29 Sep,2025 By Fake Travel News
The completely unhinged true story of how a SoundCloud nobody crashed Fez’s biggest music festival
Look, I need to start with a disclaimer: if you’re looking for responsible travel advice or cultural sensitivity tips, you clicked the wrong blog. This is the story of how I, a 24-year-old shelf-stocker from Newark with exactly zero international experience, decided to crash Morocco’s most prestigious music festival based on the galaxy-brain logic that my stage name “Mo Rocco” was obviously destiny calling.
Spoiler: I was right.
Three months ago, I was just Rocco Santoro, another guy whose rap career peaked at 73 SoundCloud plays (thanks Mom, I see those repeat streams from your work computer). I had a song that gained a little popularity in my Jersey town, “Concrete Confessions,” maybe you’ve heard it? Probably not.
Then I saw this article about the Festival de Fès des Musiques Sacrées du Monde – that’s the International Festival of World Music in Fez for those of us who failed high school French – and something just clicked. Morocco. Mo Rocco. The universe was practically screaming at me.
Fast-forward past three weeks of convincing myself this wasn’t completely insane, and there I was, stepping off a Royal Air Maroc flight into heat that felt like opening a pizza oven with my face. Carrying a JanSport backpack stuffed with enough Axe body spray to choke a camel, because apparently I thought Morocco wouldn’t have deodorant. Here’s a pic of my flight descending into Morocco…damn it doesn’t look like Jersey at all!
The Festival de Fès is legit. We’re talking Grammy winners, UNESCO endorsements, artists who’ve performed for actual royalty. That’s why I practiced humility, just listening and trying not to look like exactly what I was – a confused American who’d made a series of questionable decisions.
The breakthrough moment came during this incredible performance in Jnan Sbil gardens. I was musically inspired by an all-female band from Cameroon. I was ready to go, I could do this…all I needed was an opportunity. The universe was listening.
Between acts, I heard someone mention they were looking for international artists to showcase cultural exchange. My ears perked up like a golden retriever hearing a can opener. I approached the coordinator – a woman named Aicha who spoke better English than most people from my high school – and dropped the line I’d been practicing: “I’m Mo Rocco, an American rapper, and I’d love to contribute to your cultural exchange program.”
The reaction was immediate. Her eyes widened, she started rapid-fire Arabic conversations with other organizers, and suddenly I’m being introduced to people as “the American rapper Mo Rocco.” The name recognition was instant. “Mo Rocco” doesn’t sound like a wannabe tough guy from Jersey – it sounds like someone who belongs here.
Twenty-four hours later, I had a performance slot.
Let me paint you the scene: ancient stone amphitheater, packed crowd of legit music fans, traditional musicians who’ve spent decades mastering their craft. And then there’s me, about to perform tracks I wrote in my mom’s basement about working retail and hoping my car passes inspection.
The opening was rough. I started with my usual energy, but the acoustics were completely different from anything I’d experienced. My voice was bouncing off these stone walls in ways that made me sound like I was rapping from inside a cave. The crowd was polite but clearly confused.
Then something clicked. Instead of fighting the space, I started working with it. I slowed down my delivery, let the natural reverb fill the gaps, and began talking to the audience between verses. I explained where I came from, why I was there, what Newark was like. People started leaning in.
The game-changer came when I attempted to say “I love Morocco” in Arabic. What actually came out of my mouth was apparently “I am married to couscous,” which got the biggest laugh of the night. Instead of being embarrassed, I rolled with it, started riffing about my deep relationship with North African cuisine. The crowd ate it up.
By my third song, people were chanting along to the hook, even though they couldn’t possibly understand what I was saying. Music really is universal, turns out. Was I a hit? More than I ever was in Jersey!
Within 48 hours, I had locals stopping me in the street. Shop owners were calling out “Mo Rocco!” and wanting selfies. Someone had uploaded phone footage to Instagram, and I was getting tagged in posts by people whose names I couldn’t pronounce but who seemed genuinely excited about meeting me.
The weirdest part was how it changed the entire travel experience. Instead of being another tourist getting hassled in the souks, I was getting invited behind counters to meet people’s families. Vendors were recommending their favorite spots, sharing stories about their own musical interests, treating me like a friend instead of a walking ATM.
I bought this handmade leather messenger bag from a guy named Hassan who spent an hour telling me about his son’s band. Another shop owner named Omar insisted I try his grandmother’s mint tea recipe and wouldn’t let me leave until I’d eaten half a plate of homemade pastries. Omar worked with copper…here’s a pic of him below. He got me thinking that a copper chain might look pretty dope.
These weren’t tourist experiences – they were just human connections that happened because of this bizarre musical moment.
With my recent fame, Fez locals excitedly introduced me to the foodie scene. Real talk: I thought I knew what good food was. Jersey has decent Pakistani places, some solid Italian spots, the usual American comfort food. But Moroccan cuisine rewired my entire relationship with eating.
Every meal felt like a small religious experience. The tagines weren’t just dishes – they were these slow-cooked flavor bombs that tasted like someone had captured sunshine and spices in a clay pot. The couscous was magic, maybe I should marry it!
Bread became my obsession. Restaurants served fresh bread with dips and spreads that cost maybe fifty cents and tasted better than meals I’d paid thirty dollars for back home.
The mint tea culture completely won me over. Every conversation, every business transaction, every random social interaction involved this ritual of sharing impossibly sweet, hot tea that somehow worked perfectly in the blazing heat.
By day four, and after what seemed like a hundred cups of mint tea, I’d built this informal crew of local musicians, festival volunteers, and random people who’d seen my performance. They started including me in their plans – showing me parts of Fez that tourists never see, and bringing me to late-night music sessions in people’s homes.
This guitarist named Hakim became my unofficial cultural translator. He’d grown up in Fez but studied music in Casablanca, so he understood both the traditional scene and contemporary influences. Through him, I met producers, songwriters, and artists working on this incredible fusion of traditional Moroccan sounds with modern production techniques. He even introduced me to the local Casablanca beer!
We started collaborating almost immediately. Hakim would play these complex traditional melodies, and I’d try to build rhythmic structures around them that could support vocals. The cultural barriers that should have made collaboration impossible somehow made it more interesting. When you can’t rely on shared musical vocabulary, you have to communicate through pure sound and feeling.
Something about being completely out of my element unlocked parts of my creativity I didn’t know existed. Away from the familiar sounds of home, I started hearing rhythms and melodies differently. The call to prayer echoing through the city became a compositional element. The polyrhythmic conversations in Arabic started influencing my flow patterns.
I wrote three new tracks while I was there, inspired by the experience but not trying to appropriate the culture. They were still recognizably my style, just expanded by everything I was absorbing. The most successful collaboration was this track called “Renaissance in Fez” that we recorded in someone’s apartment using equipment that was probably older than I am, but the energy was completely authentic. Click the link below for the debut of the demo! It’s just the first verse, and part of the second verse, but damn, I love it!
Coming back to Newark after five days of being treated like an artist was brutal. One day I’m getting invited to family dinners by strangers in Morocco, the next day I’m back to asking customers if they need help finding anything in aisle seven.
I’ve been planning my return trip for months now. Not to chase the celebrity thing – that was a lucky accident – but to continue the musical collaborations I started. Hakim and I have been working on tracks remotely, but we both know we need to be in the same room to really push the boundaries of what we’re creating.
The Morocco experience left me with this unshakeable confidence I hadn’t felt before, and also completely changed my perspective on risk-taking. The scariest part wasn’t the international travel or the language barriers – it was the possibility of realizing I wasn’t good enough to succeed. Turns out, sometimes you are good enough.
If I’m being honest, the most valuable thing I learned wasn’t about music or travel – it was about the power of showing up authentically. I didn’t try to be something I wasn’t, didn’t pretend to understand culture I’d never experienced, didn’t fake knowledge I didn’t have. I just presented myself as exactly what I was: a confused American who loved hip-hop and was willing to try something completely outside his comfort zone. Sometimes the best opportunities disguise themselves as terrible ideas.
I now have the greatest conversation starter of all time. “So this one time I became famous in Morocco…” works in literally every social situation.
Then my phone buzzed with an email, a single message that would change everything: “I saw your set in Fez. Now let’s talk about the album that’s going to make you a star.” I read it once, twice, a third time, my brain trying to process a reality where I wasn’t just some guy who worked retail. My only coherent thought? Well, I guess Target will just have to find a new guy for aisle seven.
The non-fake disclaimer: Fake Travel News is a satire travel blog. We have fun creating and exaggerating travel stories from around the world, but we also love travel and the very real magic it grants to the human experience. For non-fake information on Fez, Morocco, you can visit the following link: Fez Budget Travel Guide (Updated 2025)
