Flowers for Shabjdeed, voice to Palestine's blossoming youth
9 min read
These are my flowers for Shabjdeed, for singing of the "flower youth” before anyone else did. When everyone, Palestinian or not — artists and cultural institutions and content creators and media outlets — is competing today for a piece of a small cake on the Mediterranean, Shabjdeed is mostly quiet.
Is an artist’s duty, sometimes, to do less?
It's important to start from the top, from when Shabjdeed first came to rise in the West Bank in 2018, where an experimental hip-hop scene has been in the making since the early 2000s. A very distinct sound.
"Ward, which translates to flowers in English, transformed a local term of endearment used commonly within the circles of the ‘dodem’ in the West Bank, into a whole experience. Ward, beautiful isn't it, that the men of Palestine recognise the flower in them"
Whether it was Julmud or Muqata’a, Faragh, Haykal, or Al Nather — who would later become Shabjdeed’s main producer and associate — a shared vernacular and sound palette marked the hip-hop music coming out of the occupied West Bank.
Beginnings
Old school and mellow for the most part but with chilling and ghostly violence to it; a solitary case of existence, reflecting perhaps the solitary case of the West Banker’s experience.
I can speak of Saleb Wahad —the name the music collective went by — for hours and of the feeling their music gives you riding around — discreetly — in the concrete town/“smart city” of Ramallah.
Maybe slightly intoxicated, it is late at night and in the car with you rides your friends, guilt occupying the middle-back seat — I have died a thousand times in a car ride like this. Heading home or to a gathering, a constant feeling of wrongdoing overwhelms you. A police car may be parked down the block. Natural Ramallah paranoia, let's call it, that comes natural to living — and craving a life — de facto on your own land.
This paranoia, although traumatic-sounding is, for a West Banker like myself, sensible and familiar, even homey, and is audible and accessible to anyone, in Saleb Wahad’s music.
The hip-hop scene of the occupied territories, although stood the test of time and still surviving, is made up of close mutuals and tight knits. You’d have to really be into it to want to be a part of it.
Underground we called it, speaking of invisibility that comes with feeling like an outsider to the outsiders, the marginalised of the marginalised, and then of the state of absolute rejection of the world and from the world that comes with that.
Perhaps we were — and still do — feel a great absence of belonging or maybe, in reality, we are just pretentious gatekeepers of really good music, but this is where Shabjdeed comes in. A cap perfectly bent right down the middle and an Adidas tracksuit, very ‘British Mandem’ but in Palestine we’d call our boys dodem.
Dodem, derived from the Hebrew word for 'cousin' is what a fair slice of Palestinian youngsters refer to themselves as today, especially ones constantly having to rub shoulders with “Israeli society”.
Again, the limbo of the limbo, the young men living in Kfar Aqab or Shuafat, places with no map and no authority in a country with no map and no authority.
Although Shabjdeed would use the word dodem in his songs frequently, still without completely turning an identity crisis into a product, he was able to expand the circle of delight.
Shabjdeed spoke of a more shared experience, of the average West Bankers and their living and polarities, and more precisely of an ordinary male youngin.
Ward, which translates to flowers in English, transformed a local term of endearment used commonly within the circles of the dodem in the West Bank, into a whole experience. Ward, beautiful isn't it, that the men of Palestine recognise the flower in them.
"From the jump, Shabjdeed understood he was operating in muddy waters. How do you make it as a rapper who’s also Palestinian in this grinder of a world?How do you be your true Palestinian self, without making yourself a cash cow but also a weapon? How do you make it as an artist abstracted from any identity?
Kalbi: Shabjdeed the underdog
Having started under a different alias, we, the OG fans, were split on our stance when the transition to Shabjdeed happened.
For me, at least, it felt like the music was taking a more commercial route, especially moving into a more autotune, trap-like sound scheme which was becoming the global mainstream at the time and with their songs being released under a “Palestinian record label”, all things that weren’t necessarily part of the modern Palestinian musician-ship before the arrival of Shabjdeed or BLTNM, the digital record label he’d start with his friend group.
In a small town — that pretends to be grand — like Ramallah, our heroes and prophets are underdogs. We prefer them like that, humble and militant but with a profound impact despite operating on the sidelines of the universe.
American comic Theo Von once said something along the lines of: “I like the underdog… cause if the underdog wins it makes you believe in possibility more.”
At heart, I think the Palestinian living nowadays is solely but a belief of such. We were rooting, secretly, for Shabjdeed but initially, we’d have made it clear our disapproval of this transition; classic ‘day-one fan’ behaviour but also a general rejection of the industrialisation of Palestinian creativity.
From the jump, Shabjdeed understood he was operating in muddy waters. How do you make it as a rapper who’s also Palestinian in this grinder of a world? How do you be your true and inherent Palestinian self, without making yourself a cash cow but also a weapon? How do you make it as an artist abstracted from any identity? How can one simply exist and be human, perhaps even less so, or maybe even more? Most importantly, how do you move so clinical and calculated but also remain unbound and free?
It is complex and it will happen again. Ultimately, Shabjdeed would actually blow up as a result of his collaboration with Daboor — which was his debut song if I’m not mistaken — on Inn Ann in 2021.
“You’ll be frightened to death, we’ll come out of the ground like a jinn. Peekaboo,” Shabjdeed would say this in Inn Ann in April before six Palestinian political prisoners would escape in September, through a tunnel, from Gilboa Prison, a maximum security prison in northern Israel. Peekaboo, a prophecy almost.
The song became an immediate hit, having also been simultaneously released as the Sheikh Jarrah expulsions were still in the limelight. Sitting right now at 78 Million views on YouTube, Inn Ann is a song of Palestinian pride and masculine virility, of the fearless “flower youth” of the occupied land.
Fear, however, would still be relevant. Shortly after the huge success the song was granted, Shabjdeed seemingly had to take a sidestep, an important and tactful pause.
The song, again, is honest and raw and inherently political, but not because it has to be. Shabjdeed, after he became known primarily in between the crowds for a political song would express a scare” of some sort. In an interview on YouTube with Daaka Music, Shabjdeed elaborates on the lifelong intricacy of being a Palestinian artist.
A scare of being limited to, or even scarier, being now “expected to or responsible for a revolution” to having to have to manufacture — or worse, force — a reaction or a moment or a narrative, when one's reality being, being merely a musician who in his words “doesn’t compare with the people living an actual life of comprise for the Palestinian cause”.
An implied and covert confession of guilt and paranoia. You can feel him hesitant saying all this but doubling down. On the same subject but on a different interview, Sarde podcast, Shabjdeed jokingly excused himself from benefiting off the "situation", laughing, almost nonchalantly, and quickly brushed the whole thing off. Back then, Shabjdeed’s resolution to this dilemma was to steer the wheel off completely. Kalbi (My Dog) he put out as a follow-up, an unsophisticated song about his dog.
"These are my flowers for Shabjdeed, for treading a risky territory, sensitive, honest, self-critical, responsible, and tasteful"
Following October 7, nearly five months ago, Shabjdeed has only put out one song titled Nasheed (Anthem). Quietly released and with no direct references to this particular and fraught moment in time, the slaughter of our Gazans to be precise.
Nothing out of the ordinary, again, inherently Palestinian with words like “war” repeated frequently but this is the norm and has been a motif in his songs throughout his career.
War essentially is a constant for a Palestinian. I do not intend to dive any deeper into Shabjdeed, nor will I be attempting to defend/rationalise/explain his most recent song or moves or positions and not that I have to, nobody seems to be demanding an explanation of whatsoever, or asking anybody of anything, but that to me seems to be the point: sometimes the blood is too red and deafening.
An ode
As I watch this rapid swelling of Palestinian music — or music for Palestine, or Pali-pop, or Gaza rap or whatever you want to call it — in the recent months, especially the swelling coming from outside of the occupied territories, I don’t mind a fashioning of the Palestinian cause as long as it's judicious and not so fleeting, I can't seem but to notice the offensive parting between a nuanced and durable experience of somebody like Shabjdeed, who had to explore being a ‘Palestinian artist’ and this flat and one-dimensional surge of reactionaries.
I understand the fragility of the moment, all contributions must be accounted for. I do not intend to exclude anybody from the conversation, nor create divisions nor do I want to belittle the moment nor belittle anybody's experience, if anything, I am encouraging one.
I am pushing even further and advocating for clever sincerity. It's a messy quagmire, a chaos of deep and wretched realness. To accept your destiny as a Palestinian artist or musician or writer (in my case), because you are, you must come to terms with the ‘package’.
You must accept and be ready for all odds and play all the parts. A switch. You must be ready, lock and load, and be stubborn and fight, tooth and nail.
You must grip on tight to your identities while also being easy and detached and free. This is where the real revolution resides. You must have this duality and live it and inspect it and talk it.
You must remain thoughtful, and remain honest with yourself and examine carefully your contribution, or lack thereof. We as cultural makers should be okay with having these conversations, both internally and or out loud, and to having questions and concerns with no definite answers at times.
These contradictions are foundational and necessary, they resound. This ‘package’ is not a burden nor is the metric too strict, it is coherent and real and at the bottom of it should be one simple thing — taste.
These are my flowers for Shabjdeed, for treading a risky territory, sensitive, honest, self-critical, responsible, and tasteful.
Salma Mousa is a Palestinian writer and researcher in the field of culture and the arts. As a BFA graduate in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she remains in the city working within research teams of guerrilla archivists and thinkers
