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Mixtape: The Nouruz Playlist

Music hardly exists in a vacuum. Like an interconnected web, each tune, each track released to the world both came from somewhere and leads to something else. At Aslan Media, we recognize that very few tracks come to us without influence, and it’s those artists that walked the road before who helped shape the styles and expressions of the music artists we profile in this website today.

To show that music, in its purest form, is an expression that knows no physical, cultural, societal or economic boundaries, Aslan Media is proud to expand our usual Mixtape series to include editor-curated playlists of tracks that express the diversity of Middle East customs, as well as the music that reflect them. The genres covered by these playlists are limitless, as are the artists they include, which can include those from countries outside the Middle East that carry universal messages found in every region of the world.

Album Review: Rough Guide to Arabic Revolution

It’s hard sometimes coming up with a strong opening for another review of Arab Spring music, not for lack of material or inspiration, but because we continue to see such an abundance of both, intros, it feels, have become exhausted. For the past two years, my work as a writer and an editor has immersed me in more revolutionary music than what I could ever predict, in styles and genres as variegated as the people who make up the region we know as the Middle East. Yet in all this melodic diversity, it’s easy sometimes to forget that these tracks and artists who are now part of my daily lexicon are still unknown names to even those who followed as each country called for reform and refused to take no for an answer. At least several times a week, someone will ask me for recommendations for new music to check out and new performers to pursue.

What I suggest is not far from what the prolific World Music Network offers in their recently released compilation The Rough Guide to Arabic Revolution, which, in its two CDs, presents a sampler of the Arab Spring’s “greatest hits” -the songs that “spurred on protesters during the recent seismic revolutions” and reflect the change so fervently demanded.

Rap Against the Machine: Lupe Fiasco’s “Food and Liquor II” and American Political Culture

Lupe Fiasco is the modern poster boy for politically conscious music in the U.S., having come up with just the right recipe for crafting verses about income inequality and foreign policy that still sell well. His latest album, Food and Liquor II: The Great American Rap Album, Pt. 1, delivers on more of his brash, anti-establishment stances, his well-delivered wordplay and sound commercial success (the album debuted on the Billboard Top 200 at number five and sold 90,000 records in its first week). It seems to have revived his spirit of authenticity following Lasers, widely considered to be a major stumble of the pop-rap variety, even by the rapper himself. Food and Liquor II, set up as both the follow-up to Food and Liquor I and the first part of The Great American Rap Album (with a promised Part 2), is bursting with full-speed changes from subject to subject, saxophone melodies, and vulgarity in the name of in-your-face social consciousness.

Rebel Without a Place: A Review of “The Nomadic 2” by Kuwaiti-American Rapper BigMo

BigMo's second mixtape, The Nomadic 2, contains a diverse selection of sounds - songs that contain smooth, pop hooks that would be welcome by radio audiences. There are also songs with a socially conscious taste. The album is at once capable of incredible softness (see "Time to Talk," which features some nicely integrated vocal refrains from Claire Heacock) and some blunter songs, both in topic and sound. The second song, "Nomad," is full of political zingers like "I'mma be your prophet/from you I will profit like King James did The Bible," but is followed a few songs later by the contemplative "Elevator Music," which provides a clever take on heartbreak and relationship dramas ("So sick of looking at the back of your neck/I just wanna say hello/in one ear, out the other, there you go/I went like elevator music/hear me everyday, you just got used to it"). The Nomadic 2 does not, of course, forget to include that self-referential lyrical braggadocio that makes hip-hop what it is: eternally youthful, always on the counter-attack ("Try to keep up with it/my combo syllables and verse/so vicious").

Privilege and its Discontents: A Review of Brother Ali’s “Mourning in America and Dreaming in Color”

Sometimes it takes your classic outsider to show you the beauties and flaws that lie within.

Such has been the case for Brother Ali, one of America's most critically acclaimed and financially successful Muslim rap artists, as well as one of its most controversial. Hip hop intellectual. Mainstream periphery. Arrested during an Occupy demonstration Red-flagged by the Department of Homeland Security. For Ali, hip hop isn't about the notoriety or the bling; where he raps from boils down to activism - that intersection between music, lyrics and purpose - where laying beats and spewing flows isn't just about what he has to say about society, but what he knows how to do in order to better it - called out disenfranchisement, advocate for the marginalized, give a voice to real issues we would rather feel better to pretend don't exist.

Hip Hop Uknification: Rap Trio Arabian Knightz Debut Album Fights Censorship While Empowering Listeners

Repression has a way of stalling epiphanies, but to extinguish them is a nearly impossible feat. Such has been the case for Arabian Knightz, one of Egypt’s foremost and most talked about hip hop groups, and one of Aslan Media’s “Five Arab Music Artists to Watch in 2012.” After years of fighting censorship under both the Mubarak regime and Egypt’s current government, the group finally released its debut CD Uknighted State of Arabia on August 21, albeit underground, after the album was rejected for official distribution by Ministry authorities because of the tracks’ political material and social commentary.