"Nadeem is known as a musician, mix engineer, electrician, author, and poet, born and raised in Brooklyn and Long Island. He is the founder of Elevtr, a music blog & Record Label forged by his time on the LES music scene that features over 3000,000 visitors from 150 countries. He has played over 3,000 concerts across 7 states, and his unpublished manuscript was awarded by C&R Press and is due for release in 2023, he is published by Lit Riot Press in the book Bands Do BK.

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Nadeem Gibran Salaam was born in Brookdale Hospital in Brownsville, Brooklyn, NY on April 1st, 1984. Son to a Pakistani MTA Train Conductor and an Indian nurse, It seems his birth year would foreshadow the Orwellian post 9-11 Surveillance State. 

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Before this time, before cell phones, his natural desire to play guitar seemed like a generational anomaly. It was only later discovered—as fathers age and show sons their skeletons—music was a raging passion of his fathers, who loved the 1970's era artists oscillating radio airwaves in New York City. The American soundscape filled his culture-shocked ears, Nadeem's father, a 20-year-old kid alone in a new country & a city on fire, found a way to understand American culture. It was music, from the iconic ballroom crooners, Afro-psychedelic Soul & Jazz, to political Folk Music, that often played inside the walls of their apartment.

 

His father would survive the city of Ed Koch, hustling in restaurants before working for 30 years as an MTA train conductor, raising Nadeem with his siblings in a two-bedroom apartment on 10th St. in Park slope, Brooklyn. The rides they would take to pick up their mother from work—the smell of gasoline blowing out the back of his father's Ford. At Augustana Hospital, listening to The Beatles and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan were his earliest memories. In the late 90s, he saved enough money to take Nadeem and his two siblings and mother to Elmont, Long Island. 

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While Nadeem grew up under the overtone of Reagan and came to age during what was considered the "Post-Racial Era" of Bill Clinton. It was during the Bush years his experiences traveling from Long Island, where he would later grow up, shaped his sense of writing and playing. Nadeem cites places like the LIRR train station in Garden City and the back roads of Port Washington, along with the acid-induced hippie/spiritual community across Long Island, as highly influential.  Elmont was caught in the crossfire of Cambria Heights Queens, where gang violence between The Bloods and Latin King's near the Belmont Race Track would often spill out onto the streets in broad daylight. In the middle of this is where Nadeem met an outcast of kids experimenting with drugs, reading Jungian psychology, learning instruments in basements, and watching David Lynch films on mushrooms, with what he calls, "kids having recklessly good times under a backdrop of violence." His first experiences of playing music would bloom into his first garage concerts, followed by a deeper desire to immerse himself in the city scene. 

 

Playing regularly at CBGB's, Arlene's Grocery, Kenny's Castaways, Pianos, and Cakeshop, Nadeem followed it with late nights at Mars Bars, and It was during this time Nadeem found his second ragtag of drunks, drug addicts, homeless and the struggling punks on the Lower East Side, that would shape his tastes in music, politics, writing, and introduction to Buddhism. By the early 2000s, Nadeem's first band, Apophenia, was playing regularly across the Island and city, opening for Nine Days and Tokyo Police Club. They had a 7 year run with over 2,000 concerts across 6 states under their belt before joining his family in the transportation industry, working in Aviation for a few years—a time Nadeem considers his rebirth period, after losing friends to the Iraq War, Aids, drugs & alcohol, & gentrification, nothing he knew up until now had stayed the same, he knew he needed a radical shift in lifestyle.

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sink or swim.

 

It was at JFK Airport, where both his siblings worked, that he first sat down to write about all of his wild experiences in rock and roll and childhood adventures. Nadeem's first full-length poetry book 'Ghetto Prophets' is an homage to the vanishing people of "Old New York," as well as his memoir both remain unpublished. The raucous, raw, humanistic, and subversive working-class personalities and artistry were the edifice of the Lower East Side & Long Island. Ghetto Prophets features poetic prose that fuses colloquial New York-isms with Jungian pedagogy, Sufism, Punk Rock ethos, and Buddhist teachings. The result is a brew that packs the anarcho-punk traditions of the Lower East Side with notes of fraternity, humanism, and spirituality to cultivate New Yorkers to reclaim space for free thinking and traditional everyday people's style of thinking and speaking. 

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Most recently, 'Ghetto Prophets' was awarded the 2019 Long List Manuscript Book Award by C&R Press. It also made the 1st reading round for The Button Press Full-length Manuscript Open Reading Period, as well as receiving a month-long mentorship by Brooklyn-Poets faculty members Leigh Stein. Nadeem Gibran Salaam's work has been published in The New York Times, Daily News, MTV, Timeout NY, NPR, and Soundfly, his legacy is published in the book Bands Do BK, and he's only just getting started."