Something Was Stirring: Minalshaab’s Album Launch at Kulturnest
On July 10, Kulturnest hosted the release of "Raddit Fe3el" (ردّة فعل) album by Minalshaab as part of the Beirut Art Days by Agenda Culturel. It wasn’t just a music launch. It felt like something between a gathering and a deep protest; one of those evenings where the crowd doesn’t come for spectacle, but for the possibility of resonance.
Minalshaab’s work lingers in that charged space between saying and unsaying, between the need to speak and the fear of futility, between القول and الصمت. It moves along the fault lines where expression becomes عبء, and silence turns into its own form of resistance.
Their album takes its name from something we know all too well in Lebanon: ردّة فعل - "reaction", the reflex that fills the void where action should have been. Because here, life doesn’t unfold; it erupts. And when systems fail, when futures shrink, ردّة الفعل becomes not just a response, but a condition. A loop of accumulated tension and suspended breath. The title track opens with a line that captures this perfectly:
"مقابيل الفعل في ردة فعل، والحكي ما عليه جمرك ولا محضر" -“For every action, there’s a reaction. And talk - well, no one taxes it, no one reports it.”
It’s not a punchline. It’s a tired truth. In a place where formal justice is often absent, and movement is stalled, what remains is الكلام - unregulated, untaxed, unprocessed. Minalshaab doesn’t escape this loop. They hold it in their hands, examine its cracks, and ask: when reaction becomes our only mode, what space is left for intention/action?
That tension, between what can still be said and what no longer feels possible to do, pulses through the album like an exposed wire. In ورد وفُل, the lyrics cut through the fog of diplomacy and pretense, naming what others cushion: global complicity, inherited wars, the exhaustion of slogans. The song doesn’t offer a position; it dismantles the stage entirely.
"بطّلنا بوجهات النظر، صفّينا بمرحلة الوحش" -
“We’re past differing views. We’ve entered the era of the beast.”
There’s no room here for symbolic resistance or stylised rage. This is not protest for the sake of poetry; it’s an indictment of the charade. What remains is a stark refusal: to pretend, to appease, to participate in the theatre of false choices. The song doesn’t seek consensus. It declares collapse, and in doing so, it dares to start from what’s left.
But Raddit Fe3el doesn’t speak to politics alone - at least not in the narrow sense. It reaches inward, tracing the contours of psychic fatigue, the weight of repetition, the quiet violence of simply staying afloat. One track, half spoken, half exhaled, lets the numbness speak for itself:
"عم شوف حياتي عم تقطع من وراء الكواليس... to traumatize, to fight or flight, I can only freeze."
This isn’t commentary. It’s survival stripped to its most involuntary form. A freeze response, lodged in the body long after the moment has passed. This is what it feels like when collapse is no longer an event but a climate, when you’re expected to function inside a structure that’s already failed, and all you can do is watch your life unfold backstage, unable to enter the scene.
Another track circles around a single, aching refrain:
"فل، ضل، فل، ضل..." - “Leave, stay, leave, stay…”
It’s not a chorus. It’s a dilemma with no conclusion. A quiet tug-of-war that lives inside so many generations caught between exile and fatigue, belonging and burnout. The repetition doesn’t build toward resolution; it lingers like background noise in the mind, like a metronome for a life suspended in limbo. It doesn’t ask for answers. It simply mirrors the rhythm of a country that both expels and clings to its own.
And then there’s مرحبا دولة - a track where the sarcasm doesn’t just cut, it scorches. “مرحبا دولة” - “Hi, state” - lands less as a greeting and more as an accusation wrapped in mock politeness. A bitter nod to a country that has turned against its own.
"مين بيحدد هالمصير؟ مين أمورنا عم بدير؟" -
“Who decides our fate? Who’s steering this mess?”
But the questions are rhetorical: the absence of an answer is the point. This is not satire for catharsis. It’s a confrontation with powerlessness.
And that’s what makes Raddit Fe3el so urgent, and so difficult. It doesn’t resolve the chaos, or soften it into metaphor. It doesn’t offer closure. It simply names what is, clearly, unapologetically, and leaves us to sit with the weight of that recognition.
At Kulturnest, we don’t suggest that art must always confront. But we do hold this conviction: that here - in Lebanon, in the Levant - art that turns away from the present risks becoming ornamental, stripped of urgency. In a place where memory is contested, where wounds are reopened before they’ve healed, we need work that doesn’t bypass the discomfort. We need art that insists on remembering, that holds tension without resolving it too quickly, that lingers where others are in a hurry to forget.
That evening, the responses were as textured as the performance itself. There were bursts of applause - genuine, unforced - but also long, deliberate silences. Not the silence of detachment, but of presence. People listened without needing to react, allowing the words, the weight, the residue of each verse to settle inward. It was a form of participation that asked for no display, quiet, alert, and deeply felt. Recognition, not as performance, but as witness.
To artists like Minalshaab: your work doesn’t console. It clarifies. It refuses to polish the sharp edges; instead, it lays them bare. And in doing so, it creates a space where something harder and more necessary can begin: difficult dialogue, collective discomfort, and the slow work of refusing what should never be accepted.
To those who came: you weren’t just listening to music; you were standing inside something that rarely makes it to the surface. You heard what is often swallowed, stifled, or deferred.
Something moved through the space that night. It didn’t shout. But it stayed. And it will stay.
Dr. Pamela Chrabieh
Kulturnest Co-Founder & CEO
*Photos by Alex Meouchy.
