Mustafa, Toronto’s hood poet, dissolves borders on ‘Dunya’ : NPR

Mustafa in a quiet second from the video for “SNL,” a single from his album Dunya.

Courtesy of the artist

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Rap is the CNN of the ghetto. An thought espoused by Public Enemy frontman Chuck D for the reason that Nineteen Eighties, it has since grown right into a key hip-hop excellent, defining the music’s relationship with its public. All through its historical past, hip-hop has spotlit the turmoil confronted by Black communities, in housing tasks and neighborhoods from coast to coast — and, ultimately, all over the world. Chuck’s framing was a bit restricted — rappers might all the time be a lot greater than reporters, serving themselves and their communities in different methods as advocates, radicals, lobbyists, franchisers and cult heroes — however his perception was sturdy, all the time invested within the style’s operate as a beacon. Nonetheless, it bears following the analogy to its logical finish: As soon as these ghetto tales are broadcast to the skin world, what occurs to them? Who steps in because the stewards of that shared historical past, archiving all of its beliefs, rituals and myths? Who’s there to protect the reminiscences and traditions of the misplaced, as folklorists for the streets?

For years, the poet and now singer-songwriter Mustafa has aimed to fill such a void — significantly for town of Toronto, and the turbulent Regent Park neighborhood the place he was raised, but in addition for all cities bearing a resemblance. “A lot of what I’m is the hood,” he just lately instructed fellow poet Hanif Abdurraqib. His earliest poetry was about being conscious of that distinction from a younger age, and being baffled by its problems: “A Single Rose,” which he carried out at 12 earlier than Nelson Mandela Park Public college, couldn’t make sense of the violence taking place or these turning a blind eye to it. He has spent his inventive profession, throughout many media, looking for that sense. The gang Mustafa shaped with pals from Regent Park and neighboring Esplanade, Halal Gang, turned an arts collective in 2014, centering rap music and attempting to place faces to the world’s conflicts. In 2016, the author Safy-Hallan Farah wrote in MTV Information that “the division that springs out of children’ departure from their dad and mom’ traditions is the area, place, and time that Halal Gang … was shaped,” noting the disparate cultures that the collective was navigating and the gap between them. Mustafa laid out his mission plainly to Farah: “I wanna do it for the youngsters to see themselves. I wanna refine the narrative.”

The broader strokes of the narrative have been clear: Second-generation Canadians, largely kids of East African immigrants, have been grappling with who they have been, and in attempting to say and defend the blocks they have been filling, discovered themselves embroiled in territorial violence. The refinement Mustafa was chasing was within the very position of the gang, a method of safety and of village-building. Halal Gang was dwelling each truths, as “downtown hood dream,” as Mustafa put it, and nightmare. Two days after “Nonetheless” (often known as “Rabba”), the Drake-cosigned 2016 breakout from Halal Gang members Mo-G and Smoke Dawg, was recorded, their good friend Ano was killed. One other good friend of Mustafa’s, Ali Rizeig, was shot at his Regent Park dwelling in 2017. Then, in 2018, Smoke Dawg was shot lifeless in entrance of a nightclub. “The sunshine of the group dimmed,” Mustafa instructed Noisey that very same week. In response, he produced and directed the 2019 documentary, Keep in mind Me, Toronto, and in 2021 launched his first solo music, When Smoke Rises.

Although rap-adjacent by means of Halal Gang and pop-adjacent by means of writing credit for Camila Cabello, the Jonas Brothers and Shawn Mendes, Mustafa is, nominally, a people musician. His music does draw upon a well-known acoustic, guitar-spun fingerstyle sound, however it’s extra so “people music” within the sense that he’s an precise keeper of avenue folklore. That lore is each singular and customary — as a doc of the East African expertise of Toronto gang tradition, and an accounting of how persistent and pervasive such an expertise can really feel throughout neighborhoods and cities and nations. When Smoke Rises, which was produced by Frank Dukes, a rap beatmaker working on the pop convergence of genrelessness, stretched the folks sound to suit new contexts. The mission appeared to be animated by the minimalist, indie-inflected Canadian R&B of the 2010s, and counted soulful digital artists Sampha, James Blake and Jamie xx amongst its contributors, all in pursuit of a roots motion for the hip-hop era. In its harrowingly heavenly songs you may hear a cross-cultural trade, and his capability to embody many various frameworks directly rapidly drew consideration for its readability of thought and goal: When Smoke Rises was shortlisted for the Polaris Prize in 2021, and the video for “Ali,” the poignant music Mustafa wrote for Rizeig, gained the Prism Prize in 2022. Within the video, as he sings of attempting and failing to usher his good friend away from a harmful place, these sitting round him vanish into smoke round him. It’s a highly effective picture: Mustafa, the lone voice left within the room, singing by means of the anguish for these misplaced.

That burden may be heavy, and Mustafa’s beautiful, taxing full-length debut, Dunya, tries to reconcile the results of carrying a lot of your metropolis inside you and being a voice for each these killed and people left behind. Throughout 12 tenderly murmured songs, he sounds weary, the interrogation of the mantle he bears pushing his gaze ever inward. The album appraises spirituality, gratification and agony because the means to barter concepts of East and West, dwelling and group, what’s private and what’s omnipresent. His songs have all the time pulled the listener into closed-door heart-to-hearts and pleading reflections so tense and touching they really feel each visceral and unknowable, however now the entire borders are dissolving, with solely him on the middle.

Towards the top of When Smoke Rises, Mustafa sings of being unprepared within the face of a lot loss: “We forgot to speak about Heaven / And leaving / And what it will imply / And the way I might grieve,” he sings. The concept lingers in Dunya: Final July, his brother Mohamed, was shot and killed, and on “What Occurred, Mohamed?” extra questions ring out: Are you lonely? Do you want a homie? He nonetheless sees himself as a stand-in for these the streets have claimed, as an emissary or intercessor — “Seen Ace on that massive bike once I was 12 / I assumed he’d reside perpetually, however now he’s in hell,” he sings on “Magnificence, finish.” “Wings ain’t constructed for the dimensions of his cell / So he let me maintain his until he will get an enchantment” — a accountability that has seemingly all the time been his to bear, in someway, however on Dunya he refuses to let questions on what leaving means and the way he would grieve go unheeded. He spends a lot of the album asking.

Mustafa sits at a particular cultural intersection, as a Sudanese-Canadian Muslim artist with activist bonafides who has stood shoulder to shoulder with each Justin Trudeau and The Weeknd, and in consequence has operated as a form of interpreter between realms. When Smoke Rises, even at its most withdrawn, felt prefer it was serving a eulogistic operate: In talking for and preserving the reminiscences of others, he acknowledged the need of speaking their trauma and battle for individuals who wouldn’t see them. However it’s clear listening to Dunya that Mustafa is finished translating. Songs like “SNL” and “Gaza is Calling” are decidedly layered with colloquialisms from throughout cultures, removed from indecipherable however not involved with what nuances might go unstated. Right here, lots of an important elements really feel like they’re not one of the viewers’s enterprise. And but, his panorama is so fastidiously furnished, in sound and element, that it typically looks like you’re within the room with him, aware of encounters you don’t have context for however can perceive intuitively. His aching, delicate voice is the anchor steadying listeners by means of a time-dilated non secular journey. As he remembers photographs from his previous on songs like “What Occurred, Mohamed?” and “What good is a coronary heart?” he sings as if he’s seeing them in actual time, like Interstellar’s Joseph Cooper floating by means of a fourth-dimensional tesseract composed of infinite copies of his daughter’s childhood bed room. In Islam, “dunya,” which roughly means “this world through which we reside,” is commonly utilized in reference to the transient nature of the mortal aircraft. Mustafa’s conception of this on his album tries to reconcile two senses of “short-term” — the Quranic notion of earthly life being however a blip alongside the trail to an everlasting afterlife, and the Western one in every of feeling like each single second should be seized and cherished.

When “Imaan,” the Dunya single co-produced by The Nationwide’s Aaron Dessner (notably a significant collaborator on Taylor Swift’s Folklore and Evermore), was launched, Mustafa spoke of the music as an anatomizing of this crossing: “two Muslims journeying by means of their love of borderless Western ideology and the way it contradicts with the modesty and devotion through which they have been raised.” There may be friction in the way in which it’s overlaid sonically, too — strings from his homeland, Sudan; oud from Egypt; drums and chords from American people. The contradictory pull of self-indulgence and adherence to piety is the album’s core rigidity, and in choosing at these dueling impulses, he finds himself reconsidering all of his connections, earthly or in any other case. There are way more questions than solutions, however the in search of looks like its personal response, and his probing but self-effacing lyrics really feel like proof of progress. His songs have all the time been buoyed by his writing, which is as surgical as it’s impenetrable on Dunya, however the album pulls additional away from the emphatic poeticism of spoken phrase, as an alternative transferring towards a extra hymnal high quality consultant of such devotional music.

I wrote in 2021 that listening to Mustafa’s music might really feel like eavesdropping on a prayer, pondering primarily of invocation as a non-public dialog with a better energy. However on Dunya, almost each such solemn act is carried out as a form of bonding ritual: a barometer for a way shut or far he’s from others, the vessel ushering Mustafa by means of scenes of grief and company. On “Magnificence, finish,” he explains that studying the right way to pray is likely one of the issues he memorized as a baby, together with talking and leaping and smiling. When he notes on “What good is a coronary heart?” how somebody with whom he’s intimately acquainted has modified, one of many key variations is in the way in which that they pray. “No less than return, make me imagine, these secrets and techniques are protected with you / My mom was sick, inform me you prayed / Like I used to wish with you,” he pleads on “Outdated Life,” in search of some signal of care. Religion generally is a tether, nevertheless it can be oxygen, a shared life pressure from which being separated can really feel suffocating, and all through Dunya, Mustafa appears to be between panic assaults, attempting to catch his breath. It’s within the moments the place he can really feel God within the room that he finds consolation and companionship.

A lot of Dunya is in dialog with somebody particular simply out of view: Mohamed and Imaan and Nouri, the anonymous Palestinian boy he grows aside from on “Gaza is Calling,” and, on “I’ll Go Anyplace,” God himself. The main points are so crisp and specific as to be pointed: a father’s taxi in an alley, texts acquired throughout a viewing in Rexdale. Even in conditions of separation, he appears to be internalizing the methods through which each individual on the skin of the body is an extension of his chosen path, an thought he articulates profoundly on “Outdated Life”: “I’m not yours / However there’s part of your life that’s mine.”

Perhaps that’s why the Daniel Caesar duet “Leaving Toronto” looks like probably the most gut-wrenching music on Dunya to me. In its lyrics, Mustafa has been exhausted by the battle and all that it has taken from him, singing, “If we’re burning this metropolis, inform me the place to start out.” However there may be clearly battle inside him; parting with town would imply excising a part of himself. “I’m leaving Toronto / I might drown this complete metropolis if I might,” he sings, earlier than admitting, “There’s nowhere I can go / That has sufficient room to let me convey my hood.” On the finish of the music, he leaves a kind of will and testomony: If he’s killed, he says, bury him subsequent to his brother, pray for him, and — he reiterates twice — make it possible for his killer has cash for a lawyer. It’s that final half that’s significantly telling. Everybody, he appears to suggest, deserves to be spoken for.