Since the 1990s, with the seemingly unending cycle of violence that has defined the Second Palestinian Intifada and the ‘War on terror’, Western media outlets have bombarded their viewers with the stark imagery of disaffected Arab youth. Terms like jihadi, mujahadeen, and martyr have become commonplace nomenclature for commentators and audiences alike in their attempts to make sense of why the region’s young people adopt such drastic measures to cope with their dismal prospects.
Yet while donning a hidden explosives belt or making a covert border crossing to join the ranks of like-minded insurgents are very real options for some, there are still many uncelebrated groups in the Middle East for whom artistic expression has become a preferred outlet for resistance. Among these, hip-hop communities have emerged, and their outspoken orators—the rappers—are at the forefront, leading the way as the “new-style troubadours” (Pinn 2003, 13) of the globalized ghetto.
To the conscientious observer, it comes as little surprise that hip-hop is flourishing around the world. With the export of MTV and the proliferation of international music labels, scarcely anyone anywhere remains outside of McWorld’s grasp. As one author stated, “U.S. popular culture has become global popular culture” (Wermuth 2001, 153). Nearly every country has a rap music scene of one form or another, although the local variants frequently diverge to reflect indigenous concerns accordingly.
The composite is a global phenomenon embedded at the community level but reworked and retooled by its recipients. The resulting product of this intersection between the global and the local is a “regionalization of rap” (Prévos 2001, 15), a style that lecturer Tony Mitchell has appropriately termed “glocal” (2001, 11, 32).
However, no matter how far hip-hop travels or how “glocalized” it becomes, its constituent elements remain intact. These include the graffiti artwork of taggers, the acrobatics of break-dancers, and the musical menagerie created by DJs and MCs working separately or in unison. Moreover, each of these roles is outwardly united by the fashion statements that symbolize one’s membership in the hip-hop community—“oversized, baggy pants, sloppy T-shirts, baseball caps” (Levy 2001, 134), athletic apparel, and other requisite accessories.
Hip-hop style is a cultural force that seeks to create its own niche in the public consciousness while simultaneously remaining outside of orthodox institutional frameworks. This feature provides the distinction between hip-hop’s real adherents versus its commercialized wannabes or poseurs.
Notwithstanding hip-hop’s multifaceted articulation, its most prominent feature is its music—popularly known as rap. In the United States today, every rap single is performed by an individual or crew and typically takes the form of a three- to five-minute narrative interspersed with a chorus. Combined with the lyricists’ linguistic manipulations and wordplay are the DJ’s technological arrangements of sound layering, breaks, and volume switching.
Although this musical structure may appear obvious, one must stress this intermixed lyrical and sound formula for the sake of clarity because it is the standard by which U.S. rap has been defined and categorized. Also, due to the lack of scholarship on rap outside of the United States, we have used many of these same criteria to classify rap’s manifestations in the Middle East, despite the absence of any such indigenous uniformity.
One component may be found to exist without the other, yet either may be called “rap” by locals. For instance, DJ electronica with no lyrical accompaniment or vocalized rhythmic flows unaided by a DJ’s skills can both separately qualify in the region as rap.
While this may appear as a conceptual inconsistency for stateside observers, there is a significant rationale at work here that underscores the principle not only of Middle Eastern rap but the entire rap genre worldwide. Whereas stateside rap today is produced according to the aforementioned blueprint of DJing and MCing (with a few notable exceptions), it has traditionally been not the format but rather the content that distinguished rap and set it apart as a musical genus.
As a textual agent, rap is a verbose challenge to the oppression that supplements the status quo. Just like Malcolm X’s “jihad of words” was marked by its “talking back at white America” (Floyd-Thomas 2004, 50), the same analogy can be invoked for rap’s lyrical mission. Rap mobilizes local voices and gives them an expressive conduit by which they can channel their frustrations and anxieties. In the face of global capitalism and the resultant economic trauma, social alienation, and political inequalities that are fervently guarded by police, rap becomes more than a form of entertainment—it becomes an urban “survival tactic” (Dimitriadis 2001, 63).
Hence, rap music and the hip-hop community exist as points of identity for their adherents; they are simultaneously fabrications of the self and others, as in-group or out-group affiliates. And while U.S. corporate rap has been largely commodified into a state of territorial ambiguity or disembodiment, its overseas counterparts have yet to reach this condition.
There is still among rap’s foreign variants a very distinct sense of place-boundedness, where the local neighborhood or district prevails as the site of emphasis. This “ghettocentricity” (Silverstein 2003, 55) or “tribalization” prioritizes the local, often much to the chagrin of the nation-state, and elevates the plights of the community.
Rap’s local-level commitments serve not only to preserve the values, histories, and traditions of marginalized communities; they also validate and re-create these locales by bringing them under the spotlight of performance politics. The irony of rap’s localization is that the genre’s arrival on the scene has been made possible only through the efforts of global agents. Furthermore, many MCs and DJs are keenly aware of their place in the international hip-hop arena—a self-realization that truly underscores hip-hop’s “glocal” nature.
Consequently, despite the claims of numerous lyrical protagonists, there is simply no clear-cut way to determine when rap first emerged on the Middle Eastern musical landscape. In fact, the efforts of local journalists—not to mention the egos of musicians—appear to be mainly reconstructive, retrospective, and partisan, and their arguments can be summarized in the following manner: “Although hip-hop is gaining popularity in Arab countries today, it all began in our country.”
Each state has its own hip-hop pioneer, and in some cases, there are multiple actors or groups vying for that distinction. For instance, Egypt’s Shaaban Abd al-Rahim has been heralded in the country’s media as the father of Arab rap. Although illiterate and, some would argue, crude, this former ironer has gained quite a following in Egypt. And though his music may not fit the Western model of synthesized rap, his simple repetitive lyrics, street dialect, and content—with songs like “I Hate Israel,” “America,” and “The War in Iraq”—have established Shaaban as a leading voice for the Egyptian ghetto and the Cairene masses.
While Shaaban, in interviews and songs, eschews rap as a genre along with Westernization, even he was caught in the grip of McWorld a few years ago when he wrote a jingle for a new delicacy: the McDonald’s McFalafel.
In addition to Shaaban’s folk-type chants, other troupes in the region are producing very recognizable rap compilations, though the messages of resistance, urban disenchantment, and social critique remain the same. As Takki (of the Egyptian crew MTM) surmised in 2006 after his group won the prize for best modern Arabic act at the Arabian Music Awards: “The best thing about rap is that it is a form of music that criticizes, so it discusses the issues of young people. . . . We really need this in the Arab world” (Al Jazeera 2004).
Similarly, Tamar Nafer (of Da Arabian MCs, an ensemble of Israeli Arabs) expressed his group’s approach to rap as “protest music” and explained why this global export resonates so profoundly for young Arabs today: “Black people in America were oppressed for hundreds of years—that’s why we feel connected to this music” (Winder 2004). The members of DAM (the crew’s acronym means “blood” in both Arabic and Hebrew) have become Palestine’s preeminent ghetto reporters, taking on such topics as the Israeli occupation, poverty, drugs, and the ineptitude of Arab regimes to alleviate the suffering. In their own words, they are the “CNN of Palestine” (Rush 2004).
To spread their message, DAM has toured Israel and Europe, and they have been featured on the BBC and in Rolling Stone magazine. Yet their documentary-style videos offer the most poignant examples of their music; their visual integration of the local vividly endorses their allegiance to a neighborhood struggle where military checkpoints and forced evictions at the end of a bulldozer regularly scar daily life.
While the Middle East’s homegrown hip-hop phenomenon is rapidly establishing its fan base among the region’s youth, its most appealing component—the controversial rhetoric—is troubling for authorities. As Al Jazeera (2004) recently reported, rap is widely feared to be a corrupting Western influence.
Just a few years ago, in a desperate attempt at preemption, Islam Online published “A Hip-Hop Parental Guide” (2001), followed by an article titled “Hip Hop and the ‘New Age’ of Ignorance” (2002), in which the author warned of rap’s harmful effects.
In Algeria, now home to at least 160 rap groups, local crew Intik has successfully fused Western and traditional compositional motifs with penetrating Arabic and French lyrics. However, the group’s brusque commentaries on conditions in their native land quickly attracted the attention of government censors, and in 2000 a communiqué informed the public that Intik’s songs and performances were forbidden in Algeria. Not to be deterred, Intik has since prospered in France, and their references to the Peoples’ Democratic Republic of Algeria as the “Peoples’ Republican Dictatorship of Algeria” (Original UK HipHop 2000) is an assurance that there will be no heartfelt reconciliations.
Some observers have noted that the contemporary urban Middle East is quite the appropriate environment for this nascent hip-hop movement—if it can be said that somehow poverty and upheaval represent the perfect ghetto. But we must be wary of this approach, lest we fall into the myth of “expressive causality” (Krims 2000, 32).
Instead, it is important to appreciate the multiple global and local variables that have given birth to the Middle East’s hip-hop communities and the struggles they confront as they stake their claims to the “glocal.” Indeed, Da Arabian MCs promises, “We’ll reach you all” (Rush 2004).
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Categories: Arabic Literature, Music Criticism
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