by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

Bagdad Hip Hop, the Narcicyst’s show at the Festival du Monde Arabe de Montréal, looks to be a bittersweet occasion for him. The Montreal-based MC will be centre-stage at one of the festival’s key events, joined by the hip hop collective Nomadic Massive, in which he’s now firmly planted. As well, he’s launching The Illuminarcy Project, his carefully conceptualized new album (yes, that is a wink at pop paranoia, and yes, your phone is tapped). All this follows his performance this past week in Amman, Jordan.

On a more somber note, he’s also launching a new double-disc edition of 2003’s Bend in the River and 2004’s Stereotypes Incorporated. The two albums bear the name Euphrates, a tag the Narcicyst is retiring with honours. The show falls near the second anniversary of the death of Narcicyst’s close collaborator and closer friend, Nofy Fannan, following a traffic accident.

Fannan, along with his brother, Habilis, made up the SandhiLL production team. They fashioned the Euphrates sound, drawing knowledgeably from the spectrum of hip hop—rough and steely here, coolly pensive and gamely playful there—and artfully infusing it with elements of Arabic pop, folk and classical music, buoying up Narcicyst’s quick, gritty and determined flow. The tunes were erudite, bitterly critical and even concussive. Edward Said met Eminem, the Koranic met the chronic.

Over a noontime coffee downtown, mere hours before his flight to Jordan, Yassin Alsalman, aka the Narcicyst, acknowledges no small debt to his comrades in the sprawling, polyglot Nomadic Massive. “If it wasn’t for them, I wouldn’t be doing this anymore. They really opened my heart back to it and made me feel like I had a family in this music.”

The show will be split between current Nomadic and Narcicyst material, and a commemorative revisiting of older tracks. “We’re going to be recreating most of these songs live, with a cellist, a violinist, a percussionist, a drummer, bassist and guitar player. I wanted to do something dedicated to Nofy—the time of year is right between when he got hit and when he died—because he always wanted to hear his beats live. So I made it a mission of mine.”

It’s not Alsalman’s only mission. Though battered by personal tragedy, he hasn’t lost sight of a larger one—the suffering of the Middle East and specifically the destruction of Iraq. It’s a place that, alongside Canada and hip hop, he can call his nation, though maybe it’s only hip hop he can call home.

Osama, yo mama

“When the Iraq war started, I really felt this dichotomy, the dual East-and-West feeling. Finally, this dictator that we, being outside of Iraq and watching what’s happening on the inside, have recognized as someone who’s destroying our culture and our psyche as a people—to have him removed was beyond words. At the same time, every Iraqi and Arab that was outside of that bubble knew what was going to happen.”

Alsalman had no monopoly on misgivings, but his prescience wasn’t limited to the big picture, and he was prepared to spit his visions loud and clear. Consider “Creep Up,” a track from 2004 that eerily presaged the appalling incident of rape and mass murder at Mahmoudiya earlier this year.

It’s indicative of Alsalman’s keen moral sense that he balances his yarn of decaying morale and escalating brutality among coalition soldiers with a resonant sympathy for the poor, dumb grunts ground up by someone else’s disastrous war in someone else’s devastated land. And what happened when he performed the song at George Washington University, in Washington, D.C., in 2004 is indicative of the preconceptions the Narcicyst must duel with.

“These four old white ladies stood up and walked out. I saw them out front, and they said, ‘If you don’t agree with what our president is doing, why are you coming to our country? Why don’t you go back to yours?’ I told them, ‘I don’t have a country.’

“They thought I was being racist, when I was just being understanding of that situation—which they wouldn’t have expected from a young Iraqi male. They assumed, right away. They didn’t listen, they heard. That’s one thing I always face, the obvious, the Osama of Rap and shit like that. Shit that I don’t know what to say to anymore because it’s so ignorant. How old are you, 10? We’re adults here.”

Take us to (be) your leaders

One can’t say Alsalman is torn between his Eastern and Western identities. The guy’s too level-headed to be anything other than proud of and grateful for what each has offered him. But, compounded by his ability to project his voice through hip hop, they place him at a unique and potentially bewildering position in history. He’s an interlocutor, a mediator, a bridge, and he doesn’t take the task lightly.

“I do feel like Muslims my age, especially Muslims who grew up in the West, who can speak fluent English and articulate, have a mission, or a duty. Kids my age in Iraq can’t pick up a microphone, get up on a stage at Foufounes at midnight and talk to people. So I feel I do have responsibility, but I don’t see it as a burden at all. I see it as a raison d’être—I gotta do it. I can’t stop.”

As the Jordan jaunt indicates, turning his bullhorn 180 degrees is part of the contract. The Bush administration and their remaining ventriloquist’s dummies may push Iraq as the front line in the—everybody air-quote now—war on terror, but it seems more sensible to draw that line through the Arabic youthquake. That is, to see a peaceful, productive resolution to this replacement Cold War resting with the expanding sea of young Muslims worldwide, schooled not by madrassas but by MTV. You know, hearts and minds.

“I think hip hop is the most powerful vehicle that the youth have nowadays,” says Alsalman. While he astutely notes the complications of corporate commodification, he declares, “It opened my eyes to the world, and I think that’s what it’s going to do for people back East as well.”

The Narcicyst raps in Arabic as well as English, an activity that entails its own complex set of delights and difficulties. But when he reaches out in an eastward direction, he doesn’t do so in a vacuum.

“After the guys in France, IAM and all of them, we were one of the first anglophone Arabic hip hop groups to come out, at a time where everything was political. The movement’s huge now. If you go on MySpace, it’s ridiculous how many Arab artists there are, from all over the Middle East. I think we’re all leaders, because in the Middle East, we’re at a lack of leaders, leaders that represent us and the truth. If we all take this role so seriously that we could change the world, we will.”

Anger management

Given that it was conceived expressly for non-violent gang-conflict resolution, hip hop was born with the right tools for the job. But it’s also the musical movement that gave us that other big round of bloody east-west reciprocity. The pitfalls are not lost on Alsalman.

“A lot of the Arab artists who do pick up the mic end up reiterating what the system is feeding us. ‘Lyrically I’ll drop a bomb on you, jihad this, jihad that.’ They’ll use the common terms in the media that represent us to articulate their rage and feeling of misunderstanding. I’ve made it a point to not be that angry Arab.”

He pauses, double-checks himself. “On certain songs, I’ll be the angry Arab, but on the next song, you’ll see I’m not only that.”

He says The Illuminarcy Project expands the latter aspect. “I wanted to show people who I am as an individual, more than just the political side. The reason I chose the name Narcicyst is because that’s the plight of the MC, to speak on his or her environment and experience.” (As for the cyst twist, he adds, “it’s because I grow on you—and I’m ill!”)

“You know, when Nofy passed away, I asked myself, what am I going to do now? Where am I going to turn to? Because everything that I knew and I’d built as an artist had been deleted and buried.”

The derogatory slur American soldiers sling at Iraqis is hajji, unaware that the term is an honourable one, translating to ‘pilgrim.’ Alsalman’s point in, and the point of, his pilgrimage became clear while assembling Stuck Between Iraq and a Hard Place, a mix CD of material with an array of producers, bridging Stereotypes and Illuminarcy (including NWA’s signature jam recast as “Straight Outta Basrah”).

“That’s exactly how I was feeling—stuck between wanting to belong to Iraq and here, realizing that both places are hard to live in, and that I probably won’t fit into either. That frees me to an extent, because I don’t really have a geographical connection to anywhere. The world is where I belong.”

At Théâtre Corona on Wednesday, Nov. 8, 8 p.m., $20. The Festival du Monde Arabe de Montréal runs Oct. 26-Nov. 12 (www.festivalarabe.com)

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