Marwan Moussa Already Defined Egyptian Rap. He Wants To Go Even Further

The first few seconds of Marwan Moussa’s song “3AMEL EH” open with an interaction between the rapper and a voice that seemingly belongs to his therapist.

The therapist can be heard asking the 30-year-old Egyptian artist about his feelings. Moussa responds by asking her to dim the lights so he can better share what’s on his mind, before completely baring his soul about his depression and vulnerably sharing his fears.

It was the first song Moussa released since his mother passed away in October 2023 after a prolonged battle with illness. Just a few days after her passing came Oct. 7 and the ensuing Israeli invasion into Gaza.

“3AMEL EH,” released this past July, became Moussa’s way of processing his feelings on these events, in particular his mother’s death. It marked a stark departure for an artist who’s better known for his jovial wordplay and high energy, setting the course for what would become an introspective year for the rapper.

“I was just tired of making music where I’m flexing and saying ‘I’m so cool’ and stuff,” Moussa says bluntly from his home in Cairo over WhatsApp. “I felt like this is not actually what our values are as Arabs. Moving forward, I want to choose more wisely what it is that I’m bragging about.”

In this new wave of Egyptian rappers and in the broader Arabic hip-hop scene, Marwan Moussa is considered a pioneer, constantly forging his own authentic path and standing above a crowded field thanks to his lyricism and his thoughtful blend of Atlanta trap and Egyptian mahraganat, a genre known for its edgy, low-tech production and catchy melodies.

With more than 230 million streams on the regional Middle Eastern music platform Anghami and more than 180 million views of his videos on YouTube, Moussa has maintained his grip over Arabic rap over the last few years. He’s sold out shows both in the Middle East and North Africa as well as across Europe. Moussa is the third most-streamed Arab rapper of all time on Spotify, behind fellow countryman Wegz and Moroccan juggernaut ElGrandeToto. 

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Most recently, he made a cameo appearance performing with Palestinian-Chilean singer Elyanna in London this past December for a preview of a highly-anticipated remix to Elyanna’s song “Yabn El Eh”. 

“It is young artists like Marwan Moussa and his outside-the-box vision of what Arabic popular music should look like that has shifted the Egyptian and Arab music scene,” says Big Hass, a DJ and radio host on Pulse 95 FM, an English-language radio station in Sharjah, the United Arab Emirates. “Adding your own flavor while remaining authentic is what makes artists stand out. I think Marwan Moussa has played a pivotal role in giving the scene a facelift and catering to a younger generation who have a different approach to life, to what is relatable, and to what is simply fresh.”

Born in Ismailia, Egypt, and raised in Cairo, Moussa first became exposed to music through the violin, playing the instrument when he was six years old.

“My mom forced me to do it,” he says with a chuckle. “When I was 13, I ditched it immediately.”

Moussa ditched the violin for a CD of the soundtrack to the seminal 2002 film 8 Mile, memorizing Eminem songs from the album like “Rabbit Run” and “Lose Yourself” and ultimately leading him to discover 50 Cent and the Game. (“I took The Game’s side in that beef,” Moussa admits.)

But in 2007, his parents divorced, leaving an emotional scar that caused Moussa to give up music entirely.

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“I’m an only child, and it affected me,” the rapper says candidly. “I started being just very against everything, and I hated everything. I was also at an age where I’m going through puberty — both of these things hit at the same time. I just had no motivation to even go and find music or listen to music.”

Deeply inspired by classic mafia movies Goodfellas and The Godfather, Moussa began immersing himself into filmmaking with the hopes of being a director, even obtaining a degree in film from the American University of Rome (AUR).

Simultaneously, however, Moussa was reading books on managing a soccer club. He says he was “way more into football than I was into directing,” and he closely followed his favorite teams — Liverpool, Valencia, and local Egyptian club Ismaily SC.

Despite all of this, his time at AUR proved pivotal to his musical career. While at school in Rome, he slowly rediscovered his love for hip-hop, crediting his roommates and peers for playing music all the time together — even freestyling over beats with each other.

Moussa shouts out Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d city, for his reentry into music. He went on to gravitate toward what he calls “outcasts” of hip-hop — artists like Travis Scott, Future, and Young Thug — in the years before all three became superstars. 

These artists — along with a self-reflective spring break trip to Amsterdam, where Moussa questioned why he had not maximized the potential of his musical talents — influenced the rapper to download beat-making software Logic Pro and try his hand at production.

Even then, he says, he yearned for a missing musical connection to his home of Egypt. In his last year at AUR, he started listening to avant-garde Egyptian rapper Abyusif.

“I’m loving all of these American trap artists, but there’s nothing I can do with all of this knowledge or passion,” Moussa begins to explain. “When I heard Abyusif rapping in Arabic — in Egyptian Arabic — and mentioning the names of streets that are here in Egypt and the names of the restaurants we all go to, I was like, ‘Wait a minute. I can do this in Arabic.’ I didn’t know that I could even rap in Arabic, that it was possible to not sound corny.”

Not long after, Moussa went from listening to Abyusif to fully collaborating with him, helping to launch Moussa’s career as a rapper in 2016.

The rapper concedes that his early music lacked the distinct Egyptian sound he wanted. Moussa says now that he still aspired to be part of hip-hop history and create a sound in the same way that New York and the Bay Area and Houston all had their own sounds.

Moussa turned to mahraganat — what he affectionately calls rap’s “cousin” in Egypt. He speaks about the massively popular genre with great respect and reverence, despite many attempts by the Egyptian government to suppress what they and many of Egypt’s elite perceive as a so-called lesser genre.

The Egyptian Musicians Syndicate, which oversees almost every aspect of music in the country, issued a complete ban on mahraganat in February 2020, ordering venues not to play the genre or book mahraganat artists. The following year, 19 mahraganat artists were banned from ever performing in Egypt.

“It really annoyed me because I felt like these guys, they’re just making music,” Moussa passionately shares. “And I really respect all of them. These guys — with basically no money, with no facilities — they took these old Windows computers and they made a genre with the microphone headset. That’s how they recorded. I have to respect these people, and they made all of Egypt listen to the music.”

He worked with pioneering mahraganat producer Alaa Fifty Cent to combine the genre’s uniquely Egyptian drum patterns with elements of trap to help usher in a new sound now commonly known as trap shaabi and replicated by many rappers across Egypt.

While he faced some backlash from Egyptian hip-hop fans for this approach, no one could ignore Moussa’s breakthrough 2021 album, Florida, a 13-track master class in trap shaabi that quickly spread across North Africa and the Middle East.

The rapper has since gone on to release a string of hits that not only further this sound but try to include other elements unique to Arabic music, like maqam scales and instruments native to the Middle East and North Africa.

In 2022 alone, Moussa commanded hip-hop in Egypt and the region, releasing staples in his discography like the toxic love song “Aloomek,” the braggadocious “Batal 3alam,” and the samba-inspired “Brazil” with frequent collaborator and fellow Egyptian rapper Afroto.

It led to his recognition as Best Artist in African Hip-Hop at that year’s All Africa Music Awards, but Moussa stresses that he’s not in this for awards. His true goal of creating and refining Egypt’s sound in hip-hop has not changed, even if the circumstances around him and his lyrical themes have taken a different approach.

Now, the rapper is leaning more into his feelings and his vulnerability, exposing himself more for his listeners to hear. “I’m against hiding from your emotions, and I feel like it’s counterproductive,” he says emphatically.

As he gears up for the release of a new album examining the five stages of grief, Moussa, an independent artist, dropped his latest EP, Denial, last summer. It’s an emotional preview of what’s to come, with three reflective songs including “AMOT ANA,” which cleverly samples the song “Yana Yana” by iconic Lebanese singer Sabah.

Older than many of his rap peers, Moussa is acutely aware of his place in the emerging wave of Arabic music. And he’s quick to point out that making music isn’t the same as when he was first starting.

“The SoundCloud era was one of the realest periods of music ever,” he boasts. “Everyone on SoundCloud was doing it for real. No one was doing it for money or for clout. Now we’re in a different era where the major labels have regained control over the music. We’re kind of in the radio age again, where you need to get pushed, you need a label to tell people. I’m trying to be cool with everything. But I’m telling you, the artists who make music, they don’t do it for the same reasons that we used to do it.”

Even with changing industry dynamics, Moussa remains set on his goal of ingraining his music as part of the fabric of the Middle East and North Africa.

“If someone starts singing this song and everyone sings along to it, you know that this song is in the DNA of our people, of our community, our culture,” Moussa says. “That’s a success that I want to reach in terms of the whole Arab region.”