LOS ANGELES — In the middle of Mustafa’s potent, chilling
and heart-rending debut EP, “
When Smoke Rises,” is “The Hearse,” a startling
two-minute meditation on revenge in the wake of a friend’s murder.
اضافة اعلان
“I was all about the peace / I didn’t wanna risk it all /
Oh, I know what’s at stake,” he sings, trying to maintain equanimity in the
face of trauma. But his mood, and the song — a soft folk number with
fingerpicked acoustic guitar and an almost unconscious, corporeal rhythm —
takes a somber, unexpected turn: “But you made yourself special / I wanna throw
my life away / For you.”
Mustafa, 24, sings these lines with an almost ethereal sigh,
as you would serenade a lover, not the enemy in your crosshairs. And yet it is,
somehow, a love song. And also an elegy. An indictment of the self. An
indictment of the state. A bitter promise.
When Mustafa began writing songs a few years ago, there were
no other topics but the heaviness of his experiences. “I couldn’t write
anything else,” he said this month, in a sparsely decorated Airbnb on the east
side of Los Angeles. “It was everything I was dealing with. It engulfed me.”
More than 3,200km away from where he grew up in Regent Park,
Canada’s oldest housing project and one of the roughest neighborhoods of
Toronto, he was relaxed, wearing a black sweatsuit and a kufi, and speaking
with a sober, sometimes sorrowful peace that comes from years of weathering
storms.
“When Smoke Rises” is a suite of folk songs about life and
death in his hometown; the title refers to rapper
Smoke Dawg, a close friend
who was killed in 2018. The EP is bracing and beautiful, hopeful and desperate,
a solemn prayer for lives that never reached their potential, and a determined
act to render their stories with beauty and care.
Mustafa — born Mustafa Ahmed — has been grappling with the
weight of injustice since his older sister first encouraged him to form his
thoughts into poems in the mid-2000s. His family immigrated to Canada from
Sudan around 1995. By age 12, he was getting local media attention for his
verse about the challenges facing his community; in 2016, he was appointed to
the Prime Minister’s Youth Council.
None of that changed the cycle of devastation in Regent
Park, though, and Mustafa has become something of a community ethicist and
mentor, a guide for families dealing with the death of their loved ones, and an
outspoken advocate for the Muslim community. He is also something of a
guardian: His younger brother Yassir and a young Toronto rapper named Lil
Berete were staying in the Airbnb with him. At one point during the
conversation, Berete’s mother called on FaceTime, and Mustafa assured her that
her son was praying every day, going to the mosque and not smoking.
“It doesn’t matter how anti-establishment, anti-imperialist
I am, change won’t be in my lifetime,” Mustafa said. “So all that I can do is
within me. I try to keep people alive. And I try to make sure that we’re
protected.”
As a young person, while many of his peers were finding
themselves in hip-hop, Mustafa gravitated to folk music and earthy
singer-songwriters: Nick Drake, Richie Havens, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen. “I
remember being younger and people were mad like, ‘This guy’s always
emotional,’” he said with a laugh. “But the truth is, I was just exploring a
sentimental language, you know what I mean?”
Eventually, in 2019, he went to London to work with producer
Simon Hessman on demos he had been chipping away at for a couple of years.
Later, they were joined by Mustafa’s friend Frank Dukes, who has produced for
Post Malone, Rihanna, and The Weeknd. Dukes had been probing Smithsonian
Folkways anthologies of Sudanese and Egyptian music, some samples of which
ended up on “When Smoke Rises,” bridging Mustafa’s modern-day tales to the
past. Mustafa also includes vocal samples of friends who have died, and of his
mother, his way of inscribing them into history.
Mustafa’s earliest versions of these songs tilted toward
pure folk. “I think we always struggled with what the rhythmic architecture of
the music was, because it was so guitar-driven,” said Dukes over dinner at an
Italian restaurant in Los Feliz the next evening. Working with North African
samples helped create an unobtrusive backdrop that deepened Mustafa’s
storytelling. “Sometimes it takes a while to arrive at that simplicity,” Dukes
said. (James Blake and Jamie xx also contributed production.)
The mood at dinner was lighthearted, with clouds in the
distance. Mustafa had spent some time earlier that day in a public back and
forth on Instagram with an executive at Warner Records, a minor social media
conflagration — “a microcosm of what happens when you’re in full support of
Palestinian lives,” he posted — spurred by the recent violence in Gaza.
“I’m just using the avenue of music to do the very thing
that I’ve always done,” he said, underscoring the complete overlap of his
personal and creative lives. He had just returned to the table after stepping
away to find a quiet spot for prayer. “For a lot of people, they’re like, ‘Oh,
it’s a seamless transition. He’s saying exactly what he’s always been saying.
And he’s standing alongside of the same people he’s been standing alongside.
All that he’s doing is stretching those words through melody.’”
But being the bard of a horrific stretch of time, and a
creative conscience for a community in pain, hasn’t come without a tax.
“I don’t want to write these songs. I don’t like these
songs,” he said later that night, in a car headed to meet up with some of his
Palestinian friends. “I resent everything about them and how they’ve come to be
and everything that surrounds them. I hate that I had to make them.” The music
remains a live wire, not a safe haven: “Just because it’s my responsibility
doesn’t mean that it’s serving me.”
At this point, he’s not even sure if he’ll ever perform them
in concert. But he’s relieved to have put them into the world, if only so he
might move on: “I just want young kids to come up and be like, ‘Oh, that’s what
grief looks like.’ It wasn’t tucked away. It wasn’t buried.”
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