Nadine El Roubi is at Her Most Confident and Vulnerable in ‘Freestyles Pt. 2 Mixtape’

Her second “female freestyle” took off online and connected her with a wider audience, gaining critical acclaim and nods of approval from artists like SZA and A Tribe Called Quest’s Jarobi White. The witty, audacious videos quickly became her signature format, and three years after Freestyles Pt. 1, El Roubi is back with more socio-political commentary, elegant empowerment, and a plea to keep #EyesOnSudan, her home country.

El Roubi’s music speaks to a multiplicity of experiences, spanning the spectrum of what it means to be an African and Arab woman, a believer, a young person struggling with the abysses of our societies, and an artist frequently falling into self-doubt, which she eventually overcomes by writing hard-hitting bars.

On “Too Fly,” the mixtape’s second track, she raps, “So-called ‘luck’ is heaven sent / So when I brag it’s elegant / Cause it’s God I’m crediting/ Now I’m boutta make a nice throne out his face / Shit I think I’m getting too fly.” In the conservative Muslim-majority societies of the SWANA (Southwest Asia and North Africa) region, such bold lyrics will inevitably prompt backlash.

“It always works out in my favor, I love it,” says El Roubi about the unwarranted opinions she receives for her lyrics. “I recorded the freestyle while being on holiday by the Red Sea. It was summer and I was wearing a revealing outfit. I got a comment, saying ‘Your dad would be ashamed, you’re Sudanese, shame on you’ kind of vibe. So I wrote ‘Modest Heaux.’”

That track, “Modest Heaux,” calls out the haters in the comments: “You’re scared of the pussy, admit it / Don’t wanna hear about it but you still wanna be in it / Take the nipples off of IG but you see ‘em on TV / So I’m censored unless you’re making money off me.” El Roubi has always been a rebellious person, you have to be if you want to make it in this male-dominated industry and culture, but she does not consider her music a disrespect to the culture. “It’s been liberating and freeing not to give a fuck,” she says. “It’s an arrogance that I appreciate in me. It gives me permission to do what I want.”

However, arrogant doesn’t seem to be the right word to describe this artist who speaks humbly of her achievements, as well as her struggles. Rather, her motivation seems to be the desire to live up to the self-empowerment she advocates for in her lyrics.

In that spirit, “CALM DOWN,” the mixtape’s standout track, tackles double standards in the music industry, western politics and gendered stereotypes. Over an energetic beat produced by Shepard, El Roubi raps, “Beg a man for coin, he decline like your card / Mad nerve calling that man broke / Men will sleep with anything walking / Hold up, who’s a hoe? / Colonizer call for a free world, funny / Who pick up when the phone ring? / Money!”

Replacing playfulness with urgency, “#EyesOnSudan” raises awareness about the war that has been raging in Sudan since April 2023. El Roubi shared it on her social media during the war’s first days when the media were slow to report and neighboring countries failed to act, rapping, “Look, look all we’ve ever known is violence / What’s louder than a gunshot? Silence / From all the Arab communities / SubhanAllah, whatever happened to unity!”

“It’s sad that we have to hope that people will find out about the atrocities happening in our country from a random girl spitting about it on a freestyle, rather than the news,” she says. “We’re taking it upon ourselves as lay people to create content and media around what is happening, when it should be covered by mainstream media.”

El Roubi wrote “#EyesOnSudan” to do her part as an artist, which is to highlight social issues and humanize stories that are silenced or abstracted, but also to have an outlet for the pain she felt at seeing the destruction of her home country. The freestyle was met with varied reactions, some of which claimed that now was not the time for music.

“People don’t get that this is my job,” says El Roubi. “I’m trying to make this my livelihood, I don’t get to stop. You still have to go to work, and I still have to express myself even in the midst of war. This is how I show up and care and it really kills me that writing songs about things that matter is seen as trivializing it. I don’t see my pen and my voice as trivial at all. Making music about things that matter is speaking power to them. As soon as you immortalize something into a song, you’re giving it infinite importance.”

On “Please Don’t Call Here,” El Roubi shows a vulnerable, perhaps her most relatable, side. “If not for my career I would rather disappear / Off the grid forever, I can still be hopeful / If this doesn’t work out / I got no back up plan, 27 / Got no man, got no money in the bank / Can’t pay rent, got no home/ No, really, I ain’t got no home / You see what happened in Sudan, family fled on land / Mama crying on the phone, lost everything we had.”

Between posting freestyle videos and fashionable photoshoots, the rapper regularly stresses how much she hates it here in content land, a necessary evil for a 21st-century artist. “It’s impossible to be 100% authentic on social media, but I try to share what the feelings are behind the scenes,” she says. “I know I’m not the only one. Most of my friends are artists, I know everyone hates this shit. It’s so trash to have to do something and on top of that pretend you’re happy about it.”

While our conversation dwells on the (c)overt politics that characterize El Roubi’s body of work, her favorite tracks are the classic hip-hop hype songs that see her showing off her lyricism. “KING KONG,” the mixtape’s final track, was born from an impulse which prompted El Roubi to tweet: “I need a beat that will summon the best out of me.” Palestinian DJ and producer WASEEL sent her music two minutes later and El Roubi had her mixtape’s mic drop: “Not your damsel in distress I’m the King Kong / Damn fine in this dress or my jeans on / Step foot on necks, get ya Nikon.”

“Day to day I’m really not that person that’s gonna talk myself up,” she says. “The little voices that critique or doubt me, or depict how women can live, tend to chip away at your morale. But then music, especially hip-hop and rap, is the one place where I get to be so up myself. It’s so liberating and exciting.”