Culture & Arts
Shabjdeed made Kufr Aqab's Arabic the sound of Arab rap
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
Before the world argued about his diss track this week, Shabjdeed spent a decade proving something harder: that Palestinian rap could build its own house and invite the world in, rather than knock on the industry's doors.
He was born Oday Abbas in 1995 in Kufr Aqab, the crowded district wedged between Jerusalem's municipal boundary and the Qalandiya checkpoint — inside the city on paper, behind the wall in life. That geography, and the Arabic spoken in it, became his instrument.
In 2015 a studio session in Ramallah with the producer Al Nather — Mohammed Masrouji — and the engineer and art director Shabmouri turned into BLTNM, the independent label the three founded, i-D magazine recounted. No major distributor, no outside owner: a Palestinian label, run by its artists, that has since drawn close to half a billion streams.
The breakthrough came in 2019 with "Sindibad el Ward," his full-length debut with Al Nather that the Cairo music magazine SceneNoise marked as a milestone for independent Arab music. Its title character — Sindibad, a wry, unfiltered narrator of the commute between Jerusalem and Kufr Aqab — let him rap the checkpoint's absurdities with a dark humor no press release could fake.
The hits established the sound's reach. The BBC ranked "Mtaktak" among modern Arab hip-hop's greatest tracks, and "Inn Ann," his 2021 drill anthem with Daboor, tore across the region and made the label's name a password among a generation of Arab listeners.
This month the voice grew louder still: his track "SLV" opened a region-wide debate on how Palestine is represented in music, and on 13 August he headlines Amman with the full BLTNM roster — Al Nather, Daboor, Fawzi, Touch and Smokaholic — the label he co-built playing the room as a family.
Whatever side of this week's argument a listener takes, the achievement underneath it is not in dispute. A kid from a neighborhood the municipality forgot built the most influential independent label in Palestinian music, and made its street Arabic a sound the whole region now speaks.
