BIJI: The sonic revolution of Kurdish Hip Hop

‘When you’re unapologetically yourself, it breaks through the noise‘

Maceo Frost 

On an unassuming day in June 2023, an enigmatic entity shot onto the scene: BIJI. The musical duo stole the summer with their collaborative single “Gold” on British producer Conducta’s In Transit album. A shining example of synergy across genres—a symphony of Kurdish flute, brash bars, and the DJ’s unmatched UK garage production—moved bodies from London to Kurdistan. The anthem was married to visuals shot across Southern Kurdistan and an underground souk in Southern Sweden, with thriller speeds and niche cultural motifs making one thing clear: BIJI’s subsequent rollouts would not be idle. With each announcement poster, single release, and music video, audiences curiously piece together the identities behind this vortex.

At the helm are Robin Nazari and Maceo Frost. Frost connects to our call from Indonesia, donning a Kurdistan FA football jersey. Nazari, flicking wooden Tasbeeh beads with his hoodie zipped up in snowy Stockholm, begins by telling me how the pair met, “Maceo and I are from the same area, 127, but he was this older director guy who made it out,” he recalls. “We met on tour with my rap collective nine years ago and became friends. One day, we were all hanging out, and Maceo was playing the piano when I thought, ‘This is it, the last song on my album.’ I started reading a poem about my dad over it.”

Originally published in Dazed MENA Issue 01| Order Here

Carving a collaborative process together, a journey began in tandem, and one personal project led to the other, soon winding into a place where BIJI was born. “F*ck, when we explain how we met, it’s because we explain how BIJI came about,” realises Nazari. Two hours of candour show me that the honed artists are clear on their joint purpose—connecting through a shared drive to shape musical and visual cultures, oriented by their humility before the human experience.

It takes a village

Nazari hails from a family who speaks the Erdelani dialect, one of many shaped by the fractured grooves and landscapes of Kurdish territories. His uncle, Hossein Sharifi – a beloved singer noted for his poetic lyricism and masterful riffs – sang in this very language. Nazari’s mother also studied Kurdish and Persian literature for years, raising his sister, who, in turn, has become a highly regarded poet in Sweden. He tells us this with a voice bearing the weight of not only pride, but also responsibility.

Frost, of mixed Swedish and African-American heritage, beams at the opportunity to elaborate on his upbringing and references. He explains that his father grew up in the United States alongside the advent of hip-hop, later bringing these sounds and moves with him as he migrated to Sweden. A worldliness shines through as he reflects, “My father was always playing different hip-hop songs and showing me music videos. ‘Look at that fisheye lens, look at the energy,’ he’d say. Artists like Busta Rhymes and Missy Elliot found their own ways of expressing themselves back then.”

A radical kinship grips the BIJI project at its foundation. The pair have built themselves a world that we’re all welcome to visit, one in which endless curiosity produces experimental answers and joyous outcomes. Combined, their process reveres ancestral knowledge and craft, with Nazari and Frost calling on their families’ intuition throughout the process of script and songwriting. A BIJI production is incomplete without a moment of respite, often taking the form of wise prudence—the duo is transparent about their writing process, crediting the many hands it takes to pen even one of a project’s poems or monologues. “All these people and their expertise for 15 seconds of a video,” reflects Nazari, describing a production line of swapping notes and back-and-forths, sitting and editing scripts across time zones. All these people for linguistic and narrative integrity.

Recollecting the early days of their friendship, the pair recall sifting through years’ worth of Nazari family VHS footage. Frost would sit and splice vignettes shot by Nazari’s father across Kurdistan and Sweden to create dreamscapes accompanying his collaborator’s early rap sounds. Grainy camcorder quality remains a staple aesthetic in their exploration of nostalgia and change. This process brought about questions for Frost, probing Nazari on the musical landscape in Kurdistan and its diaspora, and how far hip hop may have reached. Some elements strike clear: instrumentalist plays a massive part in Kurdish audio culture. Across the regions, we see variations of violins, dahol and zurna playing, as well as synthesisers, each with their own ceremonial purposes and preferred settings. BIJI finds itself enmeshing these cultural symbols with new locations to fuse connections.

“In my director life, an artist couldn’t reach out to me and get a video quite like that—it’s not possible, it has to be made from scratch,” says Frost, raising a point. Before we can even study BIJI’s videos, we take in a few rounds of awe and dumbfoundedness. Themes, seemingly effortlessly, blend into one another. Emotions evoke themselves in the liminality of a landscape, smashed into by a speeding car below, resuming the call to dance. “I love it when pieces of art are very rich in metaphors and layers, you can go deeper,” he continues, “Some of the layers we don’t even notice we’re doing until the edit, suddenly switching the shots and working on it until there are so many layers that you’re stimulated by it. I really learned this hypnotising rhythm from my dad.”

Merging sonic symbols

Frost’s trained eye and piqued curiosities, paired with the rich mental archive of Kurdish classical and wedding music possessed by Nazari, allowed the two to begin unpacking subcultures from all directions. Poeticism is an underlined trait here, acting as a meeting point and shared odyssey. The visions that BIJI actualise are the poetic stylings of US hip-hop legends and the epic delivery and storytelling of Kurdish musicians (both M.O.P. and Loqman Azizi shout in equal measure, they note, in the kind of belting that deeply inspires the pair).

“M.O.P. had their raw energy with the shouts, but when we heard
Loqman Azizi, he’s shouting too,” Frost explains, hinting at the strength of these voices in their sound. Their single “Chopi” features Baxtyar Salih’s distinct rounded adlibs to punctuate orders. When performed live, it’s on Salih’s “chop-, chop-, chopi” that audience members shoot up their scarves to wave in time with their feet. A Kurdish sonic landscape is beamed onto dance floors across Europe.

Despite a carefully niche discography thus far, every BIJI song still boasts a unique blend of skill sets ranging from the King of Synth to history-shaping vocalists. Nazari, however, imparts that these collaborations command a more organic approach, “Back home, you can’t call a manager and say you want to collab. Our friend got us in touch with Rizan Said because he knew her parents. It’s beautiful and mad at the same time. It was similar with Baxtyar Salih, too. We’re from different worlds, even if we’re both Kurds.”

True to Kurdish multiplicity, these soundscapes chart the migration of style alongside their makers. One notable collaboration steeped in this musical heritage is the 2024 single “Wey Wey” featuring German-Kurdish chart-topping rapper ENO. Kurds have long dominated the Deutschrap (German rap) scene, illustrating harsh realities and pushing representative ideals. This particular diasporic link-up acts almost as a guide to European Kurdism— the music we listen to, the food we eat, the charm in our cadence. Laser-sharp threads connect Sweden to the UK, over to Kurdistan, and back to Germany.

BIJI’s self-titled debut album was released in two parts, think Che (2008) or Outkast’s “Da Art of Storytellin’” (1998). Running through the tracklist, a multitude of experiences and narratives are touched. Frost explains an overarching motif that grounds the album’s essence, “Kurdish culture and its languages being suppressed, taking something that had its freedom stripped away and using that to sing about love, freedom and celebration felt transcending and healing. That’s one of the core purposes behind the project.” Outside of these cross-European collaborations, BIJI has built relationships with musicians and producers across the world, owing to their travels and internationalist sound, blaring through strong Afrobeat and Latin dance motifs throughout their latest body of work.

(Folk)lore

Aesthetically astute Frost meets rich audio elements of sampling and reworking with fresh visual references to enhance BIJI’s bespoke drops. For example, he shares that “The “Zigidi” video, with the drifting, is inspired by the film Undercover Brother (2002) that features music by Snoop Dogg and a manga series I grew up watching, Initial D. In fact, the drifter in the video grew up on the same anime, it’s the reason he bought the car.” This anecdote is a testament to the universality of art. Shying away from our interests disconnects us from the potential of bonding over them. In this instance, embodying the references that inspire Frost brought intercultural collaboration to a higher plane.

The two share a strong working chemistry, giving their respective 100% each to the BIJI vision. Frost is unafraid to gather his references and technical skill set to match Nazari’s vivid emotional landscapes and lyricism. Memories of Kurdish tea houses and his uncles playing takhte (backgammon) and cards retake form through hip-hop cinema. This symbiosis makes BIJI’s videos unmistakable. Directed in-house, they find themselves situated within a visual culture that understands how to pivot attention and utilise trends. “But we don’t need that,” shrugs Frost. There’s something intangible here, slowly drawing out the complexities of the heart. Nazari elaborates, “When we’re making music, we unpack it. What the beat makes us feel or remember. We’re discussing places and pictures, even colours. What colour is this song? All songs have a colour.”

As a result of this layered approach, we can read these short films, like patchwork they weave a grand fable. But what are we seeing exactly? And what can we infer from it? Hip-hop and Kurdish cities share an overlooked facet, a storytelling heritage that permeates its bearers. The city of Slemani, for instance, was made a UNESCO City of Literature for its history of notable writers and people’s culture of story and poetry recital. Common in Kurdistan, these essences act as a muse for BIJI, incorporating pillars of narration such as comedy, heroic journeys, and memory in their cinematic sequences. Harnessing a breadth of creative vision and drive, hip-hop storytelling stamps tracks as a rite of passage; emphases and confessions are visualised by direct symbolism and cultural references. True to their far-sighted natures, BIJI shares five revelations when asked one question.

“A long time ago, before BIJI, we were talking about this eagle that flew from my balcony. Then, of course, there were loads of eagles when we went to Kurdistan—it’s a national bird,” reflects Nazari. The group later flipped this to understand how an eagle may represent their aspirations and reclamations, such as freedom and transcending their manmade circumstances. Nazari recollects a poem his mother would recite at home:

وەک هەڵۆ بەرز بفڕێ
Like the eagle, fly high

“You might live shorter than the dove who flies low, but you will see more,” claims the metaphor. Frost draws a connection here between the eagle and Original Kurda (O.K.), BIJI’s on-screen protagonist portrayed uncannily by Nazari. Urban life and ‘modernised’ society are clear themes sliced into these dreamlike plots; a taste of steel snaps us out of idealisation. O.K. is first addressed with a lesson by actor Kardo Razzazi, who enlightens him with the eagle poem midway through “Chopi”. The misfit is later seen spending his nights at a Duhoki game centre in “Wey Wey”, and hijacking a tour bus for a free ride into Zo. He’s cheeky but never criminal.

Before taking human form, O.K. is teased on screen as an easter egg video game character. Engaging in play across realms, BIJI doesn’t limit itself to the three-dimensional. Pixelated graphics hark back to beloved experiences common for 90s and 2000s kids worldwide, tapping again into childhood as a source of inspiration and guidance. This nostalgia is also pertinent in hip hop listenership and production, keeping alive “a community thing that heals neighbourhoods and trauma… take it and transform it,” according to Frost. “We’re bringing this spirit that we learned, and we’re putting this into new places, mixing this with folklore.”

BIJI’s contemporary imagery and bilingual (sometimes trilingual) references are further assisted by subtitling, which the collective sustains as an informative practice in its videography. On the first listen, an international audience may sonically enjoy the palatability of Nazari’s velvety vocals, which enunciate hybrid Kurdish-English lyrics, but soon unlock layered meaning and connection through the guidance of text captions at the bottom of the screen. Nazari puts it delicately: “It’s in the Kurdish language, but BIJI is for everyone. For everyone to just be. A Kurdish harp playing, me singing in Kurdish, but it could be any language. We’re from Cameroon, Iraq, Syria. We are from everywhere.”

The pair seem overworked but deeply excited. At the time of writing, Nazari and Frost are working on their second studio album and preparing for a BIJI Newroz festival. Having already established a strong pace and sense of responsibility, the evergreen duo is keen to keep building bridges with its interdisciplinary artistry. Borders are no hurdle to BIJI’s determination to work with other artists. Despite their wings spanning continents, the Stockholmers haven’t lost sight of their home turf, curating vibrant in-person experiences and musical journeys for us to embark on from their town to ours. If we’ve learned anything from the artists themselves, it’s that over the next few years, we can expect deep blends of international pioneering and an unshakable urge to halparke, dancing shoulder to shoulder as a symbol of unity.

Originally published in Dazed MENA Issue 01| Order Here

Producer PARISA KOHNECHIAN, movement director MONA
NAMER, styling assistant NAMFON PHETSUT