We’re Back!

This "conceptual country music video" spins out multiple meanings of "country" as a homeland, nation/state, and music genre. Not much happens to a boy trio from State, but bliss in fine country form (and a hick-hop interlude), while a fourth from nowhere chases their fantasy into the real world and right off the edge. Earnest, absurd, and more, it dwells in the paradox of being authentically American, employing real friends of mine "from here" as my surrogate country boys. The project seeks to complicate the all too obvious problems of romanticizing America with the transgressive intimate desire to belong and embody it nonetheless, a common immigrant experience in claiming and making home without any real roots. My family moved briefly to Stillwater, Oklahoma, from Egypt when I was six. For me, it was square-one USA, and it made a profound impression on me in terms of landscape, culture, and identity. I’m back (in Oklahoma) not just as a foreigner or artist exotifying or invading the heartland, but trying on this American dream of "being country" and "of the country" as a quintessential misfit both hyper-aware of and hopelessly in love with the sprawling flyover places my life's taken hold among diverse, and identical, others.