DUBAI: Nearly two decades after bonding over hip-hop in a Jeddah neighborhood where almost no one else listened to it, Saudi rappers Alyoung and Randar have released “R2,” a four-track EP — pairing it with three music videos.
The duo — Ahmed, who performs as Alyoung, and Bandar, who performs as Randar — met around 2008, and their friendship began with a fight. Randar came down to his street in Jeddah to find several boys ganging up on Alyoung, a stranger to the area.
“I found them all on him, and I said: whoever fights him, fights me,” he said. Because Randar “controlled” the local football pitch, the others fell in line. Days later, Randar offered a line Alyoung still repeats. “He said, ‘What do you think, let’s be friends?’ Then he told me, ‘You are the true, truest friend,’” Alyoung said.
What sealed their friendship was a shared obsession no one around them really understood. “The first time we sat together, it was: ‘Oh, you listen to rap? I listen to rap,’” Randar said. “At that time nobody in my surroundings, or the neighborhood I lived in, listened to what I listened to.” He performed a rap he’d memorized, and it turned out Alyoung knew it too. “We felt, ‘OK, we have the same thing — we love the same thing,” he said.
Turning that into a living took years. “Life forced us to make rap our source of income, at a time when rap didn’t bring in any money at all,” Randar said. “I’m sure the first rappers in Saudi Arabia to make money from rap were us.”
The stakes were highest for Randar, who lost the full-time job he had relied on to support his family. “I told my mom one thing: ‘Mother, this job is keeping me away from my dream. I promise you — what I used to earn in a month, I will earn in a day.’ She laughed,” he said.
Randar’s experience was slightly different. “One day I came out of my room and found my mother listening to a song of mine — and she didn’t know it was mine,” he said. “She said, ‘Listen to what this boy is saying.’ I told her, ‘This is me, mother.’ She didn’t believe me — and when she did, she got scared.” These days, he said, she sends him notes on his songs: “‘I feel this flow needs to change.’ ‘I feel the vocal is loud here.’ I take her notes and apply them.”
The duo’s big break happened when broadcaster MBC booked them as opening acts for Algerian raï star Cheb Khaled and US rapper Nelly. “Before that, Ahmed and I were in the neighborhood sharing a plate of food for 10 riyals, each trying to eat faster than the other,” Randar said. “Then we got a call: ‘Nelly and Cheb Khaled. You’re coming.’”
“R2,” released this month through MDLBEAST Records and the duo’s own YR Records, arrived with videos for the title track “R2,” “Lessa Lessa” and “Asabi3 Shama,” alongside a fourth song, “Al Halazona.” Putting out four tracks and three clips at once is, Randar believes, a first for the Arab world. “The idea wasn’t about marketing as much as showing the world we have the production,” he said.
The record leans on an old-school sound with a contemporary edge, its four tracks focusing on, according to a press release, “staying power, self-awareness and holding to the path regardless of the noise around it.”
“Asabi3 Shama” traces the duo’s run from 2013 to the present, while the closer, “Al Halazona,” builds to a comedic sample from Egyptian actor Adel Imam. Each track carries its own mood, Alyoung said.
“There are morning songs that set a certain character, and songs you listen to in the afternoon. Every track has its place,” he explained.
He framed the release as part of a wider push. “We’re among the pioneers of this industry, and the idea of EPs isn’t very widespread (in Saudi Arabia),” he said. “We said, ‘Let’s bring the culture in and make it established among artists.’”
Their many years together, Alyoung said, have strengthened rather than strained their partnership.
“When people come from a background where they weren’t wealthy, money can cause a split. But it’s brought us closer, and taught us to use our strengths the right way,” he said. He also credits the MDLBEAST team with boosting the duo’s trajectory.
“We want the local product to go to the farthest place,” he said. “If you’re in Saudi Arabia and want someone to take you to the next level globally, MDLBEAST is the right choice.”
Asked what’s coming next, Randar kept it simple: “There is still more.”
