Michael Hakim, a Palestinian-Lebanese artist who is based in Los Angeles, has gone viral on Tiktok, with over 142,000 followers obsessing over his RnB music all about love, longing and language. Casually blending English and Arabic, Hakim’s music bridges the gap between separate and entwined parts of his Arab and American identities. His music evokes the many confusing, contradictory and interconnected types of love for both a person, and for a place.
“I started making music as a kind of self-discovery journey,” Hakim tells SceneNoise. His desire to reconcile the different parts of his identity is what initially drove him to start making music. Hakim grew up in LA with his Palestinian mother and Lebanese father, and would visit close family in Beirut throughout his childhood.
“I felt a sense of separation between parts of my identity growing up which was reflected in the world and music around me. I question this separation in my music,” Hakim says. Nancy Arjam and Haifa Wehbe were sounds kept strictly inside the family home, whilst Justin Bieber and Bryson Tiller were intrinsically Western sounds, circulating around him in public spaces. The oud, tabla rhythms and darbuka characteristic of Arab music did not mix with Western RnB. Surrounded by LA’s growing bilingual music scene in the 2000s, Hakim began to question why there were such rigid boundaries between Arab and Western music.
Through low-fi RnB melodies, Hakim evokes the experience of grappling with multiple, contradictory yet interrelated identities. English and Arabic are so seamlessly woven together in a way that just seems to make perfect sense, yet these intralingual rhymings are also so unexpected, creating an element of surprise that has captured the attention of a huge audience on TikTok and IInstagram. Confronting the confusion of being “too American” to be fully accepted as Lebanese during summer holidays spent in Beirut, and constantly being reminded of his outsider status in America, Hakim and his music linger between two identities, two places, never fully syncing into one completely.
“I didn’t want my music to fall neatly into one category,” Hakim says. “I feel as though when artists with dual, Arab-Western identities create music, their music shares distinctive tonal, rhythmic characteristics of ‘Arab’ sounding music and therefore falls into the category of Arab music.”
Producing more conventionally ‘Western’ RnB with lyrics alternating and hesitating between the rhythms of Arabic and English, but not settling into one or the other definitely, Hakim essentially wanted to “add Arabic to the music Western people listen to,” rather than producing something categorisable as fully Arabic or fully Western. As such, he also subverts expectations of what Arabic can do, narrating and enhancing ‘Western’ style music. He tells SceneNoise that his use of Arabic is “intentional, but casual and subtle.” Through such subtlety Hakim aims to “uncomplicate Arabic”, introducing a broader audience to the language as something beautiful, yet interwoven into daily life, both able to sync to the rhythms of Arab, as well as to more conventionally Western sounds.
Hakim’s music also resonates with those living in a diaspora through an exploration of the themes of love, loss and heartbreak. Tracks on his debut album, ‘Peaks and Valleys’, are all about his experience being away from a person he loves and misses whilst far away. As Hakim tells us, for those who share this experience of knowing multiple places as home, love and longing for a person becomes synonymous with a love and longing for a place. Through smooth, soulful, melismatic vocals and syncopated RnB beats, Hakim conveys simultaneous feelings of presence and absence, closeness and disconnection in relation to a person he loves as well as the places embedded in his identity. “The album is all about highs and lows: in my own personal journey with my music, in my personal life, and in relation to my own identity”.
Lingering between English and Arabic, one home and another, Hakim’s music transcends categorisation in a way that voices the experience of those constantly travelling between both places and both parts embedded in a hyphenated identity. With the release of his Valentines EP ‘Tornado’, Hakim tells SceneNoise that his new music will dive deeper into the complexities of love, continuing to resonate with those living in a diaspora. “I just want to keep subverting people’s expectations, and challenging the Western imagination of what Arabic is and what it means.”
