DJ Haram Breaks Down Eight Perfectly Produced Songs From Around the World

The Producers is an interview series where our favorite producers discuss their favorite music production. 

What does it mean to create music while the world is crumbling around you? This is a question DJ Haram has spent her entire career figuring out. As the child of Turkish immigrants growing up in northern New Jersey, she was as immersed in radical politics as she was in Middle Eastern music, hip-hop, and Jersey club. In the early 2010s, Haram, born Zubeyda Muzeyyen, moved to Philadelphia, where she began organizing with Occupy Wall Street and took on DJing in earnest. She spent the rest of the 2010s refining her craft, collaborating with Philly-based musician and poet Moor Mother in the duo 700 Bliss and working with the Discwoman collective before moving back up north to Brooklyn. Haram has accomplished so much in the last decade and change—world tours, her own zine, production for Armand Hammer and Ghais Guevara—it’s shocking to think that Beside Myself, her album, mixing beats, sound design, and raps from a handful of guests and herself, is her first solo full-length ever.

Years’ worth of musical ideas and frustrations over anti-Arab sentiment—being tokenized on festival bills and censored in interviews while talking about Palestine—power much of Beside Myself. “I tell people the intention of my work is trying to make being actually rebellious and doing subversion cool again,” she explains. “We’re in this really apathetic and nonchalant era of ‘Don’t try! Make it look like someone caught you on surveillance.’ I actually try so hard and I feel like I’m cringe a lot. I think about this Zora Neale Hurston quote often: ‘If you’re silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.’ I feel like people are really gonna get it twisted if I don’t straight-up tell them.”

Muzeyyen communicates this sentiment across Beside Myself. “I coulda been this world’s thickest eco-terrorist / But I’m in the green room drunk looking for cannabis / My ’fit not shit next to all this / But all y’all are on my guestlist,” she deadpans on “Distress Tolerance,” one of the few times she puts her own voice on the album. It manifests musically, too—with the Turkish zurna swirling around club drums on the Armand Hammer-featuring single “Stenography,” and the Iranian kamancheh presiding over the marching rhythm of “Voyeur.” Other times, her synths and 808s tremble in the distance as guests like El Kontessa, Bbymutha, and Sha Ray flaunt their shit and speak on the resistance. Beside Myself is a powerful statement drawing from every corner of Muzeyyen’s life and identity, one that will have you shaking your hips while you’re racking your brain. 

Below, Haram discusses eight songs that have inspired her as a producer, from rap and club to math rock and Middle Eastern orchestral, and everything in between.