The return of Marwan Pablo: Searching for individuality in the muck

On February 25, Marwan Pablo released his first track since announcing his sudden retirement nearly a year earlier. Widely considered one of the most important voices in a new generation of trap and hip hop artists in Egypt, Pablo’s comeback track Jungle quickly went viral, trending for two days straight across the Arab world, from Morocco to the United Arab Emirates.

For the track’s music video, Pablo collaborated with director Selim El Sadek, and muralist and graffiti artist Ammar Abo Bakr. Sadek explained on Instagram Live that he sought to transpose a vision of the jungle — using structures of concrete, cement, steel and billboard scaffolding — to create a stark urban landscape for Pablo to roam through as he sings.

Sadek chose the locations and gave Abo Bakr free rein to design the sets, Abo Bakr told Mada Masr. The video opens on a shot of a pool of stagnant water that pans through a vast empty room with concrete columns pierced by beams of light. Abo Bakr built a wooden structure draped in a paper sheath, intended to evoke the green scrim hung around buildings under construction or repair. He also threw in a patchwork of color to the draping, drawing on the image he had seen of a half-demolished building on Giza’s Tersa Street, its exposed, brightly painted room walls connected to an adjacent building.

He also painted a backdrop on a trailer truck that carries Pablo along the Saft al-Laban Corridor, employing the same decorative elements used by truck drivers on their own trailers. Favoring street art of the kind that goes unnoticed by the art scene in Egypt, he is inspired by the ornamental trappings on horse carts and shoeshine boxes: “The things that seem simple on the surface, that artists ignore because they don’t know what to make of them,” Abo Bakr says. 

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The scene in the video that references the popular 1999 crime thriller Ard al-Khof (Land of Fear) was Pablo’s idea. He sent El Sadek a link to the film on YouTube, telling him that there was some nice camera work at minute 40. Sadek said that they could use the scene for inspiration, as an homage to the film’s iconic director, Dawoud Abdel Sayed.

Pablo — who first emerged in 2015 as Dama — took an 11-month hiatus from the music scene spurred by a bout of depression stemming from the increasingly high expectations of his music by his fans and the growing pressures of his rapid success. He disappeared from social media save for an appearance in three live videos. In the first, he talks about his depression and why he stopped making music. He discusses his fear of giving in to the opinions and taste of his fans, which he felt was making him less willing to experiment as an artist. 

Combining the skills of a singer, poet, and music producer, Pablo writes his songs the way he speaks. He summed up his discontent in the final verse of Free, the last track he released before his break, declaring himself an artist beyond the confines of trap and hip hop: “I’m not a rapper, I’m Picasso.” In response to the pressures of his skyrocketing fame, he heeded his own call in Free to let everything go and announced his retirement, turning his back on the success and fame he had achieved with eight influential songs in less than two years. 

In the second video during his brief retirement, he disavowed the song Dynamite, which was released by producer Molotof on his own channel two months after Pablo quit. In the third video, Pablo declared his support for the survivors of the Fairmont rape case and encouraged any woman who had experienced sexual violence to speak out.

Two days before the video for Jungle was released, a trailer was posted on Twitter teasing Pablo’s return. It showed him climbing a huge billboard set on top of a Cairo building and dancing for the camera, with a clip of the song playing in the background. 

“Let me be, you’re in the way. I never saw you back in the day. Where were you then? When we’d stay all night in the rain, those days of action and raising Cain.” 

In the teaser, Pablo derides the behavior of his contemporaries in Egypt during the year of his seclusion, during which a rivalry between rappers Abyusif, Marwan Moussa and Wegz reached its apex, with insults traded back and forth over a flurry of diss tracks and live videos.. The same day Pablo released the video teaser, Marwan Moussa released a song dissing Abyusif, prompting him to release his own diss track. The pair carried on the feud for another two days. Meanwhile, Wegz limited his attacks to his Instagram stories, in which he tried to come to terms with what people were saying about him — “I kept on working until they said I’d forgotten my roots” — and to overcome the “obsession with money” that plagued him since he left Alexandria’s Wardayan district for a compound on the outskirts of Cairo between Madinaty and Sheikh Zayed, having spent 2020 doing commercials for mobile phone companies. 

Reviewing the output of Wegz, Abyusif and Marwan Moussa this past year, it’s easy to understand why Pablo decided to leave it all behind in March 2020. In his live videos, he makes it clear he couldn't stomach the burgeoning rapper wars, or the fact that most of their songs were diss tracks. It confused him that a rapper could diss him in a song and then be all smiles if they ran into each other at a cafe. 

In his first live video after he quit the scene, Pablo said one reason he left was that his fellow rappers seemed to think more about him and his rapid success than about themselves, writing songs specifically to provoke him or disrespect him. Although he appreciates the artistry of rap disses Pablo said the focus on diss tracks would not help rap expand in Egypt as the public would fail to understand them.

In his own work, Pablo has instead tried to open up new directions for rap lyrics. Sometimes his tracks seem like a form of self-encouragement, an urging to let loose and break taboos. He isn’t deliberately cruel, though he may reflect honestly on a long-contemplated issue: “We grew up and got it/Lost and found it/Ever present through the absence/Poverty we saw/Lived lean and raw/Thank God, he makes up for it all.” 

In one post-retirement video, Pablo made clear he intends his songs to directly reflect his views and vice-versa. He said he can’t live a double life: one as an artist who disses his contemporaries in his work, and another who feigns cordiality with the same friends in person. “If I got into it with someone and then saw him at the cafe, I’d have a go at him,” he said. 

In Winter, which was released back when he was performing as Dama, he raps: “It was never my style to pick a fight to hide my own flaws.” It was possible the problem was his, he later said., that maybe he was “incapable of separating things.”

“All the idols gonna shatter/It’s no act, I’m not a hack/I tell it plain, in your face, no shame/Demons buzzing in my ear.”

Pablo’s track Where you want spurred the first confluence of rap and mahragan music in Egypt. Sadat was so taken with Pablo’s lyrics that he covered the song after Figo remixed it as a mahragan track with drums and finger cymbals. Sadat then posted the song on his YouTube page, evidently unconcerned about copyright. 

Pablo has a talent for writing lyrics that flow like ordinary speech, employing a syntax taken from everyday expressions. He borrows idiosyncratic colloquialisms that have turned into pat phrases, such as in the track Where you want. The phrase of that song’s title originated among taxi drivers with the meaning of “where to,” before evolving into a widely used idiom with multiple meanings. It was this common linguistic currency that inspired Sadat to cover the song, after he found himself humming a line from the song one day, “We don’t go for the shady stuff, just straight up style.”

Sadat also collaborated with Pablo on the refrain of Ezbat al-Gamaa. Produced, written and performed by Pablo, the song helped make a name for him on the mahragan scene after his first two tracks had already made him famous in the rap world. “Get the facts, not from Youm7 flacks: Dama’s gone and Pablo’s back.”

Pablo was one of the first rappers in Egypt to break one million views on YouTube with six songs from 2018 to 2019, though in his year of absence he stood by as the genre has continued to gain in popularity and his contemporaries grew their audiences.

“I need a little space,” he said in one live video, after realizing that his energies were spread too thin among the people around him. He also felt increasing pressure from the expectations of his legions of fans in a country where most famous singers are over 50. “In the end, I’m just a human being. I can make mistakes or do something that doesn’t meet your expectations.” 

Wegz, arguably the best-known rapper working today, who had the public stage largely to himself over the past year with Pablo gone, was initially influenced by Pablo’s first song Cover as well as Where You Want. “Wegz was one thing before he knew me and something else afterwards, and if he says otherwise, he’s a liar,” Pablo said. “He knows I love him and the things he does.” 

In his year away from the music scene, Pablo enjoyed a return to normal life. He wandered through the alleyways of the Alexandria neighborhood of Hadra (formerly Ezbat al-Gamaa), where he was relieved from the weight of his fame and regularly going to the mosque with a friend, trying to rid himself of the guilt he felt after realizing the magnitude of his influence on teenagers. 

In his first freestyle rap — captured by online music magazine Ma3azef — he said: “My mind’s spinning never sleeps/fuck school I make cash in heaps.” In the first video after he left music, he criticized himself for this line. “The way my life is now doesn’t necessarily apply to you,” he said, trying to advise young people who looked up to him as a model. 

“We grew up and got it/Lost and found it/Ever present through the absence/Poverty we saw/Lived lean and raw/Thank God, he makes up for it all.”

Despite regretting the phrase, Pablo didn’t ask Ma3azef to remove the video. On the other hand, Wegz, who also appears in the video, informed YouTube that he wasn't aware the footage of his freestyle would be published, forcing Ma3azef to take down the video and later repost an edited version with Wegz cut out. Pablo instead took responsibility for correcting his viewpoint. He also made an apology of sorts in Free, affirming the importance of education: “Moving toward graduation, Judgment Day’s the time of tabulation.”

When Jungle opens, Pablo, as usual, is searching for himself. It was the same in Cover, which he begins with “Just once I wanted to find myself,” and Sindbad, when he tells himself “time to get up,” and Free, in which he wakes himself from a state of madness. 

“Peace be upon you, stop hiding and appear,” he says in Jungle, trying to draw himself out of his shell and overcome a perpetual sense of unease. “Sounds trite, I know, but it’s true.” “It’s no act, I’m not a hack.”

Pablo was able to translate his experience of the last year—“We grew up and got it/Lost and found it”—and gained the self-confidence he’d always been searching for, now aware of his importance in the trap/hip hop landscape in Egypt. He exorcised the demons of fear and self-doubt whispering in his ear that his success was just luck, finally getting a glimpse of himself during the year he stopped making music — “ever present through the absence”. 

And in the end, he arrived at the truth: The world is a jungle and you’re either the hunter or the prey.