Dana Salah's Music Is A Defiant Expression Of Palestinian Identity

As a child, Dana Salah watched telecast performances of Arab singers, juxtaposed against string and percussion orchestras, with her grandmother.

“We don’t have a lot of harmony in Arabic music, but you’ll have a singer centered and a whole orchestra behind her,” the artist tells me. “She’ll sing a line, then the violin will respond, and then the oud will come in. It’s a whole conversation.”

Salah’s own repertoire echoes her life in this way. In some songs, her Palestinian-Jordanian heritage speaks to the hustle she embodied while living in New York City in her 20s, then in Michigan during the COVID-19 pandemic. In others, modernity meets folklore, telling tales of a resistance that Palestinians have wielded for generations. And in recent iterations, Arabic lyrics speak to a global audience. Some know the words and others don’t — but they all dance anyway.

Hailing from Amman, Jordan, Salah was born to a family in which career paths were firmly linear and sequential: graduate from a reputable college, then pursue something in the likes of law, medicine or finance. “I felt like I needed to leave Jordan in order to [pursue music] because we didn’t really have a music industry,” she says.

The only way her parents would let her leave Jordan was if she went to what they considered a “good” college; going to Duke University was her ticket. When Salah graduated, she moved to New York City and picked up DJ and modeling gigs. “That was unheard of for anybody in my community — for a woman to say, ‘I’m going to live by myself, unsupported in this city in the U.S.,’” Salah notes.

But Dana Salah couldn’t have been Dana Salah without her first persona: King Deco.

As King Deco, Salah infused her heritage into her music as she does now, but it was less of a conscious effort. Now, when Salah looks back at the work she did as King Deco, she sees and hears remnants of her roots in the visuals and music, like wearing Palestinian clothes during tours and events. “What I took with me was our people’s aesthetics and love for craftsmanship,” she says.

Over time, Salah was emboldened to weave in more motifs and themes from her culture: “The more authentic I became, the more honest [I was] with myself.” Then COVID-19 hit, and the musician found herself stuck in Michigan — the “heart of Arab America.”

“All Arab Americans have this longing for the homeland,” she says. “When I was in Michigan, I really felt what they felt — this longing to be back home. And I had this little conflict of, do I want to continue making music?”

For all of the Easter eggs that Salah planted in her music at the time, King Deco still felt at odds with her desire to put all of herself — most importantly her culture — into her music.

The shift happened in 2021. “Michigan was where I kind of realized that I’m still able to be the girl who was born and raised in Jordan and King Deco at the same time.”

And so, King Deco’s alias was shed, and she became exactly who she’s always been. Being known as Dana Salah proved to be more than just owning herself in all her likeness; it was a defiant expression of Palestinian identity, one that resonates now more than ever, as Israel erases that very identity.

In her current artistry, cultural motifs aren’t just infusions — they’re centerpieces. With a producer’s encouragement, Salah began writing all of her lyrics in Arabic, to fully be able to capture meaning, messages and history that English lyrics just couldn’t describe.

“Ya Tal3een,” for instance, was born from Palestinian folk songs called “Tarweedeh,” hymns that women would sing to their imprisoned husbands and loved ones during British occupation. Outside of prison walls, they’d sing coded messages to their husbands by weaving in trills and extra letters so guards and troops couldn’t understand.

Salah incorporated one of those letters in the naming of “Ya Tal3een,” as an homage to Palestinian female resistance. “There’s a lot of creativity to our resistance,” she says. “It’s in our DNA.”

The artist puts as much into her sounds and lyrics as she puts into her visuals. In her hit song “Weino” — a song with a Latin backbeat about searching for love — a basket of oranges and the watermelon are all symbols of national identity. “Bent Bladak,” which she released this year, is arguably Salah’s most visually rich tribute to Palestinian culture and resilience, with glimpses of olive trees and traditional textiles among many other motifs.

While this lyric, translated from “Bent Bladak,” is about the power and love that Palestinian women wield, it seems to also encapsulate Salah’s artistry best: “If your roots were ever to waver, mine will be as strong as an olive tree.”

Salah centers her Palestinian heritage in her creative inputs — the sounds, the visuals, the lyrics. But she also seeks out intention in the outputs, in the sheer act of listening together. At a show in Amsterdam last year, the DJ who performed alongside Salah encouraged her to play “Ya Tal3een” — a song about longing for the Palestinian homeland that seemed out of place for a club, but they played it anyway. “Part of our resistance is being able to go through our lives without feeling completely debilitated,” she says.

Salah has been grief-stricken by the images of Palestinian suffering that emerged during the past two years. She credits her fans with helping her break through the writer’s block she faced at the time, after they asked her to re-release a cover she made in 2021 of a Palestinian folk song. “I started writing verses and the thing just flowed out of me,” she says. “[My audience’s] response to everything is really a huge driving force.”

The fans are also the reason “Ya Tal3een” went viral on TikTok — and subsequently became a soundtrack to protests supporting Palestinians, for its themes of liberation and resistance.

Salah is cultivating the same relationship with her fans IRL. “It’s so energizing to be able to look into a crowd and see them sing these songs that you wrote in a small dark studio years ago or in your apartment,” she says.

As Salah works on a new album, she finds herself embroiled in the task of stringing together familiar themes such as female empowerment, all while finding a new range of tones, from tongue-in-cheek to heavy moments. But if there’s anything that she gleaned from watching those telecasts with her grandmother, it’s that the music has a spirit of its own — and it never lets her down.