We know that 2020 was the year of a global paradigm shift, however strange only few awoke sapiens showed willingness to see through it, from reading the news intertextually, to connecting the dots of the media-driven narrative, to devoting the self, as well as one’s artistic career to voicing the silenced truth, despite all the oppression with which truth-seekers are confronted nowadays.

In the Arab world, where a citizen is kept inside the box of beating their brain to hold one’s own one moment, and is led by the modern crowd consciousness of blind consumerism the next, it gets even harder to chance upon visionary and purposeful humans, let alone creatives who produce eye-opening art.

What could be a better example of such artists than the Lebanese Rappers Nizar Zgheib and Anthony Samarany in their song Qine3 (A mask)?

The track isn’t only a voice that speaks, it’s on another level of creation. It feels, thinks, and criticizes. It strives towards a lofty aim to burst the bubble of ignorance, piercing the veil from the listeners’ vision so as to shatter the illusions with which contemporaries are indoctrinated.

Qine3, like any other artifact by the Anthony, it tackles a variety of topics, the complexity of the artist’s mind, A profound web of what’s going on behind the scenes is simplified by means of the causal connections he unearthed. This time, it’s not just the devil in the details, it’s the truth of the devil unmasked.

Anthony’s lyrics draw a living picture of how his creative stream was ignited for this track, you enter his unique trance of creation, shares with him the philosophical questions eating into his brain, merely triggered by the scenes of people plagued with illusory anxiety whom he’s met with along his drive in the dead of the night. The tomorrow Anthony awaited with abated breath is crippled by what the world has come to.  After the nostalgic phase for the bygones kicks in, the soul of the fighter takes over him, he’d rather cease to exist than to settle for conformity.

  
Not only did he go against the grain of the herd, but he also slays the demons behind these warped values in such a modernized Groupthink culture. He pours his hard hits, for what is normalized is everything but normal. Modernity and its so-called theory of evolution, as the artist puts it, is merely a “backwards evolving”. A chain of facts follows, paving the road for Nizar to spark many more lightbulb moments.

Qine3 is plainly distinguished as one of Nizar’s purposeful, full-of-content tracks.  He touches a base bridging the unbridgeable chasm between the personal specificity of a work of art, as a mean of self-expression, and his altruism in delivery of value-free morals and messages. Nizar in the chorus calls a spade a spade, exposing the intentions of the truth haters lurking in the shadows, to render the knowers, including him, voiceless and fearful. This illusions-based game has succeeded to blur the vision of the crowds, and the ears are already deafened to the inner calling to be authentic and free.

The individual is deluded in chase of validation from the crowd, the brainwashing gradually shakes the moral system of an individual until it reaches a head, and eventually the identity fades out, for him to join the club of the faceless heedless masses. As long as the mob is involved, a personal sacrifice becomes inevitable, the sheeple grows into a programmed liability in society, just like rusty ‘screws in the machine’, so as to say, a meek sheeple among the herd.

Once the individual is gripped by imaginary fears, to satisfy a bogus need for safety, values are surrendered, crowds are formed, and chances of reviving culture are ruined.

Nizar Zgheib resembles this track to building Noah’s arch, which was deemed an act of madness amidst the bareness. His message to act responsibly, as it seems, is the only way out of this flood of crowd psychosis. It is when individuals begin to disassociate with the illusory bliss of ignorance, navigating in accordance with the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom that resides in having an truthful and personal “why”. For self-responsibility shall guide through the process of identifying the masks and call on the remains of the static courage within to face the shadows and rid oneself of them. Only then real individual are obtained, the elite who embody the “so within so without” type of authentic existence.

And because freedom is never attained for free, our artists promise to fight for it tooth and nail, to be authentic, to peek through the masks of the mob, to assume the solemn duty of being the voice of the voiceless truth.

But how could the song say a mouthful if it didn’t ruffle some feathers all the way down the lines?

About the writer: Gnostic Gosta is a female young writer affiliated with the scene, she uses original and poetic language to depict poetic projects that touched her.