Narcy

Yassin Alsalma is Narcy. Hailing from Iraq and Montreal, Narcy is an Iraqi hip-hop artist, writer, actor, and more. Multi-talented, Narcy’s music has carefully thought through lyrics with frequent themes of the Middle East. This interview was conducted in 2010.

Please tell us about yourself. 

I was born in the U.A.E. and my parents are both Iraqi. They are both from Basara, Iraq, and I grew up there until the age of five. I then moved out here (Montreal) until I was 13 and I moved back to the Middle East for a little bit to study in high school until the age of 18. Then, I moved back to Montreal and I have been making music and going to university since. 

How did you choose your stage name, The Narcicyst?

When I was a youngin’, I wanted to be sarcastic and humourous but serious at the same time. I noticed that a lot of emcees talk about a lot of their own shit and it becomes kind of cancerous the way that we involve ourselves in our own world – some emcees have fallen due to that. It’s a reminder to myself to always be new and to push my boundaries in music and to never stay in one place. It is also a commentary on the human existence that I live in and the condition I live in, with everybody and how we all exist in a form of exploitation. Whether it is the sneakers I wear or the jewellery, there is always a form of exploitation which is very narcissistic in our capitalistic society.

Please tell us more about your music.

Well, I make hip-hop music, definitely. I started in a group called Euphrates back in 2001 and I was recording with my boy Habillis who is also another producer out here, also another Iraqi who grew up in the Middle-East. It is definitely tinged with Arabic experience being in North America and back then, it was in question in 2001, and it still is being in question about a time when we were growing up as immigrants. It’s about trying to find who you are, where you are, and me in particular as a Muslim man with Iraqi origins. 

Tell us the impact of the passing of your group member from Euphrates.

It definitely made me realize the importance of brotherhood and family and these subtleties definitely crept into my music. My music became more personal because the person I started making music with was no longer around. It became a very solo experience and I had to relearn everything – I taught myself how to make beats and record myself. I really tried to push my music sensibilities just in his memory because he always wanted to do that as well.

Have you found that your raps hold an unconscious motive that you weren’t aware of until the manifestation of the song? 

Yes. I made a song called “The Letter” in 2001 and it was my first song I ever made. I sounded like a British kid and I made it like it was a letter to the American government about the previous Iraq war and what the sanctions did to the kids in Iraq, how the sanctions destroyed the education and how it destroyed the health. I didn’t even put it out and it leaked on Napster back in the day and developed a life on its own. Years later, I was watching a documentary on CBC called Alqaida Code and they were saying, “They are even using hip-hop to train their...” and they had my song playing with these dudes working out and shit. They picked off the internet and did not do their research so I went after the producers of the show and told them that they can’t use someone’s music without their consensus. I had it copyrighted and everything so they retracted the show and put out a new version. The show was played in 58 different countries. That was the first time that it happened so it made me really conscious about what I say on a track because things can be misinterpreted in any way.

In your studies with communications, what is something that you have learned about music and its effect on the masses?

Sometimes, simplicity is key and when they say that you’re preaching to the choir, it is usually because you’re saying something that has already been said so don’t say something that’s already been said. You can code your stuff but it has to be decipherable. If you make some Da Vinci code rap shit, no one is ever going to understand it.

When you were younger, is there anything you would do differently due to your education now?

There isn’t anything I regret. On “The Letter”, there aren’t things that I regret, but maybe things that I might have said differently. They were very literal, but they worked. I have learned to be a lot less literal about politics and really boil it down to that experience about how it could have affected you as a person. Instead of talking about a specific incident in Iraq, or wherever, you take it down to the simplest element of what if your brother died, etc. When you ask that question to a person, it pierces on a different level than it would have if I told them that another person’s mother died and look at what the government did. Those are things that I double think now.