Entertainment

Farid Farid

The National

A Palestinian musician has conquered the American pop charts. DJ Khaled has cemented his reputation as one of the most recognisable faces of contemporary hip-hop, thanks to his new No 1 album, working with Beyoncé and expert use of social media.

Major Key, released last week, features an all-star line-up of collaborators, including J Cole, Lil Wayne and Rick Ross.

Born Khaled Mohamed Khaled in New Orleans to Palestinian parents in 1975, he has become an unlikely poster boy for American hip-hop culture.

His memorable catchphrases – including “they don’t want you to win” and “lion order” – have helped the savvy Snapchat user and hashtag king to seep through to mainstream American culture and become a household name.

Perhaps Khaled sensed his time has come – the cover of Major Key is fit for a king: Khaled sits on a throne adorned in flowers with a lion by his side.

The early hustle

It is a far cry from the kid who started DJing as a 13-year-old in his garage in Orlando. He watched his immigrant parents struggle to make a living selling clothes at flea markets on weekends and credits their travails as being the key to his own path.

He moved with his family to New Orleans when they fell on hard times, then worked his way back to Florida, landing a job at Odyssey Records in 1993.

He was also a pirate-radio announcer at a Caribbean music station in Orlando, sleeping in the studio between shifts as he couldn’t afford to live in the city.

His grandiose style of delivery eventually turned him into a local celebrity. This translated quickly to hosting massive hip-hop parties in Miami’s infamous clubs in the mid 1990s. His persistence and limitless energy caught the attention of other Florida rappers, including Lil Wayne and Birdman, who have worked with him ever since

DJ Khaled’s enduring power is evidenced by the inability to pin him down: it is not exactly clear whether he is a glorified hype man, rapper, producer or a performance artist.

Khaled’s lyrics, to stretch the term, are a series of shoutouts, energy grenades, management mantras that are all designed to hype up the listener. He is constantly in a confessional mode, telling the story of his life: of working hard to get to where he is – the most prominent Arab in hip-hop.

That said, even though Khaled is proud of his Middle Eastern and Muslim connections – wearing a diamond necklace featuring the word “Allah” in some of his videos – he rarely mentions his political and religious affiliations in his songs.

When he does, the results lack any compelling content.

Last year, Palestinian activists lambasted him for his support of Sabra, an Israeli food company that sponsored one of his gigs during a Super Bowl party.

During the Israeli bombardment of Gaza in 2014, he tweeted out messages of support to Palestinians but his engagement with the diverse Arab hip-hop scene coming out of the Middle East and the diaspora has been negligible.

Finding success

DJ Khaled’s rise stems from the oldest trick in the pop-music book: the repetition of a simple hook till it becomes dogma.

The heavyset rap producer – who once went by the stage name Arab Attack, until the September 11 attacks in 2001 – speaks in curt and excitable phrases that have become his signature.

His breakout hit in 2006 was a collaboration featuring Akon, Rick Ross and T.I called We Takin’ Over. Since then he has released one prolific album after another, featuring some of the biggest names in hip-hop. It’s a simple formula that has worked in his favour, eventually earning him a No 1 album. Khaled clearly has a talent for bringing together diverse hip-hop personalities to produce hit songs and albums. His persuasiveness has propelled him from a minor Miami music figure to a major hip-hop star through the power of ­marketing.

Then there is what is perhaps his strongest attribute: a digital savvy in harnessing social media, which turned him into a celebrity who regularly appears on late-night shows, has toured with Beyoncé and even had a meeting with US president Barack ­Obama.

Khaled’s social media ­accounts – especially Snapchat – have millions of fans. Each ridiculous phrase such as “don’t play yourself” or “special cloth alert” is supposed to induce inspiration, but most of the time ends up as parody.

Yet Khaled has the last laugh. He has managed to perch himself atop the hip-hop scene and American culture with his own brand of personal success.

With Major Key sitting pretty at the top of the charts, DJ Khaled’s story is perhaps another example of the so-called American dream – where no matter what your background or faith, hard work, persistence and talent can still be the keys to success.

Source: www.thenational.ae

NDTV

The Arab Muslim American comedian Dean Obeidallah has spent 15 years fighting hatred and bias against Islam, armed only with his sense of humor.

Now, the bitter tones of the US presidential campaign have added urgency to his mission.

Obeidallah’s life, like the lives of many Muslims, changed forever one September morning in 2001.

“Pre-9/11, I identified as a white guy,” he told AFP. But after the terror attacks of that day, he said he “converted to become a minority.”

Obeidallah, the son of a Palestinian father and an Italian mother, could pass for any of a variety of ethnicities.

No one had ever guessed from his appearance that he was Arab or Muslim, said the talkative New Jersey native, a former lawyer.

Still, he decided to spotlight his Muslim identity.

“When you’re demonized, it brings it out of you. You’re either going to hide in the shadows or you’re going to step up in the light and you’re going to fight for your community.”

Since making that decision, he has used every possible platform — not just the stand-up routines that are his bread-and-butter, but the 2013 documentary “The Muslims are Coming!” that he co-directed and now his eponymous radio show on SiriusXM — to spread his message.

He also founded a New York festival for Muslim comedians, the Muslim Funny Fest.

But there was nothing funny about the emergence of the ISIS group in 2013. It added urgency to his fight against the stereotypes burdening Muslims, a small and often misunderstood minority in the United States.

“We’re not in the media much,” Obeidallah said. “If you don’t know us, you’ve never met us and all you see is ISIS and Al Qaeda, of course you don’t think we’re funny. You think we’re scary, we’re going to come kill you.”

Traversing this minefield, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, rather than gingerly tiptoeing, has been lobbing rhetorical hand grenades.

In December, the New York business mogul proposed banning all Muslims from American territory “until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”

“I think Islam hates us,” Trump told CNN in an interview in March.

‘Under Siege’

Obeidallah says comments like those have fomented fear.

“Muslim Americans right now feel a sense of being alone, we’re under siege,” Obeidallah said. “We feel like no one really cares about our community.”

To understand what Muslims in the US are going through today, one need only read a few of the messages the 40-something comic receives daily on social media.

“When something bad happens and Muslims are involved, my Twitter fills up with haters who know who I am and go: ‘Look what your people did.’ It does get tiring.”

Many of the messages are in far more abusive language.
In 2012, Obeidallah traveled to several conservative states, including some in the Deep South, to film his documentary.

At the time, he had a few people shout at him, sometimes through the windows of passing cars, “Go back to your country!”

There were no verbal or physical threats, but that was before the emergence of the Islamic State group. He thinks matters might be worse now and he is not sure he would repeat his “Muslims are Coming!” tour.

But Obeidallah is hardly intimidated. On his radio program — the only national radio show hosted by a Muslim — and in his television appearances, he works tirelessly to open minds and jolt people’s consciences.

“At the end of the day, I don’t think I’m fighting for Muslims — I’m fighting for American values. I’m fighting for the idea that we all get treated equally.”

“I refuse to allow the Donald Trumps of this world to change what this country is supposed to stand for.”

Like many Americans, Obeidallah is anxiously awaiting the voters’ verdict in the November 8 presidential contest pitting Trump against Democrat Hillary Clinton.

He urges voters, particularly Democrats, to cast their ballots.

“I don’t want to end up in an internment camp,” he said.

Source: www.ndtv.com

Jeffrey Fleishman

LA Times 

When revolution swept Egypt in 2011, Ayman Samman, who had moved to America and hired a manager, fretted in the tranquil hills of Burbank about his acting career.

“After the Arab Spring actually Hollywood stopped writing roles for terrorists and that was really scary for me,” Samman, a Cairo native and the son of an imam, quipped in his latest stand-up comedy skit. “But luckily ISIS came along and I was like cha-ching. One man’s ISIS is another man’s guest star appearance on NBC’s hot new drama ‘Blindspot.’ ”

That humor cuts many ways but at its core is the typecasting Middle Eastern actors encounter in an age of Islamic radicalism and anti-immigrant fervor. Films and television shows have often unleashed wild-eyed fanatics plotting in the shadows and shouting, “Allahu Akbar,” or “God is great,” before blowing themselves up. But Samman, who appeared in Clint Eastwood’s “American Sniper,”  has sensed a bit more subtlety and depth these days in scripts portraying Muslims.

He recently turned down a role he considered too stereotypical. “The part was for a guy who gives a bomb vest to a suicide bomber. It was very clichéd. I’m not interested in that,” he said. “But I did audition for the role of a foreign minister type that was very reflective of current politics. And in ‘Blindspot,’ I played a CIA informant who went rogue. It was very accurate and symbolic of how U.S foreign policy creates monsters.”

Samman and other Arab actors living in Los Angeles navigate disparate worlds. They keep abreast of the upheaval in their homelands while seeking parts that challenge America’s perceptions of the Middle East. Their ambitions brush against the tumult of global politics and the carnage of terrorist attacks that have ignited nationalist and populist zeal in the U.S. and Europe. They have learned to temper frustration and take advantage of more layered roles. 

Few actors of Middle East lineage in the last decade have had the range of roles of Haaz Sleiman, who was a tart-tongued gay nurse in Showtime’s “Nurse Jackie”; Jesus Christ in “Killing Jesus,” an adaptation from the Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard book that aired on the National Geographic Channel; and an artist in “Dorfman in Love,” set in Los Angeles. Conservative Muslims in the U.S. and abroad criticized him for playing a homosexual and conservative Christians questioned why a man raised in Islam was cast to play Jesus.  

“The bigger the movies you’re in, the chances are better at getting more diverse roles,” said Sleiman, a Lebanese American who received strong reviews as an immigrant drummer in Tom McCarthy’s acclaimed “The Visitor” in 2007. “It’s moving in the right direction for Arab actors but very slowly. Look at African Americans. It took them forever to move ahead.  Arabs are the new blacks. We took their place as they moved up.”

He added that with his portrayal of Mo-Mo De La Cruz on ‘Nurse Jackie’ he wanted to “show Muslims in a different light. But there are still stereotypes,” he said. “The networks can perpetuate that, a kind of fear against Arabs that sells.”

Despite globalization, minority actors finding cross-cultural success are rare even as movies such as the “Furious” franchise have made billions of dollars with multiracial casts. Actors, especially those from Africa and Arab states, often contend with Western screenwriters and studios that have reduced a complex world to cursory and at times racist story lines that seldom differentiate between a Shiite or a Sunni Muslim, much less between a Pakistani or a Kuwaiti. That dilemma was one reason Samman produced, wrote and acted in “Toppled,” a short film about the fall of a dictator.

After more than a decade of conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. audiences, perhaps as much as Arab actors, appear to have grown weary of terror and war. With the exception of “American Sniper,” which grossed nearly $550 million worldwide, Iraq war films have not been big successes at the box office. Movies about Islamic terrorism tend to do less well, including “The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” which starred Riz Ahmed and Liev Schreiber and grossed more than $2.1 million. Many tales that deal directly with terrorism, such as “Homeland” and “The Blacklist,” come from television.

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Hollywood has portrayed Arabs as villains and schemers for generations, from “The Sheik” in 1921 to Steven Spielberg’s “Raiders of the Lost Ark”  to Disney’s “Aladdin.” Other minorities, including Indians, have also been fitted into constraining frames. This made for sharp comedy on Aziz Ansari’s Netflix series “Master of None” when Ansari asks, “Why can’t there be a Pradeep just once who’s like an architect or he designs mittens or does one of the jobs Bradley Cooper’s characters do in movies?”

The urbane, Egyptian actor Omar Sharif gained international prominence in the 1960s by starring in films such as “Lawrence of Arabia,” “Doctor Zhivago,” and “Funny Girl” with Barbra Streisand. No Arab actor has since reached that stature. In fact, Hollywood films, most notably Lionsgate’s effects-laden, $140-million “Gods of Egypt,” have been criticized for casting white actors to play Arabs, which would be akin to the Saudi royal family standing in for America’s Founding Fathers.   

But Judy Henderson, a member of the Casting Society of America and casting director for Showtime’s “Homeland,” has seen a slight multicultural shift: “I have noticed characters are becoming more diverse. Our industry is trying to show America as it is today. I’ve noticed this in the last few years, especially in TV sitcoms…. For so long our country didn’t understand the Middle East. We lived in a cocoon.”

Screenwriters can only “write so many ‘Allahu Akbar’ scripts. They can’t keep getting away with it,” said Sammy Sheik, who quit Alexandria University in Egypt more than a decade ago and has appeared in the political comedy “Charlie Wilson’s War” and the war film “Lone Survivor.”  He also had a role in “Homeland,” criticized by some artists and writers as Islamophobic. But Sheik said: “My character was a community organizer, not a bad guy. The scripts for the shows I was in were terrific. After that I felt like an equal to bigger name actors.”

Sheik arrived in Los Angeles after taking acting classes and busing tables in New York. He sent out 100 head shots to agents and got 10 calls back. “That would never happen today,” he said. “The characters I auditioned for were no good. But I realized how good it was for me. I got into casting  offices. Every day lots of Caucasian guys would be sitting outside offices waiting. But I got right in.”

He laughed.

“I was even typecast as a Latino guy,” he said, “but I couldn’t salsa to save my life.”

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Sheik played the insurgent sniper who is Chris Kyle’s (Cooper) nemesis in “American Sniper.” He is a character actor in America but more of a leading man type in Egypt. He works in Dubai, Lebanon, Jordan and South Africa, and recently shot a murder mystery in Vienna. Despite his versatility many of the parts he’s offered are Arab-based, including three of his most recent: A diplomat serial killer, an Iraqi translator for U.S. troops and an immigrant driver who falls in love with a Texan in what he described as “My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Egyptian-style.”

“But the roles are definitely getting more complex,” he said. “Right now, I’m playing an American soldier of Arab descent on ‘NCIS: Los Angeles.’ ”

The son of an imam and antiquities lawyer in the government of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who was overthrown in 2011, Samman is accustomed to typecasting from all sides. He arrived in the U.S. in 1998 after his heavy metal band was accused of devil worship by Islamists.

“I wanted to be a rock star,” he said. “I moved to Chicago and joined the Emerald Lizard band. It didn’t work out. I acted in a small film called ‘The Arab,’ a satire playing on stereotypes. I felt natural acting.”

He settled in Los Angeles in 2009 and auditioned for Ben Affleck’s “Argo,” about the Iran hostage crisis. “Pretty much every Middle East actor in L.A. was in that audition,” he said. He didn’t get the part. But, like Sheik, Samman’s profile broadened when he was cast as a father and insurgent in “American Sniper.”

“I called Egypt and told my mom, ‘I just booked a movie with Clint Eastwood.’ My mom said, ‘Who is she?’” he said. “The part didn’t give me a big leap, but I got different caliber roles after that. It opened a lot of doors and was a great conversation piece. It makes your faith stronger in your dream. It’s a very intense experience to be an immigrant. It’s psychologically traumatic. But it also ignited a lot of creative ideas.”

A role Samman recently auditioned for spoke to prejudices faced by many Arabs in America. He read for the part of a driver of Middle Eastern heritage whose limo is hit by a car driven by a Homeland Security agent. The police see it was the agent’s fault but allegiances and national sentiments take hold and the limo driver faces deportation after living in the U.S. for 20 years.

“I thought that was a great comment on things,” Samman said.

Source: www.latimes.com

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