hip-hop

Saint Levant

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Palestinian-French singer and rapper raised in Gaza and Jordan, switching between Arabic, French and English mid-verse. Velvet-voiced come-ons over Levantine R&B.

Marwan Abdelhamid was born in Jerusalem in 2000, at the start of the Second Intifada, to an Algerian-French mother, Maria Mohammedi, who has worked for UNRWA, and a Palestinian-Serbian father, Rashid Abdelhamid, an architect, hotel entrepreneur, DJ and film producer. He has a younger brother, Khaled.

The family soon joined his grandparents in Gaza, where his parents built a twenty-two-room beachfront hotel called Al Deira in the Rimal district, designed to his father's own plans. He attended the American International School there until the 2007 Battle of Gaza forced the family to relocate to Amman, Jordan.

Growing up he spoke French at home, English at school, and Arabic at the Wehdat refugee camp, where he also played football, and studied piano and saxophone. In 2018 he moved to the United States to study International Relations at the University of California, Santa Barbara, graduating in 2022.

Before adopting the stage name Saint Levant, a play on Yves Saint Laurent and his native Levant region, he wrote the political tracks "Jerusalem Freestyle" and "Nirvana in Gaza" and posted videos on Palestinian history and toxic masculinity in Arab culture.

"Very Few Friends," released in November 2022, drew about two million YouTube views within a month and reached number one on Spotify in nineteen countries, becoming his first widely heard track. An EP, From Gaza, with Love, followed in 2023, and in 2024 he signed to Universal Arabic Music and released "Deira" with MC Abdul, a chaabi-style song dedicated to his father's hotel, destroyed in an Israeli bombing that January and later the title track of his debut album, which included duets with Cheb Bilal and Kehlani.

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