Thirteen tracks were enough to make one thing obvious: this kid had no shortage of motivation or talent. At the time, the up-and-coming artist belonged to a very particular sonic ecosystem in Rabat. Ftour M3a Tchubi, followed by Lost Tapes. and S7OUR, circulated mostly among friends, fellow musicians, creatives, and the city’s increasingly interconnected rap crowd. His music felt local in the best possible way. You could hear the city in it: its humor, its boredom, its contradictions, and its particular kind of melancholy.
Then Diary of a Dead Man happened, and suddenly, the artist who had felt like one of Rabat’s best-kept secrets was becoming much harder to keep to ourselves. Still, no matter how far his music traveled, there was never much doubt about where he belonged.
“Rabat is where I grew up and lived through many things. My first love, first breakup, first friendships that lasted for years and years; it’s where I had my first car accident, first played basketball; it means everything to me. I always want to represent where I come from. Everyone is happy to belong to Casa; I’m glad I’m representing my city,” he said.
Speaking to MILLE, the 27-year-old returns to Rabat again and again. To him, the city is everything, a place he is deeply attached to, and one he seems almost amused to have chosen as such a defining part of his creative identity. Where Casablanca has long carried the weight of Morocco’s cultural and commercial cool, Tchubi has made a point of turning Rabat into the center of his own artistic world.
But like most artists with strong opinions, Tchubi has also had to deal with his fair share of noise, particularly when it comes to his relationship with the Moroccan diaspora. In one freestyle video that quickly went viral, he took aim at French-Moroccan artists Lartiste and Moha K, accusing them of leaning on their Moroccan identity only when convenient. In other words, he believes they use their Moroccan-ness as a form of branding now that being Moroccan is finally seen as cool.
It would be easy to reduce moments like these to “Tchubi starts beef,” but that would miss something. Provocation has always been part of his artistic personality. Throughout our conversation, Tchubi seems more interested in questioning what Moroccan identity, success, and belonging look like than in making everyone comfortable with his answers. Sometimes, that comes across as arrogance. Sometimes, as humor. Sometimes, as genuine frustration with the industry around him.
Now, after years spent in that industry, he has arrived at the project that puts much of it into perspective: A MAN WITH A GUN. For a debut album, it almost feels late when you consider how long he has been making music.
“I learned a lot, and I lost a lot, but we’re (redacted) here,” he said as the project was rolling out.
Where exactly here becomes clearer once you get inside the record. For his first studio album, Tchubi wasn’t interested in simply putting together a collection of songs. From the beginning, he was thinking in scenes, characters, and a larger story that nods back to his previous work.
“A MAN WITH A GUN was imagined as a film,” Tchubi reveals. “It’s as if it’s a prequel to A Diary of a Dead Man, the story of how he’s feeling dead, from a short story about becoming to a short story about letting go.”
Released on Sept. 11, the album is made up of 16 new songs, nine collaborators, and 45 minutes of music that Tchubi wants you to experience as much as listen to. Movie references, traditional Moroccan instruments, zaghroutas, and niche samples all help tie the project together, with each track adding another piece to the wider story he is trying to tell.
The first time I heard the album, a few months before its release, what immediately caught my attention was how cinematic it all felt. Tchubi isn’t simply asking you to listen to an album. He is asking you to watch something unfold. Throughout our interview, one question kept coming back to me, and it seems to follow the listener through the record, too: Who is the gun pointed at?
That question almost becomes the organizing principle of the project. Three characters represent three different social positions: one is anti-system, living day by day; another exists within the system but hates being part of it; and in between them is a kilimini, a Moroccan slang term for someone who was French-educated in the country, observing both sides.
Suddenly, the gun is no longer simply a weapon. It becomes a metaphor for anger, class, ambition, resentment, the desire to escape, and perhaps most importantly, the complicated relationship an artist can have with himself.
That is where the project’s visual direction becomes particularly important, this time courtesy of Mehdi Messoudi, aka Ms3oudi, a Rabat-based creative and longtime collaborator who helped bring the album’s cinematic ambitions to life. Drawing from both his own life experiences and Benali’s, Ms3oudi built a visual world around the people, places, and situations they have actually encountered.
“Nothing was forced; we were inspired by real-life people,” Ms3oudi explained in a separate conversation with MILLE.
And although two Rabat creatives were behind the project, much of that world ended up being recreated elsewhere. According to Ms3oudi, the original plan was to shoot everything in the capital, “as our stories ALL happened in Rabat,” before production logistics eventually pushed filming to Casablanca.
In an attempt to make his own story feel as universal and relatable as possible, Tchubi looks backward. If Diary of a Dead Man was about the death of an alter ego, A MAN WITH A GUN is interested in what created him.
Tchubi has spent years turning his past into music. Here, he turns that past into a story. The boy from Rabat is there. The Ftour M3a Tchubi kid is there. The provocateur, the cinephile, the rapper: all of those versions of him still exist somewhere inside the record.
Fourteen years after he first started making music, Tchubi isn’t presenting any of them as something to erase. He is using them as source material.
By the time A MAN WITH A GUN finally arrived, those earlier versions of Tchubi had stopped being the destination and became the backstory to a much larger story, one he hopes longtime listeners and new fans alike will be able to recognize parts of themselves in.
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