Musician Faraj Suleiman and writer Majd Kayyal released the album Better than Berlin in December 2020. The title alludes to Haifa, but the omission of the city’s name is intentional: Berlin is replaceable, like any other European city. Haifa, never once mentioned in the songs, is not.
Though the themes in the album are specific to Haifa – the neighborhoods’ recent, grotesque gentrification is thoroughly meditated upon – they are also deeply personal, and as such, universal. The album was created for the residents of Haifa, for the enjoyment and relation of Palestinians. It was not meant to serve as an educational tool for a foreign [read: Western] listener to gain insight or practice empathy.
Kayyal and Suleiman make music that is reflective of the human condition—of emotions that are present regardless of locale or material circumstance. Political attitudes are enmeshed with the personal—questions about the neighborhood and private life coincide naturally. In the song Questions on My Mind, Suleiman laments the loneliness of Berlin despite its crowds, misses the old neighborhood, all its joys and petty grievances: from the neighbor cheating on his wife to the police who harass Palestinian youth every night. In Hymn to Gentrification, addressed to a “lover with sad eyes,” Suleiman criticizes the razing of old buildings in order to make room for Israeli skyscrapers, and the repackaging of local, traditional recipes as expensive gourmet cuisine.
Kayyal and Suleiman don’t expect to change the world, only to reflect it—with all of its contradictions and bittersweet realities. The pair explain that the album was created out of a few texts they sent to each other before COVID-19 hit.
This interview has been translated and edited for clarity and brevity.
Majd Kayyal: We didn’t think we were going to make an album – I was just writing things and throwing them to Faraj. Once we had three texts for songs ready – and Corona started – we [realized] that we can do something, there are a lot of similarities and meeting points between different texts, maybe we have a subject or a theme to work on.
Faraj Suleiman: The idea is that this place that we're living in is the best place in the world, [and] it’s not just Berlin. Berlin is mentioned because of two reasons: it’s the face of a generation that travels and tries new places, lots of young people immigrate there. It’s a place that’s very artistic, cheap, they speak English, it’s easy for people to try [to be] themselves there. But Berlin is also recalled in the album by chance; but it’s not just Berlin, it’s Haifa. We just believe that Haifa is nicer than Paris, London, New York, but we don’t have anything to prove that.
Majd Kayyal: It wasn’t intended as a tribute to Haifa – that came about organically. In the end it’s clear that it’s about the place, but in the beginning that wasn’t the intention. The city is not an abstract – it’s a state of life and a way of life, in the people, its community, its transformation, in society, in the architecture of the place, in the politics, in the places you work. So, it’s about the city, not as itself, but through the experiences that we have: things we love, hate, that we dream of, that make us depressed, that make us feel like we failed, that we want to do. It’s all inside the term “city.”
There are cities that claim universality—that claim that whatever story you tell in these cities, Paris, New York, anything you express there is relevant to everyone: friendship, betrayal, depression. If you stage it there, it’s considered universal, but when we talk about small cities on the margins of the world, you either have to talk about yourself and about the human, or about the city itself—your city itself is not enough to express the universal human condition.
This is the main thing that we try to confront in this album: here is the claim that our place is not less than any other place in the world, and it’s capable of experiencing and representing many human conditions and stories and things that we always imagine and feel that can only happen in the huge cities, in the metropolitan cities. That is the main claim of this album—that we’re telling the stories of a place in which people feel that their stories are not worth being told, that our stories are boring, we don’t have action, drama, huge writers, big stages, big musicians.
We’re saying no, we can have all of that, we can build stories and narratives through these small pieces of boredom.
We don’t think of ourselves as representatives that are making something we want to show to people.We don’t want to show Palestine to people - we couldn’t care less about that. We just care about expressing ourselves and bringing the voices of the people that we love, and to find our place and express it in an honest way. The audience that we have in our mind is basically the local audience that we meet [every day]. That’s it.
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I ask about the song “Winter Volcano.” I try to find a political tint in it, though it isn’t there. “In actuality,” Kayyal tells me. “Winter Volcano is an erotic song. It references the works of [the philosopher] Schopenhauer. When he talks about post-orgasm and what he called the ‘laughter of the devil’ and all the ideas that come to your mind; all the nihilistic ideas that you have in mind after the excitement of sex has just ended and you have to think about your life, about what am I doing, why am I here, what’s the point of life, why am I even trying to heed the call of nature? So, this was the first inspiration for this song.”
I tell them I thought it was about global warming.
They laugh: “We don’t care about global warming.”
The humor interspersed throughout the album is also intentional.
“I think that contradictions are essential in any form of art,” Kayyal notes. “If you find the right balance between [laughter and melancholy] you can take people on a journey within the feelings and their contradictions."
They sold out the biggest auditorium in Haifa in three hours last May. Suleiman found it strange that 1500 people pre-booked tickets to attend the concert. Perhaps it’s because the universalism evoked in the album truly does speak to a larger audience, or because the music itself demands to be heard live. Either way, it’s best to hear it in Haifa.
