’t even watch the 1973 movie, so why on earth was I so glad for? I have some vague memories of me wanting to read the comics way before that, but now that I’m looking online, there was no comics of Westworld whatsoever, just movies (??). What was I thinking? I have no clue. Maybe my mind is playing tricks on me, and I was only excited about the synopsis of the project, or maybe there is some Mandela effect right there, or maybe my mind was reprogrammed.

Eh, I guess we’ll never know. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

HBO’s opening themes are visually and musically masterpieces in general, and Westworld makes no exception to that. The composer of the opening theme and of all the series soundtrack is Ramin Djawadi, a music composer of Iranian and German origin, who once was under the wing of Hans Zimmer himself, and who also composed Game of Thrones' soundtrack. All his work is just brilliant to me. Did you listen to Ramin's version of Rolling Stones' Paint it Black ? It made the whole cow-boys shooting scene look amazing.

One day as I was listening to some classics of Arabic music, I bumped into the hour-long song version of Fakarouni, by the famous Egyptian singing legend Umm Khultum. Kawkab al-Sharq (كوكب الشرق) as they called her, the "Star of the East", considered the most influential Arab singer of the 20th century. But when the song started something surprised me.

For few seconds I thought I was listening to the opening theme of Westworld. Only for four notes though, but the similarity was striking. Those four first notes of Fakarouni are the ball opening of the Westworld theme song, then they are declined in an other tone. It's not even a case of "I can see why you say that ..." or "Humm, kind of". It's just literally it. No need to compare the rest, I did it for you, and the following is completely different, but the four starting notes tho?? I know I'm being way too detail-oriented, but the devil is in the details.

Here's Umm Khultum's, Fakarouni, meaning " Remind me" in Arabic :

And here's Ramin Djawadi's Westworld's opening theme :

I looked up online and found no established connection between those two. So it got me thinking, are those exact same notes following each other in the exact same order played by the exact same type of string instrument, a coïncidence ? I am legit curious. Are we all connected ? Is Plato's theory about imagination being a place where everyone take already existent things real ? Was it a subconscious or a direct inspiration? Am I thinking too much into this ? Ramin I need to know.

#westworld #series #tv #soundtrack #gameofthrones #ramindjawadi #hbo #openingtheme #robots #arab #ummkhultum