808s and heartbreaks: Atlanta rapper Phay sits down with 285 South and talks Palestine, faith, and finding joy amid grief

When Atlanta rapper Phay—born Faris Mousa—began making music, the bops were light, fun, and simply meant to make you move. He was hardly 15 and helping a buddy out with some vocals, desperate to mimic the likes of childhood icons Cam’ron and Juelz Santana.

“It was terrible, of course,” Phay, now 34, says, laughing between puffs of his go-to hookah flavor, White Peach Mighty Freeze Love 66. We’re sitting at a table outside what he refers to as his “spot,” the Palestinian-owned Planet Hookah Cafe, tucked in a strip mall on Chamblee Tucker Road. It’s where you’ll likely find Phay on any given day between prayers, greeting this person and then another like he runs the place. (In just one hour, our interview was interrupted at least seven times by regulars stopping by to say hi).

Phay was born in Chicago and raised in Atlanta, graduating from Druid Hills High and later, Georgia State. But his Palestinian roots have always remained close to his heart. His mother and father hail from Jenin, the West Bank’s northernmost city, a town known as the hub of Palestinian resistance. Both Phay’s mother and father were forced to leave Jenin as children during the 1967 War, he says, and they grew up with other Palestinian refugees in neighboring Jordan.

On the recommendation of a family friend, Phay’s parents immigrated to Chicago, then eventually to Georgia, where his father had a vision to popularize Mediterranean cuisine in the Southeast—a vision that would ultimately lead to their successful family-run Mediterranean Grill franchise.

Growing up, he remembers his parents describing Jenin as lush and green with olive trees, its fruit sweet and ripe, and its air crisp and woody with the aroma of tobacco farms.

“They’ve always described their land the way somebody would probably describe, like, Aruba or something. Even though there are no clearwater beaches, it’s the most beautiful land to them. Honestly, it’s probably the way I would describe Georgia.” 

-Phay

It’s been more than 15 years since Phay stepped foot in Palestine, and for him, the memories aren’t as poetic. In the occupied West Bank—namely, in Nazareth, where he’d often visit with family growing up—Phay says he couldn’t shake being treated like a second-class citizen.

“I just can’t contain myself in spaces like that,” he says, referring to the West Bank’s heavy Israeli military presence and the intimidation tactics of Israeli settlers.

Still, Palestine remains at the core of his Arab American identity, and Phay credits his parents for instilling that deep affection for their roots in him and his three siblings.

“For as long as I can remember,” he says, “we were just proud of being Palestinian.”

Phay’s art, too, is animated by his love for his two homes: Palestine and Georgia. He points to his baseball cap, part of a one-man merch line named MAMA, born from his 2017 album of the same name. Stitched along the side of the cap is a 1996 Atlanta Olympics logo; along its crown, a heart-shaped watermelon bears the word ماما, or “Mama” in Arabic. The album features tracks narrated by his mother, whom he lovingly calls Mama Mousa.

If you can’t find Phay lounging at Planet Hookah, praying at the nearby masjid, or visiting his parents in Druid Hills, he’s probably somewhere on his way to the top of Stone Mountain.

“It’s just forest, forest, forest, the skyline, and then forest, forest, forest,” he says.

Anyone familiar with Phay’s discography and with Atlanta’s trap scene can also recognize how the city has shaped his rhythm and flow.

“That trap, that 808 sound—that’s all Atlanta, you know?” he says, naming Young Thug, Ludacris, and Future as homegrown inspirations, in addition to giants like Kanye and Jay-Z. “I really believe Atlanta influences everything, from the music to the culture to the history. After all, at a certain point, this city, too, was the heart of the resistance,” referring to Atlanta’s role as the “cradle of the Civil Rights Movement.”

Phay’s sound has always been about getting you to move your body or roll down the windows and cruise—longtime listeners, he admits, aren’t clamoring to him for wordplay and introspection. But last year, as Israel’s onslaught in Gaza deepened, Phay broke from that familiar, playful mold and spontaneously wrote “Watermelon Seeds” on a flight home from Houston, where he had been visiting his elder sister.

The song, which begins with a pitched-down sample of Lauryn Hill’s “Freedom Time” (“Everybody knows that they guilty / Everybody knows that they’ve lied”), sprung from Phay’s own grief and guilt over watching the carnage on his phone: “Mamas losing they babies and babies losing they mamas / The richer just getting richer I’m questioning all them commas / The missiles made in the US our children are made in trauma…”

After the song’s release, Phay became the subject of a feature in Rolling Stone, and gained new listeners eager to find resistance music responding to the current moment. But for Phay, who’d also recently gone through a painful divorce, writing the song drove him into the shadows of his own anguish. It’s a state unfamiliar to the self-proclaimed “big-ass kid,” someone who’s always been the guy you go to for a good time and a good laugh, he says. 

When he wrote the lyrics to “Watermelon Seeds,” Israel was just 75 days into its assault. It’s been nearly two years now. To this day, he says he can’t listen to the song.

“My grandparents come from that land. They were exiled. My parents were exiled. That all happened. And now look at what state the world is in,” Phay says, his voice raw and resigned. “And we’re so far removed from it all. We’re out here smoking hookah, you know? We’re not worried about starving. We’re not worried about getting bombed.”

Though he’s nowhere near emerging from despair, Phay feels grateful for two steady sources of joy and strength. One is his faith; the other is his best friend of more than 20 years, the rapper, singer, and producer Kelechi.

In the last decade, as artists have grown reliant on streaming services and beholden to the ongoing boom in AI-powered production, the music industry has left Phay jaded. It’s Kelechi alone who has been pushing Phay to release what he refers to as his final full-length project, a 16-track album—his longest—titled Heartbreak Phay. Stirred from the divorce that ended an 11-year relationship in the early years of the pandemic, Heartbreak Phay will also feature “Watermelon Seeds,” and will heavily parade Phay’s signature trap sound beloved by fans of previous albums like 2021’s Bake Sale.

When asked if he’s excited about the album release this fall, Phay says “nope” without a second of hesitation. “I love the process of making music, just me and Kelechi in the studio. It’s a bond that you can’t replicate. But I hate everything else about it. Everything,” he says, seeming a little taken back by his own tone. You may hear a single from him every now and then, but this is the last time Phay plans to release anything so comprehensive, he says.

“Not to be pessimistic, but it’s just, like, look what’s going on,” he adds. “I won’t feel good about my accomplishments until everybody’s free.”

Day after day, Phay says it’s his faith that keeps him going.

Though he didn’t grow up in a rigid Islamic household, Phay gravitated toward Islam as a teenager, when, jet-lagged and sleepless one night visiting family in Jordan, he found comfort in the 4 a.m. adhan blasting from outside his bedroom. “I remember thinking, let me just get up and pray. Let’s see how it feels,” he says. “And I guess I liked how it felt.”

Ever since that morning at 16, Phay has prayed five times a day. He says it’s the only structure he feels he has as an otherwise unrestrained creative spirit.

“Islam teaches me discipline,” he says. “It teaches me compassion and patience. Especially now, it’s just very needed, you know, to keep me grounded, to try to make sense of everything that’s going on. There’s something about knowing God’s plan is greater than we might understand.”