Last Thursday, I attended the School of Music Convocation with Omar Offendum. The SoM Convo is a weekly meeting for every undergraduate music major at Butler, and we have a wide variety of topics, from different guest speakers to audition tips to music networking opportunities and lots of random things in between. Some of these Convos in the last 7 semesters have been more interesting than others, and Omar’s was one of the coolest in my time at Butler.
He began by telling us where he was from. His parents are Syrian, but they moved from Syria to Saudi Arabia before he was born. He lived in Saudi Arabia until he was 4, and then his family came to the U.S. He grew up in the Washington D.C. area and attended our country’s first Muslim school. He learned Arabic for at least 2.5 hours a day, in addition to the meeting all of the other educational standards of any American school. He is fluent in Arabic and has a pretty vast knowledge of Arabic poetry, which is what inspired a lot of his musical work.
Offendum didn’t start to really get into music until he was in college. He studied architecture and made music for fun, blending the musical elements he was surrounded by in American pop culture with the natural rhythm and flow of the Arabic language. While he finished his degree and began his work as an architect, he uploaded the work he was most proud of and started to get hits here, back home, and elsewhere around the world. He told us that all over the world, he is mistaken for the wrong ethnicity—he has been called dozens of things before correctly identified as Syrian. It’s not malicious or ill-intentioned, but people (like reporters and media outlets) don’t ask, they just assume, and often do so incorrectly.
Offendum was given the honor of being a Kennedy Center Citizen Artist Fellow, which he finished up earlier this year. During his time working with the Kennedy Center, he wrote and performed a one hour show about the Little Syria neighborhood in NYC, in which he mixed English rap, the Arabic language, live instruments, and electronic beats. The project “uncovers what life in the heart of Arab-America was like over a century ago; while informing much of what is (still) happening today in terms of immigration, xenophobia, Syria & the ever-evolving notion of an “American dream”.” (From the video description of this eleven minute medley he shared with us). It was awesome to hear his story and even cooler to hear his music. Check it out!