Thoughts on Mustafa's Dunya
Mustafa Ahmed, formerly known as Mustafa the Poet, releases his full-length debut record, Dunya, this week. The title, translated from the Arabic, means “the world in all its flaws.” Mustafa—Sudanese-Canadian and a practising Muslim—grew up in the Regent Park neighbourhood in Toronto’s downtown.
At only 28, Mustafa exhibits a staggering level of maturity—even world-weariness—on Dunya. His first project, the Juno-winning and Polaris-shortlisted When Smoke Rises, memorialized his friend and fellow Halal Gang member, the rapper Smoke Dawg, who was murdered in 2018. The new album arrives after Mustafa’s brother, Mohamed Ahmed, was killed in July 2023 in Toronto. Dunya is, in many ways, about attempting to metabolize unspeakable grief and pain, and grappling with questions of faith in the wake of violence and loss.
A Short Digression: On “Folk Music” and Folk Festivals
Since I discovered Mustafa’s music in 2021, I’ve found it endlessly rewarding to think through his gesture to claim “folk music” as his own for his work. I grew up attending folk festivals in western Canada in my teens, and the modern folk festival is a fascinating place. Folk festivals present as vaguely or residually left-liberal as a political project, and you can find yourself sitting at a side-stage branded by a resource extraction company where a performer will give a rousing speech about the importance of individualized anti-racist action. The many contradictions of contemporary liberal politics are crystallized before one’s eyes as performers negotiate the limits of the politics of recognition in real-time. Can speech or music effect real, material change in the world? If so, does one choose to speak about individuals or systems? Is “folk music”—especially after its commercial popularization in America in the 1960s and 1970s with figures like Dylan, James Taylor, Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, etc—now inherently individualistic and, therefore, possibly fundamentally incompatible with notions of collective struggle? What does it mean to agitate for change from the Cenovus Stage on stolen land?
Another strange reality of contemporary folk music festivals—in Canada, at least—is how they relate to race, ethnicity, and culture. Some folk festivals, like the Calgary Folk Music Festival for example, adopt a more inclusive programming style1 where “folk music” is (re)interpreted to apply to basically any music from around the world.2 Rappers and turntablists will share the stage with numerous big-hatted contemporary Americana singer-songwriters, brass bands, and desert blues artists. This programming view’s underlying philosophy is, I assume, indebted to the same liberal multicultural imaginary of my 1990s Canadian childhood where people become “interculturally competent” through cultural sampling—though this often amounts to just more consumption—and learn values like respect and tolerance. Sometimes, you’ll hear people at festivals programmed like this talk about music being a “universal language” that allows people to convene and communicate beyond national, cultural, and linguistic barriers.
Other folk festivals, like Edmonton’s long-running one, take a different approach. Edmonton Folk Music Festival’s programming approach feels, generally, less cosmopolitan, and it attempts to satisfy “folk music” purists by traditionally focusing largely on singer-songwriters and fiddle music. Historically, the worst effect of this approach is that real/pure/authentic “folk music” is essentialized as anything white-coded, and racialized performers become consigned to a “world music” genre ghetto. Though I have noted EFMF booking acts like The War and Treaty, Rhiannon Giddens, and Black Pumas in recent years, they still always seem to draw the line at “no rap,” which I find amusing. That said, I should also acknowledge EFMF’s Nikamowin Indigenous programming initiative here, which was launched in 2022 and showcases Indigenous artistry in a meaningful reconciliatory gesture. Progress is being made and it is important to recognize that, though folk festivals remain, to my mind, deeply contradictory spaces.
All of this is to say that Mustafa claiming “folk music” for his art is an act of unavoidable political significance. Here is what I wrote on my 2021 year-end list about When Smoke Rises interfacing with “folk music”:
I discovered this album later than I probably should have, after the wave of initial press in May and the subsequent Polaris nomination. Having spent more time with this over the last few weeks, and with apologies to Cadence Weapon, I think this definitely should've won Polaris. The breadth of thought and emotion across this short collection of meticulously-refined material is staggering. Carrie & Lowell is an obvious reference point here, but it's transposed to a different context where suffering and loss are made more brutally banal by systemic violence. Mustafa's conscious engagement with the "folk" mode is also subtly transgressive here, as he writes from personal experience candidly yet often gently about life in Toronto's Regent Park neighbourhood, gang violence, guns, his own revenge fantasies, the premature death of friends, whether they will be forgiven in the afterlife, etc ... instead of trains, rambling, carrying loads, brothers, and little gals. This at a time when residual Boomercore conceptions of folk music in this country lead to younger generations of artists doing a kind of tedious settler-colonial cosplay of deracinated and exhausted tropes in order to ... get that sweet, sweet, oil company-sponsored folk fest money? Lol. Has Penguin Eggs reviewed When Smoke Rises? I ask because it's the most compelling "folk" album of the year by any real metric.
I am still happy with that write-up, and all of it still applies to Dunya. I still hear intrumentation reminiscent of Sufjan Stevens’ Carrie & Lowell and even his 2023 record Javelin across Dunya, though this is combined with pronounced hip-hop indebted production and sonics rarely found on “folk” albums: the Sudanese tambour, Egyptian oud, Arabic chanting, etc.
Somehow, despite being produced during an intense period of personal strife for Mustafa, Dunya feels occasionally lighter than When Smoke Rises. One of my early favourites on the record has been “I’ll Go Anywhere,” a collaboration with Rosalia, who plays bass and provides backing vocals on the track. The song is absolutely gorgeous as flamenco handclaps anchor a delicate, cycling guitar figure, and Mustafa intones, “I’ll go anywhere to bring you closer to me.”
Aching album highlight “Leaving Toronto,” a collaboration with Daniel Caesar, is Mustafa’s most direct address to the city that shaped him and that failed to show up for him in the wake of his brother Mohamed’s passing.
Sonically, “Leaving Toronto” is perhaps the most straightforward, big tent contemporary “folk” ballad on Dunya. You can picture it being algorithmically (and cluelessly) programmed alongside Mumford and Sons and Lumineers songs in cafes. The song opens, however—and is peppered throughout—with a jarring sample (that I’ve been unable to identify)3 used in the song almost like a rap producer tag: “I dropped a bag on the kid / I dropped a bag on my glock / Heart, boy, but I don't heart a lot.” The rich tension between “urban” musics—the type that one would be more likely to encounter in Mustafa’s home neighbourhood of Regent Park—and “folk music” is powerfully articulated in how this song sounds. It feels like the sonic version, to me, of what we see in many of Mustafa’s award-winning, striking music videos. In videos like the powerful “Stay Alive” and “SNL”, verité depictions of Regent Park life in Toronto—friends flexing for the camera, Mustafa clad in his signature bulletproof vest—exist in disarming juxtaposition with the radical vulnerability and tenderness of his songs.4 Though a Mustafa song may sound like “folk music,” visually there are no big hats, vests, suspenders, or Blundstones in sight.
Lyrically, “Leaving Toronto” is nothing short of astounding. Sing Mustafa and Caesar on the chorus,
I'm leaving Toronto
I would drown this whole city if I could
There's nowhere I can go
That has enough room to let me bring my hood
Mustafa musters all of his poetic talent to convey the deeply ambivalent love and resentment that he has for his birthplace. The song’s outro is perhaps the most arresting writing on the record, however, as—just when you think the track might be ending—Mustafa sings,
And if they ever kill me
Make sure they bury me next to my brother
Make sure my killer has money for a lawyer
And if they ever kill me
Ask Allah to put light in my grave
Ask Allah to take the good of my old days
Make sure my killer has money for a lawyer
It is worth noting, here, that, as far as I know, Mohamed Ahmed’s murderers have still not been found and brought to justice. In a recent interview, Mustafa spoke about his own close proximity to death that he has had in his life: “‘My whole life I’ve been right on the edge of an end,’ reflects Mustafa. ‘As a result, I guess I have a really hard time believing I’m going to live a long life. I still don’t fully believe that right now.’”
The intimate experiences with death that Mustafa has had in his own short life charge his work with a tremendous urgency. Still, however, in the horrific case that he succumbs to his community’s own violence, he writes that he would want his killer to have money for a lawyer. As with all of Mustafa’s writing, this line is open to interpretation. The way that I am choosing to interpret it right now is that he is acutely aware of the systemic and structural issues in Regent Park and elsewhere that create the conditions for gun violence,5 and, even if he were to die by the hand of someone in his community, he would still want the focus to be on those systemic issues that implicate individuals in ways that complicate notions of personal agency and responsibility. Of course, Mustafa also mentions Allah in this closing verse, and, here, I have to say that I am not fluent enough with Islamic theology to posit whether there is some kind of concept—perhaps akin to grace?—that could also be at play in his desire for his killer to have resources available to them.
One thing I can say quite confidently, however, is that never has a “folk” song made me contemplate an issue like this at such length, and Mustafa accomplishes it with 7 lines sung over minimal guitar accompaniment across thirty-five seconds. Dunya is filled with moments like this where the music’s stakes are suddenly revealed, and they prove to be much higher than any music that I’ve heard in recent memory. The album is beautiful, intensely thoughtful, and also easily some of the best “folk music” that has been made this year.
A caveat: for both of these folk festivals—Calgary and Edmonton—I was unable to find a programming philosophy openly shared online, so I am working solely from my personal impressions here.
For example, The Roots headlined—and absolutely blew the lid off—one night of the Calgary Folk Music Festival this past summer.
Update (01/18/2025): my friend Andrew helped me source this sample and it comes from Puffy L'z’s “Wheel It.” Puffy L’z is a member of Halal Gang along with Mustafa.
The artist RMR blew up in early 2020 with his song “Rascal” exploiting a similar juxtaposition, though, in RMR’s case, the juxtaposition felt more calculated to go viral. People seem to have collectively forgotten this song, because it was released like two weeks before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Mustafa directed a short documentary about gun violence in Toronto called Remember Me, Toronto, released in 2019.