Mustafa, Toronto's hood poet, shoulders the stories of the lost

Rap is the CNN of the ghetto. An idea espoused by Public Enemy frontman Chuck D since the 1980s, it has since grown into a key hip-hop ideal, defining the music’s relationship with its public. Throughout its history, hip-hop has spotlit the turmoil faced by Black communities, in housing projects and neighborhoods from coast to coast — and, eventually, around the world. Chuck’s framing was a bit limited — rappers could always be so much more than reporters, serving themselves and their communities in other ways as advocates, radicals, lobbyists, franchisers and cult heroes — but his belief was sturdy, always invested in the genre’s function as a beacon. Still, it bears following the analogy to its logical end: Once those ghetto tales are broadcast to the outside world, what happens to them? Who steps in as the stewards of that shared history, archiving all of its beliefs, rituals and myths? Who is there to preserve the memories and traditions of the lost, as folklorists for the streets?

For years, the poet and now singer-songwriter Mustafa has aimed to fill such a void — particularly for the city of Toronto, and the turbulent Regent Park neighborhood where he was raised, but also for all cities bearing a resemblance. “So much of what I am is the hood,” he recently told fellow poet Hanif Abdurraqib. His earliest poetry was about being aware of that distinction from a young age, and being baffled by its complications: “A Single Rose,” which he performed at 12 before Nelson Mandela Park Public school, couldn’t make sense of the violence happening or those turning a blind eye to it. He has spent his artistic career, across many media, trying to find that sense. The gang Mustafa formed with friends from Regent Park and neighboring Esplanade, Halal Gang, became an arts collective in 2014, centering rap music and trying to put faces to the area’s conflicts. In 2016, the writer Safy-Hallan Farah wrote in MTV News that “the division that springs out of kids’ departure from their parents’ traditions is the space, place, and time that Halal Gang … was formed,” noting the disparate cultures that the collective was navigating and the distance between them. Mustafa laid out his mission plainly to Farah: “I wanna do it for the kids to see themselves. I wanna refine the narrative.”

The broader strokes of the narrative were clear: Second-generation Canadians, largely children of East African immigrants, were grappling with who they were, and in trying to claim and defend the blocks they were filling, found themselves embroiled in territorial violence. The refinement Mustafa was chasing was in the very role of the gang, a means of protection and of village-building. Halal Gang was living both truths, as “downtown hood dream,” as Mustafa put it, and nightmare. Two days after “Still” (also known as “Rabba”), the Drake-cosigned 2016 breakout from Halal Gang members Mo-G and Smoke Dawg, was recorded, their friend Ano was killed. Another friend of Mustafa’s, Ali Rizeig, was shot at his Regent Park home in 2017. Then, in 2018, Smoke Dawg was shot dead in front of a nightclub. “The light of the community dimmed,” Mustafa told Noisey that same week. In response, he produced and directed the 2019 documentary, Remember Me, Toronto, and in 2021 released his first solo music, When Smoke Rises.

Though rap-adjacent through Halal Gang and pop-adjacent through writing credits for Camila Cabello, the Jonas Brothers and Shawn Mendes, Mustafa is, nominally, a folk musician. His music does draw upon a familiar acoustic, guitar-spun fingerstyle sound, but it is more so “folk music” in the sense that he is an actual keeper of street folklore. That lore is both singular and common — as a document of the East African experience of Toronto gang culture, and an accounting of how persistent and pervasive such an experience can feel across neighborhoods and cities and nations. When Smoke Rises, which was produced by Frank Dukes, a rap beatmaker operating at the pop convergence of genrelessness, stretched the folk sound to fit new contexts. The project seemed to be animated by the minimalist, indie-inflected Canadian R&B of the 2010s, and counted soulful electronic artists Sampha, James Blake and Jamie xx among its contributors, all in pursuit of a roots movement for the hip-hop generation. In its harrowingly heavenly songs you can hear a cross-cultural exchange, and his ability to embody many different frameworks at once quickly drew attention for its clarity of thought and purpose: When Smoke Rises was shortlisted for the Polaris Prize in 2021, and the video for “Ali,” the poignant song Mustafa wrote for Rizeig, won the Prism Prize in 2022. In the video, as he sings of trying and failing to usher his friend away from a dangerous place, those sitting around him vanish into smoke around him. It is a powerful image: Mustafa, the lone voice left in the room, singing through the anguish for those lost.

That burden can be heavy, and Mustafa’s gorgeous, taxing full-length debut, Dunya, tries to reconcile the effects of carrying so much of your city within you and being a voice for both those killed and those left behind. Across 12 tenderly murmured songs, he sounds weary, the interrogation of the mantle he bears pushing his gaze ever inward. The album appraises spirituality, gratification and agony as the means to negotiate ideas of East and West, home and community, what is personal and what is omnipresent. His songs have always pulled the listener into closed-door heart-to-hearts and pleading reflections so tense and touching they feel both visceral and unknowable, but now all of the borders are dissolving, with only him at the center.

Toward the end of When Smoke Rises, Mustafa sings of being unprepared in the face of so much loss: “We forgot to talk about Heaven / And leaving / And what it would mean / And how I would grieve,” he sings. The idea lingers in Dunya: Last July, his brother Mohamed, was shot and killed, and on “What Happened, Mohamed?” more questions ring out: Are you lonely? Do you need a homie? He still sees himself as a stand-in for those the streets have claimed, as an emissary or intercessor — “Seen Ace on that big bike when I was 12 / I thought he’d live forever, but now he’s in hell,” he sings on “Beauty, end.” “Wings ain’t built for the size of his cell / So he let me hold his till he gets an appeal” — a responsibility that has seemingly always been his to bear, in one way or the other, but on Dunya he refuses to let questions about what leaving means and how he would grieve go unheeded. He spends much of the album asking.

Mustafa sits at a distinctive cultural intersection, as a Sudanese-Canadian Muslim artist with activist bonafides who has stood shoulder to shoulder with both Justin Trudeau and The Weeknd, and as a result has operated as a kind of interpreter between realms. When Smoke Rises, even at its most withdrawn, felt like it was serving a eulogistic function: In speaking for and preserving the memories of others, he recognized the necessity of communicating their trauma and struggle for those who wouldn’t see them. But it’s clear listening to Dunya that Mustafa is done translating. Songs like “SNL” and “Gaza is Calling” are decidedly layered with colloquialisms from across cultures, far from indecipherable but not concerned with what nuances may go unspoken. Here, many of the most important parts feel like they are none of the audience’s business. And yet, his panorama is so carefully furnished, in sound and detail, that it often feels like you are in the room with him, privy to encounters you don’t have context for but can understand intuitively. His aching, sensitive voice is the anchor steadying listeners through a time-dilated spiritual journey. As he remembers images from his past on songs like “What Happened, Mohamed?” and “What good is a heart?” he sings as if he is seeing them in real time, like Interstellar’s Joseph Cooper floating through a fourth-dimensional tesseract composed of infinite copies of his daughter’s childhood bedroom. In Islam, “dunya,” which roughly means “this world in which we live,” is often used in reference to the transient nature of the mortal plane. Mustafa’s conception of this on his album tries to reconcile two senses of “temporary” — the Quranic notion of earthly life being but a blip along the path to an eternal afterlife, and the Western one of feeling like every single moment must be seized and cherished.

When “Imaan,” the Dunya single co-produced by The National’s Aaron Dessner (notably a major collaborator on Taylor Swift’s Folklore and Evermore), was released, Mustafa spoke of the song as an anatomizing of this crossing: “two Muslims journeying through their love of borderless Western ideology and how it contradicts with the modesty and devotion in which they were raised.” There is friction in the way it is overlaid sonically, too — strings from his homeland, Sudan; oud from Egypt; drums and chords from American folk. The contradictory pull of self-indulgence and adherence to piety is the album’s core tension, and in picking at these dueling impulses, he finds himself reconsidering all of his connections, earthly or otherwise. There are far more questions than answers, but the seeking feels like its own response, and his probing yet self-effacing lyrics feel like proof of progress. His songs have always been buoyed by his writing, which is as surgical as it is impenetrable on Dunya, but the album pulls further away from the emphatic poeticism of spoken word, instead moving toward a more hymnal quality representative of such devotional music.

I wrote in 2021 that listening to Mustafa’s music could feel like eavesdropping on a prayer, thinking primarily of invocation as a private conversation with a higher power. But on Dunya, nearly every such solemn act is performed as a kind of bonding ritual: a barometer for how close or far he is from others, the vessel ushering Mustafa through scenes of grief and agency. On “Beauty, end,” he explains that learning how to pray is one of the things he memorized as a child, along with speaking and jumping and smiling. When he notes on “What good is a heart?” how someone with whom he’s intimately acquainted has changed, one of the key differences is in the way that they pray. “At least return, make me believe, those secrets are safe with you / My mother was sick, tell me you prayed / Like I used to pray with you,” he pleads on “Old Life,” seeking some sign of care. Faith can be a tether, but it can also be oxygen, a shared life force from which being separated can feel suffocating, and throughout Dunya, Mustafa seems to be between panic attacks, trying to catch his breath. It is in the moments where he can feel God in the room that he finds comfort and companionship.

So much of Dunya is in conversation with someone specific just out of view: Mohamed and Imaan and Nouri, the nameless Palestinian boy he grows apart from on “Gaza is Calling,” and, on “I’ll Go Anywhere,” God himself. The details are so crisp and particular as to be pointed: a father’s taxi in an alley, texts received during a viewing in Rexdale. Even in situations of separation, he seems to be internalizing the ways in which every person on the outside of the frame is an extension of his chosen path, an idea he articulates profoundly on “Old Life”: “I’m not yours / But there’s a part of your life that is mine.”

Maybe that’s why the Daniel Caesar duet “Leaving Toronto” feels like the most gut-wrenching song on Dunya to me. In its lyrics, Mustafa has been exhausted by the fight and all that it has taken from him, singing, “If we’re burning this city, tell me where to start.” But there is clearly conflict within him; parting with the city would mean excising part of himself. “I’m leaving Toronto / I would drown this whole city if I could,” he sings, before admitting, “There’s nowhere I can go / That has enough room to let me bring my hood.” At the end of the song, he leaves a sort of will and testament: If he’s killed, he says, bury him next to his brother, pray for him, and — he reiterates twice — make sure that his killer has money for a lawyer. It’s that last part that is particularly telling. Everyone, he seems to imply, deserves to be spoken for.