DUBAI: Nearly two decades after bonding over hip-hop in a Jeddah neighborhood where almost no one else listened to it, Saudi rappers Alyoung and Randar have released “R2,” a four-track EP — pairing it with three music videos.
The duo — Ahmed, who performs as Alyoung, and Bandar, who performs as Randar — met around 2008, and their friendship began with a fight. Randar came down to his street in Jeddah to find several boys ganging up on Alyoung, a stranger to the area.
“I found them all on him, and I said: whoever fights him, fights me,” he said. Because Randar “controlled” the local football pitch, the others fell in line. Days later, Randar offered a line Alyoung still repeats. “He said, ‘What do you think, let’s be friends?’ Then he told me, ‘You are the true, truest friend,’” Alyoung said.
What sealed their friendship was a shared obsession no one around them really understood. “The first time we sat together, it was: ‘Oh, you listen to rap? I listen to rap,’” Randar said. “At that time nobody in my surroundings, or the neighborhood I lived in, listened to what I listened to.” He performed a rap he’d memorized, and it turned out Alyoung knew it too. “We felt, ‘OK, we have the same thing — we love the same thing,” he said.
