On a quiet morning, sometime during his final year of university, Marwan Moussa sat in the kitchen hunched over his laptop. He had just finished breakfast with his father, who went off to work around 10 a.m. When he returned in the evening, he found his son in the exact same position—back stiff, eyes locked on the screen, headphones welded to his head. Hours had passed, but Moussa hadn’t moved. He had been making beats all day. Later, he recalls to MILLE, his father admitted: “That’s the day I knew you were going to make music, since you spent all that time doing it for free.”
The funny thing is, the 30-year-old didn’t set out to be Egypt’s most influential rapper. For a while, it looked like his future lay behind the camera. He studied cinema and directing in Italy for four years, flirted with film, and even moved to Los Angeles in 2016 to train in sound engineering. But somewhere along the way, the pull of music became undeniable. “When I started producing, I realized I enjoyed spending my time doing that way more than film-related stuff,” he admits.
It was a moment of clarity. The Egyptian-German artist realized that producing brought him more joy than anything else. So he leaned into it. Even though those hours in the kitchen may have been less about ambition than compulsion, they laid the foundation for a career that has since redefined what Egyptian rap can sound like.
The story of the Moussa’s rise is also the story of how Egyptian rap mutated from a subculture into a full-blown movement. He dropped his debut album Bel Monasba in 2017, followed by the release of two albums, Russia and Brazil, a year later. But it was his 2019 project Propaganda that officially catapulted him into the spotlight, cementing him as an icon in his own right.
By the late 2010s, several rappers had carved out a lane, and trap-heavy sounds were bubbling across Cairo, but Moussa brought something different. His beats were slicker, his flows more playful, and his references unapologetically local. He wasn’t trying to mimic Atlanta or London—he was trying to sound like Egypt. “I don’t want to hear an Egyptian rapper doing a US trap-type song,” he says. “ I think it ruins the authenticity of the entire scene. We should be digging into this treasure of our culture.” That approach resonated with fans who were hungry for rap that felt like it belonged to them not borrowed from elsewhere, and before long Moussa’s songs were the ones blasting from car stereos and schoolyards across the country.
Part of that has to do with his background. Born in the north-eastern city of Ismailia to an Egyptian father and a German mother, and growing up straddling two worlds that could not be more different, Moussa became fluent in contradiction. “My sound and personality are Egyptian, but the way I use technology itself is more German,” he reflects. That paradox made him able to embrace the looseness of Egyptian slang and street culture while applying the discipline of German engineering to his craft. For him, rap was not a genre to imitate but a tool to build something new.
Moussa would go on to release a number of chart-topping albums and singles (including the now-classic 2022 hit Batal 3alam), critically-acclaimed music videos, co-found his own record label Raks Mal Record, dabble in some public rap beefs, and take home prestigious awards at the 2022 All Africa Music Awards (AFRIMA) in Dakar, including Best Rapper, Best Lyricist, Best Hip-Hop Artist, and Breakthrough Artist of the Year. By 2023, he became the third most streamed Arabic hip-hop artist of all time across the Middle East and North Africa. But what was supposed to be one of the happiest and exciting moments in his life turned out to be the worst following the loss of his mother that same year. For six months, he couldn’t even listen to music. The thing that had always grounded him felt unbearable.
All he had left was his phone, where he’d empty the heaviness into the Notes app whenever the grief became too much to hold in his head. “When things got overwhelming… the thoughts were too strong in my mind,” he says. “I had to write them down. It kept me sane,” he admits. “I need to constantly be emptying my mind,” he reveals.
Those notes became the scaffolding for The Man Who Lost His Heart in 2024. A grieving process pressed onto wax, the project featured 23 tracks, split across five discs, each one tracing a different stage of loss. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance—it’s all there. One track samples Mohamed Mounir, another leans on trap, another is bare piano. It’s chaotic, uneven, and painfully human, because that’s what grief is.
His willingness to go where rap rarely allows— vulnerability— is part of what makes him so singular. And yet, for all the acclaim, he doesn’t seem weighed down by the pedestal. Being called one of the defining voices of Egyptian rap doesn’t rattle him. “The pressure is from me to me,” he muses. “What preoccupies me isn’t the fancy titles, but the work itself—how many songs I can make, how many hits I can deliver, how many times I can create a cultural moment. Like a football player has to stay consistent,” he adds.
Over the years, the rapper and producer has proven himself to be a chameleon, sliding between trap and EDM, weaving in shaabi rhythms, even leaning into moments of raw vulnerability when rap usually demands bravado. He’s already shown he can shapeshift, and now he’s setting his sights on something deeper. Each year, he says, he wants to turn the dial on the “Egyptian-ness” in his music a little higher. Recently that’s meant sampling dusty ’70s records, teaching himself Arabic music scales, and experimenting with a keyboard packed with traditional sounds. He dreams of chopping Abdel Halim Hafez vinyls into rap songs, or colliding shaabi drum patterns with modern production. “The melodies, the scales, the sounds… they’re so rich, and so many of them have never even been touched,” he insists.
That same curiosity extends beyond the studio. Moussa has always had a sharp sense of style, blending vintage sportswear with tailored silhouettes, mixing codes the same way he does in music. It caught the eye of adidas, who tapped him to help relaunch their Superstar sneakers. For Moussa, the collaboration carried a certain poetry: a German sportswear brand asking a part-German superstar (pun intended) to reintroduce one of hip-hop’s most iconic silhouettes at an exclusive launch party last week.
Set in a cavernous industrial warehouse in Dubai, the space was packed, bodies pressed together, the air thick with anticipation. Local rappers Saud G and Santo warmed up the crowd before Moussa stepped on stage, and by the time he appeared, the room was electric. People were rapping along word-for-word, as if Cairo had been transplanted into the Gulf for one night only. “It feels good to be performing for people outside of Egypt,” he says. “Sometimes they miss you more than the people that have you around most of the time.”
The Superstar, of course, isn’t just a sneaker. the Tesla rapper remembers seeing it in the hip-hop documentaries he devoured as a kid, always tied to Run DMC. “The shoes play a huge role in hip-hop culture. They’re a classic, and their impact and cultural importance is massive.” For him, the collaboration wasn’t just a brand deal as much as it was connecting past to present—taking something with history and reshaping it for a new generation. Which, in many ways, is exactly what he’s been doing with Egyptian rap all along.
For adidas, he reintroduced the Superstar. For Egypt, he’s become one himself—though he’d never say it out loud. Moussa may avoid speaking in absolutes about who he is or what role he plays, but his impact is impossible to ignore. He’s still the kid in the kitchen who loses track of time because the beat demands it, only now, the beats he’s making are shaping an entire generation’s idea of what Egyptian rap can be. He’s both archivist and futurist, excavating forgotten sounds while pushing the culture forward. Vulnerable yet uncompromising, local yet global. And maybe that’s why he’s hard to pin down. He’s Egypt’s reluctant icon—one who keeps building, experimenting, and refusing to sit still.
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