IN STEREO

What we do is not for ‘Palestine’ as a noun. Politics changed many things in our minds as Palestinians, for sure. For me, the ground is for everyone, and everyone can live in this place. But we have problems with, you know, checkpoints, walls, and all the racist things that are happening right now with the Israeli government. And they will not take it off and let people live together. I believe that our people deserve better than this life: the camps, these ugly places. And they are doing this for people to not study, to not think, to not educate, to not read, to not watch. So, yeah, politics is a very important subject – I mean, we can talk about politics until the morning. And we do care about politics. But in our music, I think, we don’t believe that we should be specific about our situation.

I know people who do it, actually. They talk about people who are dying every day, and people in prison, people in Palestine. We respect these people for sure, but we don’t go direct this way. We choose traditional songs and we do new arrangements for these songs, so we don’t talk politics actually. For me as a person, I think it’s good to save my traditional songs not because of politics, just because of the fun that we had when we were young, [when] we didn’t think about politics. I always think about politics; we live in politics every day. Fuck the occupation and fuck Israel as well, for sure. But I don’t care to do art for politics. No, it doesn’t mix, or something like that. We have fun, too. [So] let’s have fun with our music and our lyrics – without Israel, for a bit. – Ahmad