This past February, Orlando-based Palestinian rapper/producer Snotnoze Saleem released Type Shit, his first tape with Florida’s Illuminated Paths cassette label. From the strained shouts of “I’m in your bitch belly like an Alien chestburster” over the noisy, claustrophobic groove of its opening track, Snotnoze quickly made it apparent that he was an MC with a voice and vision for hip-hop all his own: one characterized by urgency, political rage, metaphysical philosophy, and an experimental spirit. Less than half a year has passed between the release of Type Shit and its follow-up Intifada, a blitz of beats that range from wild to breezy and hyper-literate bars across thirteen tracks that average under two minutes in length each.
An emphasis on brevity or, more accurately, density is the signature of Snotnoze’s songs. They present as snacks but eat like full-course meals much like the tracks of Madvillain do (“I’m tryna make punk versions of Madvillainy,” he admits). In the same sense, they forgo traditional hooks in favor of a bombardment of quotable wit. Opener “Febreze” features an erratic Zolo/no wave beat that would be impressive to flow over at all, regardless of any lyrical substance, yet “Steal a new stripper box / New strain of chicken pox / Stricken sorry / Hari-kari / Check safari / Hades docks / Obey the tyrant / Start a silence / They Live glasses on / Burning down the Amazon / Apeirogonal lexicon” is but seconds of the masterful wordplay Snotnoze regularly demonstrates over its sprint. As much as MF Doom serves as a solid point of comparison, it might be as accurate to liken Snotnoze to a pissed-off Arabic Aesop Rock spitting verbose fury over Paul White-adjacent production.
For someone who started rapping because he was struggling to find other people to rap over his odd production (he previously only made beats under the Hyperlink moniker), Snotnoze is shockingly ambitious and adept on the mic. Beyond his writing, his emotive delivery carries well over everything from the turbulent propulsion of “Febreze” and “RIP Liveleak” to the more laid-back jazz and blues-flavored beats of “Francis Bacon,” “Rusty Arabic,” and “Duck Hunt.” Recorded over a single day (though written and produced over months), Intifada’s not overly fussed with. There are occasional voice cracks and audible resets, but rather than becoming distracting or overbearing, they serve more as a garnish to accentuate the authenticity of the recording process (“[I] shitted out all the vocals at once,” “I was legit losing it”). It’s raw but far from amateur.
Informed by Snotnoze’s Palestinian heritage, much of Intifada’s political content is anti-Zionist in nature. “Duck Hunt” is among the most overt, with “This beat sounds like / Smoking weed after an acid trip / Provoking greed and laughter / From nosebleeds to Gaza Strip,” “Telling all who disagree with me / To suck cunt / No anti-Semite, but I clap Zionists / Like Duck Hunt,” and “Deliver my speech to the United Nations / Bomb in my pocket, fuck relations / Rather vent frustration / I’m like a Heaven Smile straight from killer7 / A little scary at first but I leave a strong impression / Bloody images, I should take a class in discretion / Until then, I call out instances of mass oppression” being choice lines representative of the radical confrontation Intifada often addresses.
“Boltzmann Brain,” on the other end of the spectrum, is an unsettling abstraction. It brings to mind the off-kilter psychosis of The Residents more than any traditional hip-hop with its sparse, hypnotic beat, half-mumbled modulated allusions to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Slaughterhouse-Five and ruminations on the bizarre Boltzmann brain hypothesis (which more or less suggests the formation of random minds, spontaneously popping into reality). On the whole, Intifada might be just slightly less out there than Type Shit, but “Boltzmann Brain” is perhaps the maddest track Snotnoze has released to date.
To think that Snotnoze Saleem is essentially a project born of happenstance: that there’s a timeline where we don’t hear this underrepresented perspective bursting at the seams with verbal assaults on the Israel Defense Forces and Suda 51 references. Intifada would’ve made a spectacularly inventive beat tape, but it’s all the better for the passionate, creative rhymes laid down upon them.