47SOUL with WAKE ISLAND at Radio (formerly Adelaide Hall, 250 Adelaide West), Saturday (March 9), 7 pm. $35-$40, $30 students. eventbrite.ca.
47Soul have created a revolutionary new genre called Shamstep and this week – after a lengthy, but utterly symbolic rescheduling after a problem with their visitors’ visas in January – they’ll finally bring it to Canada.
Shamstep is a mix of traditional Palestinian street music and electronic beats. “Our influences derive from hip-hop, dub, soul, rock and even gospel, but the drums stay Arabic,” says El Far3i, vocalist and percussionist of the London, England-based quartet, which also includes Z The People, Walaa Sbeit and El Jehaz.
Formed in Amman, Jordan, in 2013, the Palestinian and Jordanian musicians all have roots in Bilad al-Sham, Arabic for “land to the north” and the region referred to as Levant or Greater Syria.
Their varying citizenships make them accustomed to travel issues and displacement, but rather than deter them, it inspires them to create lyrics infused with political messages.
The most intriguing characteristic of their music, sung in both English and Arabic, is the seamless blending of dabke – an Arab folk dance, which originated in Bilad al-Sham and remains a cherished tradition in the region – with more modern sounds to create a rhythmic, hypnotic sound.
Their first hit single, Intro To Shamstep, defined their infectious blend of politics and rhythm and racked up more than eight million views on YouTube.
But El Far3i doesn’t want to take full credit for it.
“The way people in Palestine and around the world interact with our beats reminds us that we don’t own them people have been dancing to these grooves for ages,” he says. “We need to appreciate the power behind any sounds we inherited, but also make a contribution that represents our crew, our music style and our generation of Arab youth because we’ve been subjected to multidirectional oppression that needs expression.”
The title of their debut full-length, Balfron Promise, released in 2018, is a pun tinged with irony: It alludes to the British government’s 1917 Balfour Declaration, which paved the way for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine as pledged by Arthur James Balfour, the foreign secretary at the time.
As fate would have it, the band members found themselves temporarily residing in Balfron Tower, a social housing complex in London. The landlords had opened up several of the unused apartments to artists on a short-term basis, while evicting their established tenants, after having been bought by a luxury property developer.
Given the band members’ shared legacy of dispossession, displacement and exile, it was only natural for them to draw parallels between the political and economic forces that can uproot people on a whim, and how hegemony impacts people’s lives. Thematically, injustices and inequalities are inextricably linked in their music.
Dania Majid, programmer of the Toronto Palestine Film Festival, partnered with Jokermail Productions to bring 47Soul to Toronto. She says they have broad appeal inside and outside the Arab world.
“47Soul’s music is transboundary,” she says. “Their lyrics address a range of universal themes that affect Palestinians and marginalized peoples across the world: exile, borders, gentrification and homelessness.”
Given those realities, El Far3i shares the inspiration behind the group’s name.
“We put our soul in our music and we feel this energy comes from the feeling of separation, which the youth in Bilad al-Sham have been subjected to as a result of the borders that have been forced on our people, but also from the longing for freedom of movement between areas, which ended in 1947,” says El Far3i.
That’s the year Resolution 181 passed at the UN, calling for the partition of British Mandate Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, with Jerusalem being administered as a separate entity.
“47Soul is emblematic of a person who believes we need open borders to reunite families, friends, artists,” El Far3i says. “Or just to reunite a people who’ve been separated from one another with no control over their own destiny.”
