Justin Strauss Reimagines Kasper Bjørke’s “Tears We Haven’t Cried”

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[Originally published in office magazine Issue 21, Spring-Summer 2024. Order your copy here.]

Born and raised in Zahle, Lebanon, Makadsi immigrated to the United States with his family when he was 19 years old and has lived in New York for well over a decade. Though he’s fiercely loyal to the city, he says he has been enjoying the slower pace of Los Angeles, using the extra time to work on producing his own music. 

“I’m going to play some original tracks tonight that I produced that I’m really excited about,” he says, a slight smile peeking through his beard. But Makadsi has no plans to release anything at the moment: “If you want to hear it, you’ll have to come to my set.” When we arrive at Paragon, there is already a line of people spilling down the sidewalk. A cursory scan of the crowd reveals the typical Myrtle-Broadway ilk of the 2020s: racially diverse and visibly queer 20-somethings, more than a few steadily puffing away with cigarette in hand, all of them suited up in their Saturday night finest and ready to dance. 

Makadsi has an hour to kill before his set, so we head to the “greenroom,” a repurposed room in the back of the venue that, evidently, was once a commercial kitchen. I lean against a deep fryer as Makadsi tells me about his early life in Lebanon. He and his family left the country due to the escalating violence of military conflict, but the memories of his adolescence that Makadsi shares are far from macabre.

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“Growing up in Lebanon, we were such party animals,” he reminisces. “We love life. We’ve been through a lot, socially, politically, economically, and we've been through wars. We have that stamina and mentality, that nothing is gonna come between me and my good time. It showed me how raving and activism can go hand in hand.” 

He expresses his belief in the power and importance of revelry as a salve for anguish, a salve that is needed in this present moment more than ever. “I think our healing is going to take years,” he says somberly, citing the COVID-19 pandemic, the rising cost of living, recent political upheavals, and our overexposure to news and information among the factors contributing to cultural malaise and a collective feeling of despair. “It’s like we’re in a blender trying to figure out what the fuck is going on. People really need a space where they feel safe and away from the chaos of the world.” 

But for Makadsi, the dance floor is not apolitical, and safety is not necessarily synonymous with complete escapism. Early in his set, he plays a mix of “Dammi Falastini” (دمي فلسطيني), a song by Mohammad Assaf that has become a protest anthem of the Palestinian resistance. The lyrics triumphantly repeat “my blood is Palestinian, Palestinian, Palestinian” in Arabic, asserting Assaf’s love for his people and his willingness to sacrifice for his homeland. In May of 2023, the song was temporarily removed from streaming services in what many pro-Palestinian activists condemned as yet another instance of censorship against Palestinian voices. 

Makadsi has been vocal on social media about his support for a free Palestine for years. A quick scroll through his current Twitter feed shows a long stream of reposted news and content documenting and condemning the latest rounds of atrocities committed in Gaza since October of 2023 — a “textbook case of genocide,” as described by former top United Nations official Craig Mokhiber and numerous other human rights experts and authorities.

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The keffiyeh, a black and white patterned head scarf like the ones shown photographed on Makadsi for this story, is widely known as an emblem of Palestinian resistance and is often worn in the West as an expression of solidarity with the Palestinian people. But before it became a Palestinian political symbol in the 1930s, the keffiyeh was worn by nomadic communities known as the Bedouins, who migrated pastorally and herded camels, goats, and cattle throughout the Levant region and the Arabian peninsula. Inspired by his memories of seeing his father and other Lebanese men wear keffiyehs and cowboy hats to go hunting, Makadsi collaborated with stylist Eddie Lopez Bautista to reconstruct the image of the Bedouin cowboy. The keffiyeh is still familiar and commonplace in Lebanon, and the history of the symbolic garment is intertwined with Makadsi’s heritage. 

Including “Dammi Falastini” in his set is Makadsi’s way of channeling the collective energy of the room into a unified will. “Music is such a unique language,” he explains. “Even if you hear a song and you don't understand the lyrics, you can still feel the essence and the spirit of it. I cannot help but react to the world in my art. It’s human instinct. I believe art in general can make an impact on people, but music is so easy because people consume it pretty much daily. You can paint the world you want to see and live in. To be able to deliver these messages and still have people dance — it’s ceremonial. As a group, our vibration is heightened, and we can make even more noise and deliver that energy to a further space.” 

For Makadsi, the energy of the people on the dance floor exists in a symbiotic relationship as he plays a set. “I'm very privileged to be interactive with the New York dance floor,” he says. “Its energy is very specific and receiving. I love this scene, what it represents and stands for, and how people show up for each other.” That’s why, despite his breakneck schedule, Makadsi still finds time to go out dancing — “a lot, to be honest” — even on nights when he isn’t playing a set himself. Hearing the wide array of influences and sonic evolutions in the sets of his peers inspires him and keeps his ears sharp. “And it keeps me in touch with my community,” Makadsi says. “Unfortunately in New York and a lot of big American cities, it’s getting more and more expensive and difficult to live. But a lot of the youth still find a way to make it happen and bloom in the city. It’s very inspiring to see how resilient people are. And it's a privilege that sometimes I forget how hard it is, because luckily my parents lived 45 minutes away. I didn’t just drop like a parachute and land in New York.”

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After immigrating to the United States, Makadsi’s family settled in New Jersey while he enrolled at the University of Toledo in Ohio. In 2010, he graduated with a degree in Film and TV Broadcasting and moved back in with his parents in Jersey City, with the plan of eventually living in New York once he could find work. “Even when I lived in Jersey City, though,” he admits, “my Facebook still said New York.” Applying to job after job to no avail, Makadsi initially sought work in post-production but found nothing even after he widened his criteria. “The more time passed, the crazier I got,” he tells me. “I was applying to jobs that I knew nothing about, but I was like, ‘I'll figure it out.’ I just needed a call. I was driving limousines to the airport, doing so much unrelated career work.” He took buses into Manhattan for odd jobs and nights out, experiencing the city in small tastes and trying to hold onto hope. 

Then one day, after over a year of job searching, Makadsi got a call with an offer for an internship as an assistant editor for a New York Fashion Week documentary. “It was the best way to start, to be honest. I was already in love with fashion, growing up and in college. That was my first stepping stone towards a career.” After that first internship, he was asked back to assist for a different documentary; his work caught the eye of the editor he was assisting, who enlisted Makadsi to help him edit some fashion films. 

“With a lot of creative careers, the door is so hard to open,” Makadsi says. “But once it rains, it pours.” He found a full time job as a video editor at a production company, and soon he was working on fashion films of his own at a time when the medium was reaching its peak, building up a portfolio of work for brands such as Chanel and Louis Vuitton and artists including Kanye West and Jay Z. In 2014, Makadsi had the opportunity to work on visuals and video content for Beyoncé and Jay Z’s On The Run Tour. In another snowball effect, he was hired back for another project, and then another; by 2016, he was hired full time as an Art Director by Parkwood Entertainment, the production company and record label founded and chaired by Beyoncé. In 2020, he would take the helm as the Creative Director at Parkwood.

Unsurprisingly, Makadsi becomes reticent when it comes to his world-famous employer. As I anticipated, he says little about his day to day work, cannot divulge any information about her new album or satisfy any of my own random curiosities, and apologetically declines to answer thornier questions about her silence on Palestine. It’s no secret that “B” (as he refers to her) runs a tight ship, but his reluctance to speak about her is rooted more in collaborative courtesy than contract adherence. “That’s her work, that’s her art, and I feel like she should be the one to talk about it,” he says. “As an artist myself, it would be annoying for someone I worked with to go out there and talk about the work and the process.”

However, he does indulge me with one story. Makadsi tells me about the first and only time he visited America with his family as a teenager, a few years before they immigrated. He heard Beyoncé’s “Crazy In Love” playing for the first time in the hotel, and soon after he and his parents received a call from the receptionist with a noise complaint; Makadsi had been blasting the song on repeat. “After I flew back to Lebanon, I ran to the local discotheque like, I need this album. This is what America is listening to. You need to be on this. I was so proud to share my intel with them. There was something about the energy in that song, it took me to a different world. I grew up to her music and artistry and I never, ever thought I would end up working with her in this way.” 

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For teenage Makadsi in the discotheque all those years ago, a creative career felt distant and inaccessible. “I grew up in the middle of nowhere, in a beautiful countryside, and I didn’t have access to information like people do now with social media,” he describes. “I didn't really have a mentor. Growing up, I always wanted to do it all, but I had no idea how to articulate my thoughts and ideas.” However, even without a clear path before him or role models from his community to look up to, Makadsi had a premonition about what his future held. “Based on the instinct in my heart, I would always tell my friends that I would be a director or a music producer,” he recalls. “I didn’t have anything to back it up. Now in the weirdest and most romantic and soulful and organic way, I arrived at that destination that I manifested when I was 14.” 

When he started college, he didn’t aspire to or even fully understand what the titles of art director or creative director entailed, but the world-building principles he learned from studying film gave him the foundation for his future role. 

“Learning about the mise en scène, and what that means to film — you're creating a world, and each of the design decisions you make all funnel towards a final image. That was the beginning for me, of understanding that all the creative decisions that you make on a project are essential to the big, big idea that you're trying to drive to the finish line.” Similarly, his film education came in handy when Makadsi began to experiment with making his own beats and mixes. “I didn’t necessarily understand that language at all in terms of writing music, and music theory,” he says. “Sound design was my introduction to making music and audio.”

Makadsi had always been a deeply appreciative connoisseur of music, but his journey as a DJ began one weekend in the summer of 2019 when he and a group of friends decided to rent a house in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Makadsi and George Najm, who would later become his manager, arrived a day or two before the rest of their friends, and on their first night out dancing the two decided to go home because they weren’t feeling the music. They hadn't known each other for long yet, but Najm knew that Makadsi had wanted to try his hand at DJing for a long time. “So he and I went to the house, like, let’s just play our own music,” Najm recounts. “He downloaded software on his laptop and started mixing at home — out of the gate, I was like, holy shit. I danced in the living room until four in the morning, just the two of us.” After the rest of their friends arrived, Makadsi played a set for them every night for the remainder of the vacation. 

As the two grew closer, Najm began to buy DJ equipment and speakers, throwing parties on rooftops in Williamsburg and at houses on Fire Island so that Makadsi could continue to play. Word began to spread, and Makadsi booked his first gig — a private birthday party in New York — just a week before the COVID-19 lockdown swept the world in March of 2020. Stuck at home with nowhere to go, Makadsi kept playing. “I wanted a distraction from the world. It was my escape mechanism: let's turn the lights off and put some lasers on and DJ,” he describes. “It was definitely a transformative act for me.” The compulsory solitude allowed Makadsi, like so many others, to reexamine his life and work. “I felt that specific side of me that I was neglecting. I was working in film and [creative direction] but I hadn’t really focused on this part of me — the music. So I gave it all the love I have.”

ANDREW wears COWBOY HAT by STETSON, JACKET by CRISIS EVOLVED, TOP by ENTIRE STUDIOS, PANTS by RAGA MALIK, BOOTS by RICK OWENS

Najm sent a few of Makadsi’s mixes to his good friend, stylist and nightlife aficionado Paloma Perez, who moved to New York in 2004 at the personal request of Amanda Lepore and has hosted parties for years, including Unter, The Carry Nation, and Horse Meat Disco. 

Perez was immediately impressed. “The talent was palpable,” she says. “I knew that coming out of [the pandemic], there would be new talent to emerge and he was it.” She was so taken by Makadsi’s mix that she broke one of her own personal rules: she asked Nita Aviance, prolific DJ/producer and ½ of The Carry Nation, to listen to the mix as a favor. “Nita is considered an oracle of music — particularly a voice on the sound of Brooklyn queer house music,” Perez explains. “She's not going to pretend to like something. People give me their stuff to pass along all the time, but I’d never done it before — that’s not my job. Nita says, ‘Ok, I’ll listen to it, because I know you wouldn't waste my time.’ And then she hit me back later and she said, ‘This is actually really good.’”

In the meantime, Najm was hatching a plot for a future when partygoers could congregate again. Nightlife at its best can be a carefree, safe space and a site of community building; but Najm knew that for nightlife professionals like promoters and DJs, it can also be intensely competitive and catty — or as Perez puts it: “it’s New-York-fucking-cutthroat-City.” Even in typical times, emerging talents are expected to pay their dues and wait their turn; those expectations would be heightened after the hiatus of lockdown, when even seasoned veterans would be hungry again to return to the booth. 

So rather than trying to cozy up to promoters to try and squeeze Makadsi onto lineups at established popular parties, Najm started planning his own. “I didn't want to have to climb that ladder from the ground up,” he says. “[Makadsi] was good enough out of the gate. I could just start this. I just knew it.” Eventually, vaccines were distributed and venues started to open again in the summer of 2021. As soon as indoor events became legal again in New York, Makadsi and Najm threw their first party, presented under the name “FUNCTION.” Perez and her best friend Nirco volunteered to host; Najm discovered his own passion for event production, repurposing skills from his background in interior design and home building to design lighting and fog effects. “People who have lived here for over 15 years were gushing about it,” Najm recalls, “saying how it was one of the best parties they’ve ever been to in New York City.” 

“It was just the epitome of fresh,” Perez says. “[Najm] knows how he wants things to look, Makadsi knows how he wants things to sound, but they always leave room for play. And music is the art of play. To honor this thing born out of love — it felt like a karmic investment.” Now that she has known him for a few years, Perez has a theory as to why Makadsi was so inexplicably gifted from the beginning. “He’ll never speak about himself this way because he’s too humble,” Perez tells me. “But as a Buddhist, I don’t believe in luck. I believe in fortune. Fortune is built. It’s earned through your actions. [Makadsi’s] talent is proof that he’s someone that has cultivated a lot of fortune, because of the way he treats people, the way he lives his everyday life.”

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FUNCTION threw three more parties before the year was up, beginning to include additional DJs on the lineup with Makadsi. In the years since, their guests have included musician Chloe Bailey and ballroom legend Kevin JZ Prodigy — Kaytranada and Nita Aviance herself (now a friend of Makadsi’s) have also graced the lineup. Najm cut his teeth on talent management and promotion, booking Makadsi for sets at other parties in addition to FUNCTION and using their platform to give other emerging DJs a platform. 

As FUNCTION solidified its place in the nightlife landscape, Makadsi was simultaneously hard at work at Parkwood as Beyoncé prepared to roll out her 7th solo studio album. Released in the summer of 2022 as “act i” of a three-act project, the critically acclaimed RENAISSANCE took inspiration from the history of Black queer ballroom, club culture, and house and disco music of the late 20th century. The record-breaking Renaissance World Tour followed in 2023, with 56 stadium shows across 39 cities in Europe and North America for a staggering total of 2.7 million fans. Featuring and sampling iconic figures like Grace Jones, Honey Dijon, Donna Summer, Kevin Aviance, and Kevin JZ Prodigy, the album was already characterized by an affectionate deference to its cultural forebears; the tour presented an opportunity to honor the new vanguard. 

“DJs specifically have a big influence on this genre,” Makadsi says. “There’s credit to be given, to DJs that produce, even DJs that don’t — I’ve always been in love with the relationship between the artist, the DJ, the producer, and their contribution to the dance genre from the ‘80s to the ‘90s until now.” Though there were no opening acts officially advertised, Makadsi helped curate a selection of DJs to open for Beyoncé at nearly 40 of the 56 shows on the tour. The openers included the multihyphenate artists Arca and Shygirl, The Carry Nation, an array of FUNCTION alumni including KIA, Leonce, Dee Diggs, and Tory Stiletto, and New York City nightlife favorites such as Goth Jafar, River Moon, and office Issue 21’s very own Memphy. For Makadsi, highlighting the artists at the beating heart of contemporary queer dance music and culture was a no-brainer. “This was the perfect opportunity to share a platform with these talents, and I’m so proud of everyone that came and was part of the show,” he says. “It was just right — it was the obvious thing to do, in a way.” On the last stop of the tour, Makadsi stepped up to the decks himself.

Back at Paragon, I study Makadsi in the booth as he DJs. Watching his hands reminds me of sitting in the front row at a jazz club, close enough to witness as the tide of the room is turned with the improvisational flick of a finger. He never stops moving —  always adjusting a knob here, turning up a dial there —  and his decisions are entirely spontaneous. “I never stick to a script,” he told me, just before heading to the booth. When the music reaches a particularly ecstatic peak, I hear a wave of cries and shrieks from the audience. Makadsi breaks his unemotive laser focus for a moment with a pleased smile, punctuating each beat with a flourish of his wrist. I peer over the edge of the raised booth and can make out a pair of hands through the fog, reaching out and upwards towards Makadsi and gently trembling in a gesture of praise.

I step back and away from him and close my eyes, relinquishing my role as observer and letting the music overtake me. I think of the car, and Makadsi’s conception of his role as an energy worker; I think of the ancient peoples around the world who danced to heal, to call upon their gods, to bring about rainfall; and then I am not thinking at all, just moving, dancing. I have a long journey back to uptown Manhattan ahead of me, so I had truthfully only planned to stay for the first hour of Makadsi’s set, but before I know it, the lights are turning on to the decrescendo of his last track. It is 4:02am, and I can see the bartenders closing up. On the dance floor, seven dedicated dancers remain, each of them seemingly there on their own. They pay no mind to the sharp fluorescent glare above them, eyes tightly shut, still animated by the music, gyrating and twisting and spinning until the very last note. Outside, it has begun to rain.