A Brooklyn-based artist and activist–Haram means “forbidden,” according to Sharia law–who bills herself as a “multidisciplinary propagandist,” she doesn’t want to be restricted by categories that have more to do with consumerism than art.
If a traditional disc jockey is someone who rides waves of sound from one record to the next, DJ Haram seeks to execute the much more difficult feat of staying afloat on a sea of content, cluttered with sights and sounds she can never fully control.
It’s an aesthetic of survival, reflecting what it means to be a politically engaged Arab-American artist at a time when the mainstream media isn’t simply marginalising your perspective, but trying to actively punish you for expressing it.
Growing up in a part of New Jersey where her Syrian and Circassian heritage was celebrated in a diasporic community, but which also imposed many restrictions on a rebellious young woman, New York City surely represented a place of freedom for Zubeyda Muzeyyen.
Now that DJ Haram has made the city her home, however, after a detour through the club scenes in her suburban home and Philadelphia, she is confronting the disturbing realisation that even in the multicultural metropolis, the pressure of an increasingly authoritarian establishment is making its presence felt.
As the intense backlash against Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the Democratic Party’s mayoral primary makes clear, the rich and powerful will do whatever they can to thwart the will of the people when it takes the form of a candidate who wants to make the city more affordable and refuses to be silent about Israel’s decimation of Gaza.
Long an outspoken supporter of communities pilloried for their “wokeness,” DJ Haram harbours no illusions about what the United States was like before Donald Trump returned to the White House.
Liberals supported the war against Palestinians as enthusiastically as conservatives, sometimes even more so. And their lip service paid to Black Lives Matter during the pandemic ceased as soon as it was politically expedient.
Yet as bad as things already were, they are getting worse by the day. Even the most peaceful protests are denounced for being Antisemitic and MAGA supporters talk openly of deporting Mamdani and other naturalised American citizens simply because of their political views.
It’s not easy to make art in such a relentlessly hostile environment, particularly when the art you want to make is self-consciously progressive.
That’s what makes Beside Myself so impressive. Not only did DJ Haram manage to complete one of the most impressive audio collages in years. She found a way to stay true to her convictions without resorting to the sort of button-pushing that has threatened to turn Bob Vylan and Kneecap into political sideshows.
Collaborating with like-minded artists such as Carmen Nebula, KAYY DRiZZ, El Kontessa, and Moor Mother, her partner in the duo 700 Bliss, DJ Haram keeps reminding us of her heritage and the commitments it entails, creating soundscapes that turn Orientalism inside out.
Even when you hear something that reminds you of the Middle East, it is contextualised within the American urban environment she calls home.
Like 700 Bliss’ debut, Nothing to Declare, Beside Myself was released by Hyperdub, the groundbreaking London label that helped dubstep transcend its club origins.
The relationship makes perfect sense. Following in the footsteps of Burial and label head Kode9’s 2006 collaboration with The Spaceape, Memories of the Future, DJ Haram situates listeners within a complex urban environment, shadowed by despair.
If those early Hyperdub releases captured “London after the rave,” as Mark Fisher famously put it, Besides Myself conveys an equivalent impression of American cities in which the future lies in ruins.
The relationship between the album’s opening track “Walking Memory” and a 36-minute vlog DJ Haram recently posted on YouTube under the same name testifies to her eagerness to blur boundaries.
The track opens with the sounds of overlapping conversations, as if a recorder had been set up in a café or other public space. Ponderous bass notes come next, spaced far apart and without an obvious pattern, followed by the plinking sounds of a piano’s upper register, machine gun synths, and more ambient sounds.
For the next three minutes, “Walking Memory” conveys a sense, not of coordinated music-making, but of its negative space.
This is the raw material that a talented disc jockey like DJ Haram might coordinate with the help of an underlying beat. But that is not what happens here.
Instead, “Walking Memory” meanders for three minutes more without ever coming together into cohesive music-making.
That’s why this track introduces us to the album. As its title indicates, DJ Haram fashioned it from the experience of being beside herself, split into pieces by rage, fear, and longing. She wants listeners to understand the effort required for someone in that state of mind to produce anything coherent.
The vlog begins the same way, with the beginning of the track playing underneath, as we see DJ Haram opening the curtains to her apartment, before cutting to a shot of watermelon being sliced. This juxtaposition, between the mundane details of her everyday life and the extraordinary attention to detail she devotes to her art, is the video’s dominant theme.
Once DJ Haram heads outside, the crowded spaces of New York City provide a visual counterpart to the vlog’s sonic bed.
At one point, a close-up of someone selling the Nation of Islam’s newspaper, The Final Call, in the subway shows the issue’s cover, in which a photograph of a huge explosion accompanies the headline “Genocide and Palestinian Expulsion Plans Persist Amid Closed-Door Talks.” This fleeting glimpse is echoed later in the vlog when the camera lingers on the handwritten slogan “Free Palestine.”
Although DJ Haram’s primary focus is her work as an artist, she finds ways to remind us that her personal struggle for self-expression is bound up with that of the Palestinian people. The privilege that makes it possible to create must not be taken for granted. Nor should we forget that the horrors of Gaza feel so close because of American involvement in the conflict and the relationship between high-tech firms and the Israeli war machine.
In a 2018 interview for The Quietus, DJ Haram expressed ambivalence about the internet’s impact on music. On the one hand, “it’s an access point for people without money or connections or who don’t live in big cities.” That makes it possible for someone like her to connect with a dispersed global audience and forge solidarity that transcends geography.
On the other hand, however, “it also requires you to do so much more work as an artist. There’s so much maintenance of your online brand and social media and content to be done in addition to just being a musician and playing gigs. Endless work”.
What the “Walking Memory” vlog attests to, more than anything, is DJ Haram’s commitment to this “endless work”, which the release of her album made even more demanding.
At one point, while chewing some of the watermelon she sliced earlier, she declares, “I’m so excited not to have to listen to the album anymore. I’m really tired of it.”
It’s a sentiment with which any working artist can identify. The harder you work on a project, the more it weighs you down.
“I think all the tracks could stand alone pretty well in the right context,” she continues. “But it’s an album that you listen to as an album. I can’t wait to not have to say the word ‘album.’”
Even though Beside Myself is one of the rare contemporary records that can be appreciated as a seamless whole, DJ Haram resists the sense of containment, of being boxed in and walled off, that the album as a finished product implies.
DJ Haram shifts gears with the restlessness of someone who knows that precarity follows from being pinned down. That’s why she channels everything from the traditional Middle Eastern sounds she grew up with to club music, hip-hop, and even punk’s rejection of mainstream palatability.
The point is the process, for which the tracks on the record function as snapshots.
Sometimes these snapshots are blurry. Sometimes the horizon is askew. Sometimes they capture details that complicate the picture they were meant to capture, haunted by a surplus beyond the artist’s control.
That’s what makes Beside Myself a perfect time capsule for these dark times. If we keep working as hard as DJ Haram, we might one day be able to revisit its contents from better ones.
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Photograph courtesy of B.C. Lorio. Published under a Creative Commons license.
