THE OLIVE TAPE: A MIXTAPE RAISING AID & BUILDING COMMUNITY
BY: Katarina La POLL
Curated and produced by actor Rosaline Elbay (Judy Goodwin on Netflix’s Kaleidoscope, Amani on th 3X Emmy-nominated Hulu/A24 film series Ramy, Sara on MBC’s Qabeel), actor Dario Ladani Sanchez (Sam in Dear Edward on AppleTV+, Lucas in Netflix’s forthcoming The Life List), and Brooklyn-based experimental indie-pop artist Blood Cultures.
The Olive Tape opens with ambient music then a voice cuts through to say, “my country is a ghost.”
It is the opening line of Palestinian-American poet and clinical psychologist Hala Alyan’s poem, “When They Say Pledge Allegiance, I Say.” The poem was remixed exclusively for the album and begins by inviting the listener back to 1948 to the poet’s great-great-grandmother flattening bread with her hands. Then it is 1967 and Alyan says, “every mother is clutching the sons she has left and my great-grandmother names my mother nostalgia while my other great-grandmother names my father a gun.” It’s 1990 and her mother is crossing a border; 1994, she is habitually “falling in love with a white boy;” 2006, “another war;” 2003, 2016, 2020 as time blurs and “it is every year,” Alyan says, and “I am in my country watching my country burn because of my country.”
In February of this year, a group of friends pulled together their networks to create The Olive Tape raising humanitarian aid for PCRF and Anera. The creators of the project include actor Rosaline Elbay (Judy Goodwin on Netflix’s Kaleidoscope, Amani on Hulu’s Ramy, Sara on MBC’s Qabeel), actor Dario Ladani Sanchez (Sam in Dear Edward on AppleTV+, Lucas in Netflix’s forthcoming The Life List), and experimental indie-pop artist Blood Cultures. The Olive Tape consists of 20 tracks from 24 contributors from all over the globe. On it you’ve got rappers who’ve performed alongside Wu Tang Clan, musicians currently on tour with Adrienne Lenker, vocalists who have been shouted out by SZA, as well as more indie artists with loyal followings.
When asked about the project, the team explains how the group came together to commiserate after the retaliation following Oct 7th. “We were asking ourselves, ‘how do we actually move the needle and how do we do that using our platforms and using our crafts?’”
Just as the opening track calls forth ghosts, other tracks on The Olive Tape pass the mic to ghosts. One is Malcom X in Track 2, “Friends” by Iraqi-Canadian rapper Narcy, hailed as one of the pioneers of the Arab hip hop movement. The song takes the listener to King Solomon Baptist Church, where the revolutionary leader calls on his community to put aside individual faiths to unite against oppression, exploitation, and degradation. Another is James Baldwin on Track 6 “Going Home” by Blood Cultures.
The third track is “Watermelon Seeds,” by Phay, a Palestinian-American rapper and the son of Palestinian refugees. Accompanied by strings, soft piano, and a singular wood block percussion to carry us through, we hear Phay absolutely flow—“survivor’s guilt got me feeling like why not me / so I’m standing behind these bars til all my mans free / til all of my women free / to the olives on my tree / to the shells from their bullets / turn into watermelon seeds.”
Then there are other songs on the mixtape that speak less directly to the ongoing Nakba. There’s an honesty and reclamation of innocence in the album when roses emerge from soil in Track 16 of Rasha Nahas’ “Wrood.” Or when we’re pointed to “a white sheet in the water" in Track 14 of Olivia Barton’s “there’s a part of me that never got hurt.m4a” or a raw cover of the well-loved alt-pop rock song, “Torn” in Track 8 sung by indie-rock artist Molly Martin and re-contextualized on The Olive Tape in a way that is nothing short of heartbreaking.
The curation is also noteworthy with its sonic blend of the East and West. There’s the dazzling “Shams (Sun)” Track 11 by Nour Harkati who sings in Tunisian Arabic, plays the oud, and employs rhythmic handclaps while modulating his voice with striking grace. When speaking to actor Rosaline Elbay about this stunning song “Shams,” she tells how, “Shams means sun, and the metaphor that pulses through the song is the warmth of the sun being the warmth of home. My mother’s a poet,” Elbay explains, “if she ever wrote anything political then, by necessity, it was metaphor. So I've grown up with that, particularly in Arabic. While the song is an allegory, when placed on this album it becomes very clear what it's about. That feels powerful — context giving a piece permission, or opportunity, to reveal its meaning.”
This track cuts sharp into heavy drumming of the next song, “No Where To Go,” a tongue-out grungy basement-rager-type-track by musician Nick Hakim and followed with “Brownies" by vocalist Orono Noguchi and her sincere admittance: “didn’t mean to make you upset, can I make you brownies?"
The album ends as it began, with a poem. So music and poetry in times of social upheaval have always been companions. Think 1971 Gill Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” or today where poems are anthems and circulating in modern ways—the late Refaat Alareer’s poem “If I Must Die” moving from digital to analog: first on Professor Alareer’s screen then penned down onto white kites by readers and protesters and lifted above crowds in packed streets all over the world.
Reminiscent of early mixtapes, a compilation of new exclusive, pre-released, and remixed tracks, The Olive Tape does justice to the forms’ original intent. In the 70s when cassettes moved from its main use as a dictation tool to a device for recording music and then later, to listen on the go—as made possible with the 1979 invention of the Walkman—so the mixtape emerged. “The first tapes were used to record people at places like a park jam, a party, a community gathering," says Regan Sommer McCoy, founder of the Mixtape Museum, to the Recording Academy in "The Unending Evolution Of The Mixtape: 'Without Mixtapes, There Would Be No Hip-Hop.’” “They were called party tapes then, and people would make copies to give out to friends that couldn’t be there, so they could hear if the DJ was hot or not."
In Jehnie Burns’ book Mixtape Nostalgia: Culture, Memory, and Representation, the author shares how mixtapes were “often being made by people with something interesting to say that didn’t fit into [the mainstream] mold," and this movement toward mixtapes “had a lot of similarities to the early days of punk—where local culture was so important, local community, local issues. Mixtapes are able to speak to that community in a way that they understand it and care about."
Actor Dario Landi Sanchez shares how for this album’s community, “the inability to talk about the wound is its own kind of wound.” So instead, music. The team shares how, “the goal in making The Olive Tape was to say, ‘We're all standing in this together. We're all doing this united, and here's something back.' It's not just a donation. It’s the donation and you get something in return for it too. So it allows people to be a bit more connected to the cause for the music itself.”
The Olive Tape is a community gathering. And it invites you, too. Like all mixtapes made from the heart, it is meant to be passed along. So in true mixtape fashion, listen… do you feel it too?
If so, send something back.
