It’s the day before Rakim Al-Jabbaar’s seventh studio album, FM4840: Loyal to the Soil, is released on May 20, and he’s reminiscing about how his hometown, Duncanville—a suburb southwest of Dallas—influenced his music.
Al-Jabbaar, a former
Dallas Observer Music Award winner for Best Songwriter, provides the context of where he’s from. “The neighborhood that I’m from and I represent sits between Duncanville, Cedar Hill and Grand Prairie. But it’s Dallas, we got a Dallas address,” he says. “When I left school in the ninth grade to go to my partner Jamar’s house to rap, we rode the DART bus to his house, not the school bus.”…