A crowd starts to gather in front of the Cabaret Sauvage in Paris, a circus-themed venue nestled in the French capital’s 19th arrondissement, typically known for hosting nights that stretch well past the last metro. And things were no different two weekends ago when Palestinian DJ Habibeats took over, simultaneously marking the start of his Europe and North America tour.
Embarking on a three-week marathon set to pass through more than 10 cities across the two continents, the Bay Area-born selector born Ibrahim Abu-Ali has been on a steady run since 2020, having established himself as a defining act in the region’s soundscape over the past six years. With a following many only dream of (over 1.7 million across Instagram and TikTok, to be precise), his sets and viral mashups now reach thousands beyond the Arab world, making him a reference point for anyone looking to understand the region’s club culture.
Drawing from a wide-ranging palette— cruising through Brazilian funk to Arab pop, Raï, and other genres from around the world— Abu-Ali’s sets feel like a patchwork of sounds, stitching together arrangements and compositions that, from the outside looking in, seem unlikely to fit but somehow do. At the centre of it all, though, sits an unmistakable Arab throughline— the spine of his taste— recontextualizing sounds once confined to family gatherings or the nostalgia box, and placing them before audiences who, more often than not, latch onto them almost instantly.
Ahead of his show, we sat down with the artist for a quick conversation. We caught him between finalizing his upcoming EP, set to drop April 29, and gearing up for a run of shows across Europe and North America, with a long-awaited Coachella debut on the horizon.
MILLE WORLD: Hello. Tell us, what have you been up to? What’s been keeping you busy in the days and weeks before going on tour?
IBRAHIM ABU-ALI: I have been tirelessly working on my upcoming EP. I’ve just been all day, every day, working on finishing this project, and it’s pretty much done now. I’m in the final mixing and mastering stages, but I’m super excited. It’s expected to come out on April 29.
Why choose to tour Europe rather than other areas of the globe right now?
IA: It just comes down to trying to hit different parts of the world at the right time. A lot of the Middle East is too hot during the summer, so if you go play, especially in the Gulf or in Egypt, it’s scorching hot then. So those parts of the world tend to become more active around November, December, and January, so we typically save that region for that time.
As for Europe, it must have been my agent that had some inkling. Also, I’m playing Coachella in a few weeks. And once Coachella hits, I basically start the North America tour right away hence why we tried to squeeze in as many shows in Europe as we could now.
Congratulations on the Coachella debut by the way. Speaking of, there’s been quite a few Palestinians that have performed there over the past two or three years. How does it feel to add your name to such a prestigiously small circle of artist who have ever managed that?
IA: I always used to say that I would only go if they booked me and they did. I never thought it would ever happen, but I never would have thought I’d see any Palestinian artist there either. So it means everything.
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Why is it you think that Palestinians — and the wider region more broadly — are only now starting to gain such level of visibility. What do you think has changed?
IA: A lot of things, and it’s hard to boil it down into a simple answer. But, at least from an American perspective, being Arab post-9/11 was not trendy. Many of our parents and community members were worried about us. So it was always, “Maybe don’t be so loud about your Arab-ness, tone it down a little bit.”
But as time has gone on, at least in the US and I think most of the world too, it’s become more acceptable, I guess, to own your identity, and people have become more interested in learning about different cultures and music. I attribute that largely to globalization, TikTok, and the Internet. Suddenly, you see white kids doing dabke online.
It’s the same for a lot of communities, not just ours. I think most immigrant and diaspora communities have, over the past five to ten years, gone through a wave of reclaiming their identity, and that has shown up in many different forms. You can see it in the way Bad Bunny became one of the biggest artists in the world, K-pop exploded globally, and Afrobeats reached a whole new scale. Artists like Wizkid and Burna Boy are selling out arenas and stadiums in the US. These are non-American acts coming into America, doing huge numbers, topping charts; that was pretty much unheard of before.
How do you deal with the fact that for the past maybe 15 years, they didn’t call you because you were Palestinian. But because you are Palestinian, you are now being booked.
IA: It’s a tough one because, on one hand, if we’re given opportunities to showcase our culture, we should take them. I’m all for that as it’s through visibility that we shift narratives, represent ourselves properly, and celebrate our culture in a way that feels normal, fun, and free. At the same time, intention matters. If someone is reaching out just to fill a quota and it’s obvious that’s the motivation, then I’m not interested. So it’s really a case-by-case thing. It depends on the context and the intention behind it.
I think it’d be fair for anyone to feel vindictive in some way. Is that your case?
IA: I didn’t go into any of this with an intention of revenge or flipping the hierarchy. For me, it was simply about being my full, actual self. Growing up, part of me felt Arab and part of me felt American, and I was never fully one or the other. I wasn’t “Arab enough” for some, and not “American enough” for others. I was always that in-between, so what I’m doing now feels like an honest merging of both sides of my identity, in a way that’s celebratory and hopefully resonates with others who’ve felt the same.
I didn’t set out thinking, “I’m going to disrupt the system,” but as things started gaining momentum, that idea began to grow too. It became more like — okay, this is real, this is happening — so now I want to push it as far as I possibly can.
Speaking of your early days, could you tell us how you started out?
IA: I started DJing when I was around 13 or 14, so I’ve been doing it for a long time. Growing up in the Bay Area, I was a big hip-hop head — that’s the culture there. All I wanted was to be a hip-hop DJ. I never imagined, not even for a second, that I’d be playing Arabic music in clubs or bars. I’d play it at weddings here and there, sure, but never in a proper club setting or on a lineup. Touring with it? That felt completely out of reach. I genuinely didn’t think people wanted to hear it. I even thought Arab crowds in clubs might be like, “What are you doing?” It just didn’t feel like something that had a place in that environment.
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And when did the switch happen?
IA: The first real moment came through a party called No Nazar, which doesn’t exist anymore unfortunately. It was a collective of South Asian DJs in Los Angeles, throwing monthly parties that blended South Asian sounds with Afro, Latino, and Bollywood. It was essentially a South Asian diaspora version of something like [my party series] Habibi’s House, and it ended up being a huge inspiration for me. I got close with the people behind it, and they invited me to DJ on my birthday in 2022. Having been to their parties and seen how seamlessly they were playing South Asian music in a club setting, it clicked for me. I thought, okay, this is the right space to try something different.
How did it scale?
IA: Around that same time, I had started producing remixes and edits. I made one that flipped an Arabic track into a Brazilian funk–style remix and it ended up going viral on TikTok. It was used in tens of thousands of videos, and those videos accumulated millions of views over time. Suddenly, my SoundCloud— where I had it available for free download—was getting hit nonstop. DJs were downloading it and tagging me every weekend, from Paris to Greece to India to Brazil, playing it in their sets. I’m pretty sure I played that remix during that first No Nazar set. A few clips from that night went viral too, mashups of Arabic music with Punjabi tracks and other South Asian sounds. That’s when my following really started to grow.
Not long after, I had the chance to throw my first event: Habibi’s House, at the same venue. The first one, honestly, was a failure. Maybe 40 or 50 people showed up in a space that held 400. I only had three days to pull it together and promote it, so it was very last-minute. But those 40 or 50 people had the best time, and the energy was real. I kept posting videos from it, and even though it wasn’t packed, people were blown away by what they were seeing. The second one, I had about a month to promote. Around 320 people showed up. Then that went viral. After that, it became a monthly thing, and it started selling out consistently.
What really pushed it forward was the reaction. People would come up to me after and say they’d never felt represented like that in a club before. For a lot of them, that music only existed in weddings or hookah lounges; spaces that are either too family-oriented or too laid-back. This was different. It was loud, it was high-energy, it was theirs. There was something freeing about it too. People heard sounds tied to their childhood, but in a context they could fully claim as their own. From there, it just kept growing. And soon enough, people started asking when it was coming to New York, to Miami, to other cities. That’s when it began to move beyond one place and turn into something bigger.
Where does your stage name come from?
IA: I was always proud of being Arab, so I wanted my name to reflect that. Even when I was DJing straight hip-hop, I kept the same name. The funny thing is that a lot of non-Arab people didn’t catch the play on words. They thought my name was “Hobby Beats,” so people in the club would come up to me like, “What up, Hobby?” genuinely thinking that was my name. I don’t think people really understood it at first, but I’ve had that name since college.
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How much impact do you think the internet has had on your career?
IA: I think the main thing is that people just wouldn’t have been aware. I might have found some success in LA on a local level, but expanding beyond that without the internet would have been really difficult. It’s hard to reach people in other cities when you’re not from there. What changed everything was things going viral, people seeing it and asking, “What is this? I want to go.”
Beyond that, the internet also made it possible to scale, because it lets me constantly learn what’s happening globally. Growing up, my uncle was a DJ — it runs in the family — and he taught me how to DJ when I was around 13. He used to make mixtapes of all the classics, like old Ahmed Adaweya tracks and other hits, remixing them in his own way. I grew up listening to that my whole life.
But at the same time, my exposure was pretty limited. I was in the US, so most of what I knew came from family, weddings, and the community around me. I mainly grew up on the big pop records, I didn’t really go deep into other genres or regional sounds. For example, I was just telling Rita [L’Oujdia] that I didn’t even really know much about raï until about three years ago. That’s just because California has few North Africans—mostly Levantine communities—so you’re naturally exposed to a narrower slice of the culture.
What’s your relationship with other DJs in the scene? Is there a sense of solidarity, or is there a bit of competition?
IA: I generally take a collaborative approach and try to share everything. I don’t believe in gatekeeping. There’s that saying, “a rising tide lifts all boats,” and that’s really how I see it. I’m not in this to hold things back or protect access. If anything, I lean the opposite way. I’ve never put my remixes or edits behind a paywall, even the ones that have gone viral and been downloaded heavily. I’ve never tried to sell them on Bandcamp or monetize them like that. For me, the more accessible the music is, the better it is both for the people engaging with it and for myself. The more my work is out there, whether through DJs playing it, people sharing it, or it circulating online, the more it contributes to both my own visibility and the growth of the scene as a whole.
I think the mindset of restricting access just to extract money is short-sighted. Of course I want to make money, but that’s not the core of why I do this. If a DJ hits me up asking for a remix, I send it. That same mentality applies across the board. Even within DJ culture, where there’s a lot of unspoken rules — like headliners limiting what openers can play in terms of BPM or specific tracks — I don’t subscribe to that. I trust my own ability enough to know I can come in and do my thing regardless. I try to carry that through in how I credit people as well. If you look at my socials, I make a point of tagging the artists behind every track I use — whether it’s a known name or someone who sent me a remix the day before. I know what it feels like to have your work played without acknowledgment. It takes a second to credit someone, and it matters.
LEAD PICTURE COURTESY OF THOMAS SPAULT (8PO.LLS)
