The Narcicyst

I recently stumbled across Iraqi-Canadian rapper The Narcicyst from his "The Real Arab Money," his response track to Busta's latest hit, "Arab Money." You can check out an article on what went down here. He's performed all over the world, including the Trinity Hip Hop festival in CT in 2006 (performance here.) He released two albums with two other artists with the group Euphrates and has since been working on some solo stuff. He has two mixtapes you can download for free from his site. Narcy also made another album with a couple other artists under the name Arab Summit.

His two solo mixtapes are definitely worth downloading. Most of the tracks are short instrumentals of popular American hip hop songs: Jay-Z's "Roc Boys" becomes "Iraqafella," Busta's "Put Your Hand Where My Eyes Can See" becomes "Put Her Hijab Where My Eyes Can See," NWA's "Straight out of Compton" becomes "Straight out of Basra," and a funny interlude playing on DJ Khaled's "We Takin' Over." A lot of his lyrics deal with being Arab in an insightful yet humorous way, often peppering in some Arabic phrases or even whole segments in Arabic. What I love the most about three albums of Narcy's that I've downloaded is the way he uses other songs and clips to enhance his own music with sampling and interludes. While so many people continue to complain about the lack of originality in today's hip hop game, really creative use of existing media is to me the beauty of hip hop. I admit that sometimes sampling goes to far, but The Narcicyst has got it just right.

One of the coolest (re)uses of media is on the Arab Summit album. The album is framed by clips of Sean Connery talking from The Next Man. For one of the interludes entitled"Al-Jaz Islam," they took a one-minute clip from the popular Al-Jazeera show al-ittijah al-mu3akis where the two guests are arguing about whether or not Sadaam Hussein was a martyr or tyrant. The full youtube clip of the show can be found here and you can download the album here.

Another thing I really like about Narcy and his music is his blog. I love the picture on the top of it: a stencil of Oum Kalthoum saying "Boos al-Wawa," the title of one of Haifa Wehbe's latest hits. His posts vary from youtube clips to political commentaries to downloads of his mp3s. One of the most recent posts was "Hamdulilah Gaza Remix" featuring Shadia Mansour. Someone posted it to youtube: