page_title: Lydia Canaan
section_title: Early life and education
hierarchical_section_title: Lydia Canaan / Life and career / Early life and education
caption_attribution_description: English: Lydia Canaan at the age of eight, Brummana, Mt. Lebanon, Lebanon
context_page_description: Lydia Canaan is a Lebanese singer-songwriter and humanitarian activist widely regarded as the first “rock star” of the Middle East.
  Credited as the first internationally successful Lebanese recording artist, Canaan rose to fame performing rock music in English amid enemy military attacks during the Lebanese Civil War, holding concerts in vicinities of Lebanon that were simultaneously being bombed. Hala Habib of Society wrote, “in a small country that was ripped by war, there was this young girl making a difference”.
  Canaan was the first Middle Eastern artist to sing solely in English, and the first to have music videos played on MTV Europe, MTV Southeast Asia, MTV Russia, and MTV Middle East. Her musical debut was described as having defied tradition, challenged convention, and transcended millennia-old gender barriers. According to Arabian Woman, “as a girl who grew up in the midst of a bloody civil war, Canaan was breaking down seemingly insurmountable barriers ... She rocked the establishment”. In 2015, Canaan was cataloged in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum's Library and Archives.
context_section_description: Born and raised in Brummana, Lebanon during the Lebanese Civil War to a prominent Greek Orthodox Christian family, Canaan studied at Brummana High School (BHS) and later at Lebanese American University (LAU).
  From a young age singing, lyrical composition, and dancing served as an outlet and catharsis for Canaan. At the age of eight, she was awarded the first place prize (in a contest in which all grades competed against each other) by her French elementary school, College des Saints-Coeurs, Bikfaya, for a poem she composed about a child who wept for being scolded for trivial matters such as staining her fingers with ink when she writes.
  Raised in a conservative family, Canaan's parents discouraged her from singing rock music and forbid her to have a musical education or formal training. Nevertheless, Canaan cultivated the ability to compose and store melodies and English lyrics by memory alone.
  As reported by the newspaper Campus, “For Lydia Canaan's first gig, she had to throw her trademark short rockish black leather skirt and studs out of her bedroom window in Brummana, put on a long skirt, lie to her conservative father about where she was going, and, after changing into her leather gear, singing her teenage heart out as Angel with the band Equation”.
caption: Lydia Canaan, age 8, Brummana, Mount Lebanon, Lebanon
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image ExifOffset": "38", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "720", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "576"}