Stephan Othman Said () (born May 30, 1968), aka Stephan Smith, is an American singer-songwriter, rapper, writer, and global activist. He hosts borderless, a docuseries about people at the front lines of change, produced by difrent:, Inc. where he travels the world meeting people through music and discovering stories of courage and creativity.
His musical style bridges pop, hip-hop, rock and world folk music in a border-breaking sound of unity. His lyrics advocate global equality, social justice and reconciliation and cited for reinventing social-activist music for the Internet generation. Said is fluent in English, French and German and also sings in Arabic, Spanish, Hebrew, Hungarian and other languages. He is the founder of difrent: a platform for music for social change.
Musical career and personal life
Beginnings
Said was born in Cleveland, Ohio to Mohammad Said, a Muslim Iraqi physicist and Monika Smith, a Christian pianist and women's rights organizer from Vienna, Austria. His name is drawn from German (Stephan meaning voice/Greek honor/crown) and Arabic (Othman, meaning chosen one; and Said meaning happy or enlightened). He has three older siblings: Leila, Rob and Nadja. Shortly after his birth, the family moved to the Appalachian country of Western Pennsylvania. When Stephan was two years old, his parents divorced; his mother married Frank Gutowski, a former Jesuit priest, and Stephan grew up as Steve Gutowski. The children all studied music from an early age; Stephan took up the piano at the age of three and the violin at the age of four. The family home was a meeting ground for people of all religions, ethnic, economic, and political backgrounds.
The family moved to Richmond, Virginia where he attended St. Christopher's School and also became an Eagle Scout. The summer of his junior year, he attended the Governor's School for the Gifted and received an invitation for early entry into the Jazz Program at Virginia Commonwealth University, where he briefly joined a quintet under the direction of Ellis Marsalis at age 17. After less than one semester he left to tour with Alternative/Punk bands Always August and The Office Ladies of SST Records, and played with groups including Firehose, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., The Meat Puppets and other Alternative and Punk bands.
In 1993 at the invitation of The Fugs, Stephan performed several Appalachian folk songs at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado where he came to the notice of beat poet Allen Ginsberg and producer Hal Wilner. Ginsberg urged Stephan to move to New York City, where he became his mentor.
Early career (1994–1997) Said moved to New York City's Lower East Side where he built singing-songs of social change and helped start several old-time, bluegrass and Irish traditional music sessions. He recorded and appeared with the rock group Ween, Rufus Wainwright, played the fiddler in a video for Leonard Cohen's "Dance me to the end of love", and became a fixture at demonstrations for human rights, independent media, housing rights, and environmental issues, scoring underground hits with songs like "It Rose From The Dead" for the squatter and community garden movements. Allen Ginsberg and folk legend Pete Seeger became Stephan's mentors and The Village Voice called him "the heir apparent to Woody Guthrie". As major label interest in his career grew, Stephan was told repeatedly by industry executives that he could "never have a career in the United States with an Arabic name". With great difficulty, and much to the dismay of colleagues like Jeff Buckley he stopped performing under his given name around 1997, and, started using his mother's maiden name and performed as "Stephan Smith".
The Ballad of Abner Louima (1997) Said first broke into national press in 1997 with the anti-police brutality single "The Ballad of Abner Louima" with Patti Smith on background vocals. With less than 100 copies printed, the ballad charted in the CMJ Music charts, aired on the Howard Stern Show, and thrust Stephan into the folk music limelight. In a New York Times full-length feature article folk legend Pete Seeger compared the rapid spread of Stephan's song, accomplished without the backing of any label, to that of the civil rights anthem "We shall overcome."