Rakim Al-Jabbaar Is Reintroducing Himself by Going Back to the Beginning

It’s the day before Rakim Al-Jabbaar's seventh studio album, FM4840: Loyal to the Soil, is released on May 20, and he’s reminiscing about how his hometown, Duncanville—a suburb southwest of Dallas—influenced his music.

Al-Jabbaar, a former Dallas Observer Music Award winner for Best Songwriter, provides the context of where he’s from. “The neighborhood that I’m from and I represent sits between Duncanville, Cedar Hill and Grand Prairie. But it’s Dallas, we got a Dallas address,” he says. “When I left school in the ninth grade to go to my partner Jamar’s house to rap, we rode the DART bus to his house, not the school bus.”

The Duncanville area he grew up in was heavily into battle rap culture, an art form and a sport you often see in New York City or Los Angeles. Here in Texas, it was just as competitive. “So in my age group, I’m in middle school when DSR (Dirty South Rydaz) has their wave,” he recalls. “Every single day, somebody is beating under the bleachers or the table in the cafeteria, and people are freestyling. That is our culture. In the apartments, there’s these green boxes, we would bang on those boxes and freestyle.”

Al-Jabbaar instantly jumps into a story about skipping school one day. “A guy had moved down here from Brooklyn, and in his mind, there’s nobody who could fuck with him,” he says. “He’s in the cafeteria talking crazy. He can battle anybody and beat anybody. We slow, all this. We can’t rap. So people started calling me, ‘Man, where you at? This guy talking crazy.’ I told him, ‘Tell him to come across the street.’ He came across the street. I battled him, beat him. I say that to say we had a heavy battle culture around here, too.”
On Instagram, Al-Jabbaar posted that FM4840: Loyal to the Soil is his most personal project to date. The album takes listeners back to the beginning, telling his origin story in hip-hop. He is an adept rapper who can create storytelling songs without writing anything down, opening up about himself for the first time on FM4840: Loyal to the Soil. Why it took seven albums to do this was a matter of timing.

“It’s a lot of misconceptions about me,” Al-Jabbaar says. “I’m an anomaly because I sit in the middle. In Dallas, we have a lot of pockets, but it is mainly divided between the street rappers and the Deep Ellum rappers or whatever. I sit in the middle. For a street guy, I am too weird. For a weird guy, I’m too street. You might be expecting one thing and getting another depending on the scenario. I feel like people need the backdrop to that. You need the stories that explain the way I am that I am.”

FM4840: Loyal to the Soil has layers of interpretation. For starters, the title: The FM stands for The Farmacy, a wellness-focused brand he’s building up. The numbers represent 4,840 square yards, which equals one acre. “Three generations ago, everyone knew how to live off the land. Now we don’t,” he says. “In the inner city, one of the largest obstacles and catalysts is poverty, and poverty is attached to hunger. When people’s stomachs are empty, their minds don't get to thinking right, and then desperation kicks in, and now they do anything. If we knew how to grow our own food, then we can alleviate that stress for ourselves and our communities.”

The concept is rooted in self-sustainability and independence, emphasizing the subtitle's three-fold meaning. “Loyal to the soil, as in that’s a street perspective. Loyal to the soil of whatever area I come from,” he says. “Loyal to the soil as in I know through research in America, we have depleted our soil, but the soil is what provides our nutrition. And the last one is the soil representing a woman. That’s another thing wrong in hip-hop culture, the way we degrade the perspective of our women just being in a patriarchal society.”

Al-Jabbaar calls himself a revolutionary figure, upholding the essence of hip-hop by spreading knowledge. Each song reflects his meditation, using mesmerizing beats by Donny Domino as well as contributions by Oktober1st and Darkside as a canvas for his life stories. FM4840: Loyal to the Soil is a double disc split into two volumes with skits by K104 radio personality Dee “Lil D” Porter that touch on scenarios from not letting Pimp C down to praising all the moms out there. The artwork is a photo of his parents from prom.

The opening tracks for both discs – “Sunday” and “Solstice” – are prime examples of Al-Jabbaar’s gift as a technical rapper creating from a point of view. “Sunday” is about the day he was born. “My father was DJing at a park in Oak Cliff when my momma went into labor and had to get rushed to the hospital,” he recalls. Al-Jabbaar remembers his grandmother scolding Big Al to get to the hospital quickly. He says his father had to stop the music. “He packed everything up, and all the homies came to the hospital with him.”
Al-Jabbaar is the son of the late Big Al, who was part of the Dallas rap group Nemesis that gained national recognition in the ‘80s and ‘90s for songs like “Munchies for Your Bass” and “Hold Up.” On “Solstice,” he raps from the perspective of his father on the day he died, channeling his spirit and letting the words reimagining the evening flow through him. After recording the first verse, Al-Jabbaar writes the second about how he learned about his death from his mom, adding details like crying on Christmas Eve and going to his funeral. He says Big Al’s birthday was the last time they spoke before he passed.

Big Al died at just 36 years old when Al-Jabbaar was 12. Even today, he still wishes his father were around. “I be wanting him to be here to help,” he says. “The music industry is a tricky place for a young creative mind. You just want to make art and put it out to the world. Then you realize it's a business, and with it being a business, you are dealing with a lot of people who are not honest, or they’re not genuine in their interactions with you. That becomes a lot to deal with at times. I be wishing I had him here with me so I can lean more on his experience.”
On “Patricia’s Gift,” he recorded his mom telling a wild story, which she “cussed him out” for. “It’s not really a voicemail, I just sat my phone down and started talking to her,” he says. “My father’s super popular in this time, the late '80s, early '90s. I’m his fourth child technically, but at the time, I’m the third. Either way, his first baby mama and my mama knew each other, and his first baby mama didn’t like my mama. My mama got pregnant, and she has me. The lady finds out where we live, and she comes to the house and she throws a brick through the window. It lands on my baby bed.”

In the song, his mother tells him how she just came and got Al-Jabbaar, moving him from his bed to hers. “If she doesn’t do that, things could’ve been worse. That’s her telling that story of that day of what happened,” he says. “That explains the texture and the type of energy that I was raised around so it’ll help you understand me more.”

In other parts of the album, Al-Jabbaar is contemplative as he delivers street gospels for the night shift on “Open 24Hrs,” “Free Game,” “Crabs” and “44.” These are narrative-driven tracks for the hustlers on the block, revealing an introspective angle on the topic that fans haven’t heard from him before. They have the potential to be incredible live, where he’ll get a chance to do his new tracks as an opener for Dave East’s From the Dirt Tour that’s coming to Trees on Friday, May 23. It’s also a full circle moment for Al-Jabbaar as Trees, a venue with a history of booking hip-hop acts, had Nemesis perform there during their early days.

As a local artist who knows the difficulty of marketing an album in a genre high in oversaturation, Al-Jabbaar is focused on his rebrand. As people noticed, He has a new look. He has cut his dreadlocks and has a buzz cut, embarking on the new journey that lies ahead.

“I always felt like it was my job to uphold the essence of what hip-hop is and represent hip-hop culture,” Al-Jabbaar says. “My music is a metaphor for my energy. I also look at hip-hop as the mythology of the future, which means I'm a mythological creature, which means that when I'm creating this art, I'm creating landscapes in order to describe to you the energy of the individual that you're dealing with. So I want people to digest it on a metaphysical level and not just a surface level.”