Fareed El Boricua Arabe brings the world into a sexy dance banger

You don’t have to speak Spanish to get peak enjoyment from the latest release from Fareed El Boricua Arabe, “Una Noche Con Un Arabe.”

“It’s a banger, man!” he said. “It’s a banger. You’ll dance no matter what!”

And it is banging, in a variety of styles and instruments from multiple cultures, and the guy and girl who hook up in the song are from different cultures.

“As a songwriter, I’m multicultural,” he said. “I like doing my message songs, but sometimes you just need a good love song mixed in with a good party song,” and that is what he created.

“Sigue sigue sigue bailando,” the singer tells the girl, “keep on keep on keep on dancing, “sigue sigue sigue gozando,” “keep on keep on keep on having fun.”

“A guy in a club meets a girl. That’s what the song is talking about,” he said. “He’s like, ‘I wanted to dance with you. I wanted to caress you in the VIP. To be sane.’ It’s like a romance novel, all rolled up in a song.”

The song’s title means “a night with an Arab,” and the artist’s name, Fareed El Boricua Arabe, translates as Fareed — with a Moroccan father and a Puerto Rican mother — the Arab Puerto Rican.

The music in the track is not limited to two cultures. It has Mediterranean instruments and melodies, a mandolin, Indian (as in the subcontinent) vibes in the guitar, plus Afrobeat, reggaetón, and God knows what else.

“It’s just a jambalaya of styles,” said Fareed, but it is fed through Fareed the Moroccan-Puerto Rican who was born and raised in New York City.

“Even my producer, my Dominican producer, Junior, says to me, ‘No matter what genre you do, you kind of flip it and turn it into an urban thing.’”

His own musical roots began in hip-hop in the late ’80s, but the industry then did not know how to deal with an Arabic/Latino rapper.

“People, the audience, looked at hip hop as a Black thing, an African American thing. If you took a picture of us, they’d say, ‘Wait, what’s that Puerto Rican guy doing there? He’s a breakdancer?’ ‘No, he raps. He’s an MC.’ So, a lot of us lost our record deals.”

Which, he said, led to Latin hip-hop, which was the precursor to reggaetón, which began in the Latin underground.

“We kept the hip-hop beats, we just speeded them up, and instead of rapping we sang the lyrics.”

Fareed naturally gravitated toward reggaetón, with its hip-hop roots. Still, he retired, he said, from music in the late ’90s, but in about 2011, he returned to it as it became possible for independent artists to make their names.

But he is now conscious of being half-Moroccan, half Puerto Rican, and being having grown up and lived his life in New York City, half a world of other things.

He has a lot of music out, albums and albums, he says, of English and Spanish music.

“But this specific song embodies who I am. This song embodies everything in my history of who I really am, that I didn’t know I was when I was a kid.”

If you are being metaphysical, philosophical, the song represents mixed race, mixed culture, the world after 9/11. Since then, he said, people look at race differently.

Before that, “No one would ever think of this type of a love song, and a sexy song at that, with someone of a semi-Islamic or Arabic background.”

He has been to Morocco twice. On one of those trips, he went to a club, and when he was coming up with “Una Noche Con Un Arabe,” he thought of that club.

“I expected this Muslim country to not have discos, and I’m in the club and they’re playing reggaetón. I’m like, ‘Look at this! These girls are dancing around all over the place.’”

He has more music coming out, and videos, and he has performances scheduled in New York and in the Caribbean. What he wants is “to entertain.”

“I want to be like James Brown — I want to be the hardest working man in the Latin market, and if I can enlighten people’s world, man, and bring some love, and help people accept people of mixed races, hey, man, I did my job. You know?”

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