Saint Levant on Shattering Arab Stereotypes and Why He’s Keeping the Mustache
Saint Levant joins our Zoom call from Amman, Jordan. It’s 7 p.m. there, and he has plans to record vocals after this interview. The day before, he released his single, “I Guess,” but the 22-year-old rising star has no idea how well it’s performing online. “I still haven’t checked social media since I posted it,” he says.
Born Marwan Abdelhamid, the independent artist blocks off just one hour a day for social platforms, including work-related tasks. “I really care about my mental health,” says Abdelhamid, who isn’t on Twitter anymore, partially due to the naysayers and negative comments.
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“I Guess,” featuring artist, producer, and Abdelhamid’s college friend Playyard (real name: Henry Morris), is up to more than a million Spotify streams. It’s a sensual, Brent Faiyaz-like track — sung from the perspective of a man who questions whether his amour really knows him. “It’s a bedroom song for sure,” Abdelhamid says with a boyish smile. “And I would encourage people to test it out.”
“I Guess” is not his only cheeky tune, nor is it his biggest. His November release “Very Few Friends” is a lyrical romance of a song where lover boy Levant raps in French, Arabic, and English over jazzy guitar and deep percussion. The single has amassed more than 18 million Spotify streams, and with more than 4.4 million views on TikTok, #veryfewfriends has also landed a spot on the platform’s “Emerging Artists” playlist. It didn’t hurt that Carter Gregory, vice president of A&R at Capitol Records, posted a TikTok with Dixie D’Amelio, Sabrina Carpenter, and socialites Zack Bia and Anastasia Karanikolaou lip-syncing to it. Its lyric video, starring a scruffy, smoldering Saint Levant listing the ways he plans to spoil his boo, is dividing the internet as it borders between sexy and cornball; some listeners rated it “Wattpad rap.”
Born in Jerusalem to a French Algerian mother and Palestinian Serbian father during the Second Intifada, Abdelhamid spent most of his childhood in the Gaza Strip before fleeing to Jordan following the Battle of Gaza in 2007. “You have to be open-minded to survive,” he says. Now living in Los Angeles, he’s back in Amman to spend time with his grandparents during the holidays.
In his family kitchen, Abdelhamid sits in front of tangerine-colored cabinets decorated with sunflowers, sporting a green, gray, and navy-blue Nike x Martine Rose color-blocked track jacket. His tousled brown hair matches his signature mustache, which has been the focus of a heated debate between fans who are in favor and against the anti-fashion look. But Abdelhamid says it’s here to stay — for now. “It’s part of the era,” he says, furrowing his bushy brows and stroking the ’stache.
Drawing on early-2000s R&B, Arabic trap music, and Franco-Arabic rap, Abdelhamid invites global listeners to embrace Middle Eastern culture. “I am a lover,” he confesses. “I was always a bit insecure about my voice. But my friend was telling me ‘You took a language that was so demonized in the West, and you made it sexy.’”
While Abdelhamid’s music reflects his multifaceted heritage, he separates himself from his eclectic stage persona as a lovesick Casanova. “It’s a good way to protect myself,” he says. Although he goes by Saint Levant, French for “holy rising,” Abdelhamid hints that he might change his stage name to Cheb Levant, after Algerian singer Cheb Khaled, sometime in the future. Even so, his character feels authentic because it’s a personal creation — a hybrid of a magnified Abdelhamid and his childhood dreams.
For Abdelhamid, shattering Arab stereotypes is only a fraction of the mission. His vulnerable lyrics also attempt to normalize taboo discussions around sex and mental health in the Middle East and North Africa. Growing up in Jordan, Abdelhamid felt out of place. “I had an earring when I was 15, and I used to paint my nails,” the self-proclaimed third-culture kid says. “But it’s never my intention to be provocative.”
In the soul-searching “CAGED BIRDS SING,” he muses about going to therapy, singing, “Arab men don’t really talk ‘bout what they’re going through.’” The song is full of nostalgic longing and heavy revelations: “I miss when all my friends were on the same time zone/I miss not knowing I was living in a war zone.”
Music has been a constant in Abdelhamid’s life, having grown up playing the piano and saxophone. He attributes a lot of his sonic influences to his father, who introduced him to icons like Lenny Kravitz, Wyclef Jean, and Timbaland. By his teens, he started listening to Arab hip-hop artists like Shabjdeed and Marwan Moussa, who inspired him to later forge his own genre-bending sound.
His music is a community effort. For the making of “I Guess,” he and Morris first came up with the bass line, then sent it to Abdelhamid’s father, who suggested they sample Timbaland and Elton John’s 2007 collaboration “2 Man Show.” After reworking it, Abdelhamid recruited Egyptian singer Bayou, Lebanese Canadian artist Zeina, and Palestinian American pop star Lana Lubany from his close-knit circle to sing the harmonic backup vocals. “It’s a celebration of me and Henry,” Abdelhamid says, referring to them as the two-man show. “We’ve been doing this together, alone, [with] no one listening since college, and now the world is listening.”
Partly because of his mother’s past involvement with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, Abdelhamid has aspirations for Palestinian economic development. “Since I was a kid, I’ve always said that I wanted to be the president of Palestine,” he says.
This past June, Abdelhamid graduated from the University of Santa Barbara with a degree in international relations. During the lockdown, he began posting TikTok videos about Palestinian history and comedic commentaries on controversial subjects like toxic masculinity in the Arab world. A month later, he co-founded GrowHome, a startup dedicated to connecting diaspora communities with entrepreneurs from their home countries.
It wasn’t until late 2020, when Abdelhamid released his breakout single, “Jerusalem Freestyle,” that he decided to pursue music. His career is part of a greater vision, and a stepping stone to building a platform — because Palestinian activism is always at his core. “I’m getting more comfortable with my artistry and talking about the things that I want,” he says.
In his single, “Haifa in a Tesla,” Abdelhamid dreams about driving back to Haifa with the late Palestinian American academic Edward Said and model Bella Hadid. En route, he professes his deepest desires: “I wanna invest in my people/I wanna invest in the land/I wanna go back to Gaza/And I wanna lay in the sand.”
For Abdelhamid, Gaza is home and a state of mind. He’s working on an EP called From Gaza, With Love, and he’d love to release it on Valentine’s Day next year. In January, he’s headlining the Quoz Arts Fest with Syrian rapper Bu Kolthoum in Dubai.
As a child of the Palestinian diaspora, Abdelhamid’s music has chameleonic powers, meaning something different to everyone. And while his artistry may draw you in, he’s not necessarily doing it for you. “I make [music] for me and my friends,” he says. “If people want to support me, that’s amazing, but I never expect anything.”
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