Revolutionary Arab Rap الراب العربي الثوري

Wednesday, Feb 29 at Univ. of East London: Meet 3 Arab Rap Superstars

2012-02-29T01:07:00.004-05:00

If you're in London (or simply on the internet), you have an opportunity to meet 3 of world's greatest Arabic hip-hop MCs: Libya's Ibn Thabit, Egypt's Deeb, and Iraq and Canada's the Narcicyst. For you Ibn Thabit fans, this will be Ibn Thabit's first public appearance since he revealed his face and retired from hip-hop in November.

On Wednesday, February 29 from 6:30pm to 8:00pm GMT, Lecture Hall WBG.02 (click here for map) on the University of East London's Docklands campus will host an event called "Rap and the Arab Spring." The campus is across the street from the Docklands Light Rail (DLR) Cyprus Station, and they'll have signs to direct you from there. If you can't make it, you can still watch the event LIVE (details will be posted here) through a streaming broadcast from OpenDemocracy.net (1:30pm on the US East Coast, 7:30pm in Libya and Western Europe, 8:30pm in Egypt and Eastern Europe, 9:30pm in Iraq and Saudi Arabia, etc.)

Bassam Gergi and the folks at OpenAwakening and OpenDemocracy.net have worked hard and put together a fabulous panel, so please show them your support by attending tonight's event or tuning in online. You'll be glad you did. Ibn Thabit, Deeb, and Narcy are more than just sick MCs. They're three remarkable young activists, analysts, and poets who understand how social change in the Middle East really works. I've got videos, links, and descriptions after the jump, so check those out, too!

Deeb (@El_Deeb) whose real name is Mohamed El Deeb, is a poet and conscious rapper who lives in Cairo. His music draws deeply from the traditions of old school hip-hop and the classic age of Egyptian music.

Jackson Allers' interview with Deeb, July 1, 2011

The Narcicyst (@TheNarcicyst), whose real name is Yassin Alsalman, is an Iraqi-Canadian emcee, academic, journalist, and exhibition curator (check out "The Arab Winter") who lives in Montreal. His music explores political themes, Arab identity, and dislocation of diaspora life, among many other subjects.

Democracy Now!'s interview with the Narcicyst, March 2, 2011
Rayya El Zain's Jadaliyya article about Diatribes of a Dying Tribe, May 30, 2011
PRI's The World's interview with the Narcicyst, September 19, 2011

Ibn Thabit (@ibnthabit), who still uses the pseudonym he adopted during the Gaddafi era, is a Libyan rapper and activist who lives in Tripoli. His music attacks the Gaddafi regime, celebrates Libya's culture, heritage, and people, and calls for reconciliation in the framework of a new Libya.

My blog post (with many translations) on Ibn Thabit's Retirement, December 1, 2011

How Has the "Arab Spring" Changed Arabic Hip Hop?

2012-02-22T09:22:00.006-05:00

Big shout-out to Bassam Gergi and the OpenDemocracy and OpenAwakening people for publishing my article. Thanks! Click here to see the article on OpenDemocracy.net.

Ever since "Arab Spring" became the dominant shorthand for the revolutionary uprisings that began in December 2010, writers have been taking issue with the term. Rami Khouri considers the phrase dehumanizing and Orientalist because it downplays the agency, initiative, and courage of people fighting for dignity against brutal, authoritarian regimes. Seasons just happen, but people make revolutions happen. In Arabic, the most common terms are intifada (uprising), sahwa (awakening), and thawra (a revolt or revolution). In English, I think the phrase "the Arab uprisings" works best because, with the partial exceptions of Libya and Tunisia, these events have not fundamentally transformed any country's social relations, political dynamics, or power structures. There have not been any revolutions yet. The injustices and deprivations that inspired the revolts remain largely intact, as does the influence of the local elites and international interests who have run the Arab world into the ground. The past year has witnessed a remarkable flowering of social and political consciousness in the Arab world.

In 2011, Arabic hip-hop, much like the Arab world itself, did not see any fundamental changes to the power structures than govern it. While the Arab uprisings certainly strengthened the social and political consciousness of Arabic hip-hop, that consciousness was already quite strong before 2011. The Arab uprisings gave Arabic hip-hop a new energy, vitality, and inter-connectedness, but except in Libya and perhaps Tunisia, they have not sparked any "revolutions" in the Arab world's hip-hop scenes.

The Diaspora and the International Media

The Arab uprisings have changed Arabic hip-hop by greatly raising the profile of Arab rappers across the world and spurring intensive collaboration among them. As the producer Excentrik told Aisha Fukushima, "Yeah, there’s an Arab hip-hop scene, but it’s a global scene, it’s not like a localized scene...it’s random because it’s so big and so spread apart.” Before 2011, international coverage of Arab hip-hop artists was quite rare The youth-driven nature of the recent uprisings, though, has made Arab rappers, especially those in the diaspora, a go-to source of insight. This can be problematic because western observers tend to overestimate Arabic hip-hop's role in the uprisings. Many also so enthusiastic about seeing Arabs adopt Western cultural forms that they often seem contemptuous of other cultures. Despite these problems, international media coverage plays a critical role in expanding Arabic hip-hop's audience, spreading the revolutionaries' message, and helping artists from across the diaspora and the Middle East forge a more unified, vibrant, and coherent Arab hip-hop movement.

Since January 2011, the Libyan-American emcee Khaled M., the Syrian-American emcee and poet Omar Offendum, and the Iraqi-Canadian emcee the Narcycist have become fixtures in the English-language media. Narcy and Offendum drew worldwide media attention when they released the song "#Jan25 Egypt" at the height of the Egyptian Revolution. Al Jazeera English interviewed Omar Offendum on February 8. Earlier that week, Egypt's Arabian Knightz risked their lives by releasing "Not Your Prisoner," a ferociously anti-regime track to which two diaspora Palestinians, Fredwreck and Shadia Mansour, also contributed. The song "Can't Take Our Freedom" turned the Libyan-American Khaled M. and the Anglo-Iraqi rapper Lowkey into sought-after interviewees as well. CNN, NPR, Al Jazeera English, and the BBC have all devoted extensive coverage to Arabic hip-hop over the past year.

None of these artists have made it big. Omar Offendum works as an architect. The Narcicyst is an academic, journalist, and exhibition curator. Khaled M. makes ends meet by doing live shows at small venues and universities. Not even Lowkey, whose new, independently-produced album "Soundtrack to the Struggle" debuted at #1 on iTunes' UK hip hop chart, is a rich man. However, as Lowkey says, "the truth is you don't need a fortune to be fortunate." By staying independent, these artists can maintain their creative and political integrity and serve as fantastic mentors and role models for up-and-coming Arab artists across the world.

The Industry

The uprisings have not changed Arabic hip-hop's relationship with the Arabic media and the Arabic music industry. The Arab entertainment industry is still an intimate part of the corrupt, rotten structure of Arab state politics and raw political subversiveness of Arabic hip-hop terrifies it. The revolutionary Egyptian rappers Arabian Knightz and Deeb regularly complain that Western media supports and promotes Arabic hip-hop far more than the Arabic media does (although the Western media's reasons are not always honorable). Even in Morocco, the only Arab country where Arabic hip-hop enjoys substantial commercial success, rappers such as L3arbé decry how little support society gives to hip-hop artists. These realities force Arabic hip-hop to be an underground, uncommodified, do-it-yourself genre.

On the Saudi, Lebanese, and Egyptian radio and satellite channels that dominate the Arab world's musical preferences, the hip-hop is either heavily pop-ified or a shallow imitation of mainstream American rap. The Egyptian rapper Hoss, for example, got heavy satellite TV rotation by singing with the now-disgraced but still ubiquitous Egyptian pop superstar Tamer Hosny. Rotana, the Arab world's most powerful music company, signed Blak R to be its first Saudi hip-hop act. Blak R's songs, such as the hyper-sexualized "She's Hot Like Summer" and the jaw-droppingly sycophantic "Love Letter to the Prince Sultan," tellingly illustrate just what kind of hip-hop is deemed acceptable by the powers that be in the Arab world.

Even in the conscious hip-hop that it supports (it's a niche market), the Arab music industry allows very little reformism, much less revolutionary sentiment, in its lyrics. To his credit, Bahrain's DJ Outlaw, one of the Arab world's leading producers, uses his mixtapes to promote some excellent revolutionary Arabic hip-hop. Yet DJ Outlaw has shown little solidarity with his fellow Bahrainis' fight for freedom. On March 14, 2011, he released "Bahrain Unite," an upbeat, positive track that calls for unity, dialogue, and reconciliation. The problem? That very same day, Saudi Arabia spearheaded an invasion that crushed Bahrain's pro-democracy movement. Today, Bahrain suffers under near-apartheid levels of repression and discrimination that only a fundamental reordering of society could address. No one should blame DJ Outlaw for not speaking out against the government. The Bahraini regime arrested, tortured, and exiled the footballer Alaa Hubail, the country's greatest athlete, for supporting the February 14 Movement, so imagine what they would do to a dissident hip-hop DJ. Outlaw could have avoided reinforcing the regime's disingenuous narratives about "dialogue" by steering clear of politics. He might have supported revolutionary movements in other countries while maintaining a prudent silence about his homeland, as the Iranian rappers Emad Ghavidel and Hamad Fard do in their remarkable song "The Battle for Homs." Yet by emphasizing Arab unity above everything else, the artists in DJ Outlaw's song "Arab World Unite" largely ignore the question of how to achieve human rights, social justice, and a more representative government. While the track does feature one revolutionary rapper in Rush of Arabian Knightz, it also features Syria's Murder Eyez and the Ben Ali regime's favorite rapper Balti. The Syrian Revolution has torn the Syrian hip-hop community apart. Of Syria's three leading hip-hop acts, Eslam Jawaad and Murder Eyez openly back the Assad regime while Black Bannerz wholeheartedly supports the revolution. The shattering of Syria's hip-hop scene makes the the burning desire for Arab unity in "Arab World Unite" quite understandable. People certainly shouldn't divide Arabic rappers into pro- and anti-revolution camps and castigate one side - the Arabic hip-hip scene is usually too nuanced and complex for that. But if unity only comes at the expense of social justice, the Arab world will be even worse off than before.

Transformational Change: Libya and Tunisia

It's no coincidence that the two rap scenes most transformed by the "Arab Spring" are in the two countries that experienced the most profound societal change: Tunisia and Libya. Hip-hop played a genuinely vital role in the Tunisian Revolution, although it needed a good dose a serendipity to do it. In November 2010, El Général, an obscure rapper from Sfax, released a jeremiad against Tunisia's president entitled “Rais lebled.” It immediately became an underground sensation. Soon afterward, Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation sparked pro-democracy demonstrations across Tunisia. The world hardly even noticed the revolution until the secret police arrested El Général on January 6. The arrest backfired spectacularly - it brought Tunisia far more international attention than anything else had since the uprising began. Realizing its mistake, the government freed El Général after three days. It didn't matter. On January 14, president Ben Ali fled to Saudi Arabia and the new government began the country's transition to democracy.

The revolution has dramatically changed the way Tunisian society views hip hop. Before, it was seen as music for thugs and gangsters. El Général's parents strongly discouraged him from pursuing it. Now, they're proud of his profession. Even Al Jazeera interviewed El Général. "Now everyone is looking at rappers as the new elite of the country," the journalist Haythem El Mekki told David Peisner. "When everyone was silent, they spoke up. When everyone was at home, they went to the streets shouting and fighting against the police. So today the old generation are feeling guilty and giving rap much more respect." In fact, even Rachid Ghannouchi, the leader of the Islamist al-Nahda party that now governs Tunisia, has proudly stated that he prefers hip-hop to traditional mizwid folk music, Tunisia's most popular genre.

Click here to read more about El Général and the Tunisian Revolution

The struggle against Muammar al-Gaddafi completely transformed the Libyan hip-hop scene. Indeed, the cultural flowering that accompanied the Libyan Revolution practically created a new hip-hop scene from scratch. Before 2011, Libya's intense isolation and repression meant that it lacked the cultural bonds hip-hop bonds that, say, Tunisia or Palestine enjoy. Yaseen, a Libyan-American activist with EnoughGaddafi.com who compiled the Mish B3eed mixtape, told me that Libyan rap was mostly "a weak attempt at imitating gangsta rap of the US." Most rappers (e.g. Double Zero) were beefing with each other and cussing throughout their entire songs, often in broken English. According to Yaseen, the only decent pre-revolution Libyan rap came from Ibn Thabit, MC Swat, and a guy named Toshy/Sheba. From 2008 onward, Ibn Thabit risked his life by calling for revolution in Libya. His music attacks Gaddafi’s rule and celebrates Libya’s culture and people. “Ibn Thabit really transformed what it meant to be a rapper in Libya," Yaseen says. "It made younger people feel that this revolution was theirs and added a new dimension to the revolutionary culture.”After Sirte fell, Ibn Thabit announced his retirement from hip-hop, but Libya's remarkable hip-hop renaissance is still going strong. "I'm really excited," says Yaseen, "to see what will come out of the rap scene in Libya in the coming years once everyone tires of doing their respective Ibn Thabit or MC Swat impressions."

Click here for the full lyrics to MC Swat's "Freedom of Expression"

Palestine and Lebanon: Arabic Hip-Hop in Fast-Forward

The Palestinian and Lebanese hip-hop scenes have much in common. Lebanon and Palestine's hip-hop scenes both blossomed in the late 1990s - much earlier than in most other Arab countries. They are the Arab world's two most fully trilingual hip-hop scenes (Arabic, English, and French for Lebanon; Arabic, English, and Hebrew for Palestine). The Second Intifada (2000-2004) gave Palestinian hip-hop a tremendously high level of political consciousness and the July War (2006) had a similar effect on Lebanese hip-hop. Both Lebanon and the Palestinian Territories suffer from paralyzed governments and fratricidal political establishments that are unable to fundamentally address poverty, unemployment, gender inequality, national sovereignty, and other vital issues. In recent years, Israeli military offensives have inflicted major economic setbacks, infrastructure damage, and loss of human life upon both societies. Palestinians in both Israel and Lebanon are under-served and disadvantaged minorities. Lastly, Lebanon and Palestine both have enormous, vibrant, and diverse diasporas with strong links to their homelands.

All these factors have made Palestine and Lebanon's hip-hop scenes develop with remarkable speed and sophistication. DAM, the leading Palestinian rap group, drew worldwide attention in 2001 with its song, "Who's a Terrorist?" As Shadia Mansour, Sabreena Da Witch, Arapeyet, and TAR demonstrate, no Arab hip-hop scene features female rappers like Palestine's does. With Malikah, Lebanon boasts the Arab world's biggest female rap star. The Palestinian diaspora and the solidarity of rappers across the Arab world have helped make Palestine perhaps the most internationally connected and thematically sophisticated Arabic hip-hop scene of all, as this video from early 2010 shows:

Egypt: New Faces, Old Problems

Between 2006, when the current Egyptian hip-hop took shape, and January 25, 2011, Egyptian rappers slowly but steadily intensified the directness and political radicalism of their music. While the revolution opened a floodgate of creative and radical energies, Egyptian hip-hop remains an almost exclusively underground phenomenon. Today, the Egyptian people face a military government that is, in most respects, every bit as bad as Mubarak's. SCAF's profound mismanagement of the economy, its assault on Egyptian civil society, its unlawful imprisonment of thousands of civilians, its complete unwillingness to reform the security forces, and its desire preserve the military's dominant role in Egyptian politics mean that Egypt's revolutionaries - and the many rappers among them - face as great a nemesis as Mubarak himself. Egyptian hip-hop has become a key weapon against the current regime's propaganda.

The story of "the Voice of the Streets," a concert that took place in Cairo on November 4, illustrates just how pervasive and perverse the counter-revolution in Egypt has become. The event brought together Palestine's Boikutt, Lebanon's Malikah and Ed Abbas, Jordan's Khotta and DJ Sotosura, and Egypt's Deeb, Arabian Knightz, and MC Amin. It was quite possibly the single greatest concentration of Arabic hip-hop talent ever brought together in one place. Martin Jakobsen, the Danish DJ whose NGO Turntables in the Camp spent two months organizing the concert, told Jackson Allers, "Everything has stayed the same. You have to bribe your ****ing way through the process. The bribes we had to pay off to organize this event were unbelievable." On night of the concert, the Interior Ministry and the Gezira Youth Club threw a wrench in everyone's plans. The club's director refused to admit a group of wounded protesters - many of them with eye patches or on crutches - because, she said, they were “criminals who were at the event to cause trouble.” At 8pm, the Interior Ministry officially canceled the concert and threatened to arrest those who refused to disperse. The rappers and 500 of their fans trekked across town to the Darb 17 18 Cultural Center, where they held a remarkable and entirely impromptu concert. The successful concert showcased Arabic hip-hop's resourcefulness, vitality, and relevance to young Arabs' lives. As Allers puts it, a coherent, unified hip-hop movement is starting to really take shape - one that holds great potential for the future.

The Egyptian blogger and parliamentary candidate Mahmoud Salem (Sandmonkey) recently wrote,

"One of the biggest mistakes of this revolution... was that we allowed its political aspects to overshadow the cultural and social aspects. We have unleashed a torrent of art, music and creativity, and we don’t celebrate or enjoy it, or even promote it... In our arrogance and hubris we assumed that people will change by themselves, that they will act right... Sorry everyone, we were arrogant and idealistic. Forgive us."

The most important feature of Arabic hip-hop is its capacity raise social consciousness and confront society's most intractable injustices. Soultana does that when she attacks patriarchy by rapping, “She’s selling her body because you are the buyer/And when she’s walking by, you act all Muslim.” Malikah does that when she declares, “We want progress, we want to learn, we want to shine, and we want to control our lives!” Ramy Donjewan does that when he cries out, "I'm against the government because I have value as human being!" As Priscilla Smith Robertson writes in Revolutions of 1848, "The democratic spirit is elusive, and has first to be learned within a much smaller group even than a nation. It involves, first of all, a recognition in each man's soul that all other men are as good as he, at least potentially...Democracy also involves the recognition in each man's soul that he is as good as other men, at least potentially." By helping people affirm the value of others and of themselves, Arabic hip-hop is, however modestly, helping create a more democratic future for the people of the Arab world.

My New Article in Italy's Corriere della Sera

2012-02-02T18:15:00.003-05:00

The Milan-based daily Corriere della Sera has just published my new article about Arabic hip hop and the Arab Awakening.

Click here to read "Hip-hop, Arab Youth, and the Arab Awakening" (En.)

Clicca qui per leggere del mio articolo, "Cosi l'hip hop arabo ha inspirato le proteste (ma anche i regimi)" (It.)

I want to thank Serena Danna of Corriere della Sera for reaching out to me and asking me to write an article for her newspaper. It's quite an honor to see my work appear in Italy's most respected and widely read daily and I am grateful for the opportunity. Many thanks as well to Ted Swedenburg and Hani of Hot Arabic Music for their input on the article and to Realityexpress for his/her constructive criticism of my "Hip Hop Revolution" piece on OpenDemocracy.net. I think I conflated different Arabic hip hop scenes and movements a little too breezily in that piece, so I worked hard to make my Corriere article's analysis more nuanced, rigorous, and accurate. I had to jam everything that I considered essential to an introduction to Arabic hip hop into 700 words, so sometimes it felt like writing an entire article in haiku form. Fortunately, I was able to say most of what I wanted to say and I let the hyperlinks do the rest of the talking.

I have a few other updates and things to share, as well:

#1 I have updated my El Général, Hip Hop, and the Tunisian Revolution post with some insightful comments about the Tunisian hip hop scene that SPIN's David Peisner, author of "Inside Tunisia's Hip-Hop Revolution," graciously shared with me. Check it out!

#2 I will soon be posting a lot of new song translations and subtitled videos, so please keep checking back for those. I'm also working on several more pieces about Arabic hip hop for OpenDemocracy.net that will be coming out this February.

#3 For my Corriere della Sera article, I interviewed Yaseen, a Libyan-American activist with EnoughGaddafi.com who has spent a lot of time in Libya recently. Thanks again, Yaseen! Yaseen was the person who selected the songs on the Mish B3eed mixtape that EnoughGaddafi.com released in early February 2011. For more on Mish B3eed, check out NPR's interviews with Abdulla Derrat, who did the artwork and promotion for the mixtape, on On The Media and PRI's The World. Mish B3eed is THE thing that made me an Arabic hip hop fan, so it was a lot of fun to talk to Yaseen about Libya, Ibn Thabit, MC Swat, and Arabic hip hop more generally. The following is a slightly edited transcript of our correspondence:

Yaseen: I want to try to get a Guito'n and MC Swat collaboration. When working on the mish b3eed mixtape, I reached out to Lotfi Double Kanon and he hollered back. I wanted him to work with Ibn Thabit. I think it's the responsibility of rappers in the West to try to help out rappers in Arab countries without resources and empower them by giving them platforms, advice (if need be), and resources. Malik L and Ibn Thabit really stepped up in that regard.

Revolutionary Arab Rap: How common is this collaboration and mentorship between emerging Arabic rappers and more established Arab hip hop artists in the west and in Arab countries with older scenes (Algeria, Morocco, Palestine, Lebanon)? How important will it be in the future?

Yaseen: I really don't have enough background on the Arabic rap scenes to answer this accurately beyond the Libyan rap scene, and I don't really like Arab-American rappers usually and don't pay attention to it as a result, but I'll give this one a shot.

Here's a little story that you could use somehow (feel free to reword what I said as long as you don't change the substance of it). After I connected with SWAT in Benghazi, I put him and Ibn Thabit in touch. SWAT ended up coming to Ibn Thabits house in Tripoli and they recorded La Shek not long after (Victory or Death was recorded by SWAT on a different beat...beat ended up being changed by the producer which is why SWATs flow sounds like it is off...originally flow was perfect...it was too much effort to re-record so we just rolled with it). I spoke to Ibn Thabit after that first meeting and he said that he felt like Puff Daddy when Biggie showed up at his doorstep...

As for a connection between rappers in the West and in the East, I don't feel that it is as established as it should be...at all. The disconnect is huge, unfortunately. I mentioned before I don't really like Arab-American rap and it's probably because I feel its more in tune with the things that I don't like about what rap in America has become ridden with in general (the posturing, meaningless clever lines, etc). I think its pretty reflective of our disconnect as Arabs in the West with our brethren back home and its a discord that can be seen in how Arabs in the West often perceive entities in the East, narratives of history, and in how we often align ourselves en masse with groups and ideologies (Leftist) that really are not reflective of the actual aspirations of the people we claim to be in solidarity with. With the Arab Spring, this is changing. We can see it with Egyptians, Tunisians, Libyans, etc. I could elaborate on this if you would like (I would now, but I'm a bit tired).

Revolutionary Arab Rap: How important, in your opinion, was hip hop (especially Ibn Thabit) in raising level of political consciousness of Libyans (both in Libya and abroad) since 2009?

Yaseen: I think that it was important in adding to the culture of the revolution in a way that was more 'shababiya' (hate to use the title of a Gaddafi channel, but whatever). Rap in Libya is pretty unique in that it really isn't as developed as rap in other countries. The Magreb (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia) kind of has a connection to the French rap scene that has helped raise the bar and popularize rap in those countries. Egypt and the Middle East also shares this type of connection with the outside world. In Libya, it really wasn't like that. Libyans didn't really have a working class connection with the outside world, and until recently, the rap scene in Libya was something that was a weak attempt at imitating gangsta rap of the US...it was more like a side goth culture rather than as something that really was thriving. You can go search for this stuff on YouTube...the most well known rappers were really rapping about nothing at all, beefing with each other and cussing throughout the entire songs, often in broken English (see: Double Zero). The only kind of decent stuff to come out of Libya pre-thowra was (Ibn Thabit aside) some of SWAT's old stuff (see: hadha al leebee) and this guy named Toshy/Sheba (those might be two different rappers, but they are the oldest and most well known in Benghazi)...Toshy has a song called al 7aya al saa3ba. Personally, I think they suck...their style is different, more like off-beat spoken word over an instrumental, but it's been marginalized now that Ibn Thabit has become popular. Ibn Thabit really transformed what it meant to be a rapper in Libya. Not that it is a big deal to be one, but it now has a little bit of legitimacy. He raised the bar with his beats, his flows, and his content--he was that connection between what the artform was in the West and he showed the East how it could be done on a large scale, and he (during the thowra) served as that missing bridge that the Maghreb had in their being bilingual and in their relative openness. I'm really excited to see what will come out of the rap scene in Libya in the coming years, once everyone tires of doing their respective Ibn Thabit or SWAT impressions. Anyways, back to the original question, I think it played a huge role with the youth and reminded younger people what this thowra was all about, just like the work of other fanaaneen in Libya. It made younger people feel that this thowra was theirs, and added a dimension to the revolutionary culture that was not there before. I also know that lots of shabaab at the front line would play Ibn Thabit...got a couple friends who kept nadaa' shabaab libya on repeat during the early days during the back and forth between Brega and Ras Lanuf. Prior to the thowra, I don't think Ibn Thabit played a huge role in Libyan culture, and neither did rap, for reasons mentioned above. In Benghazi, some knew the song "Benghazi" but didn't know his name, they just called him 'al tarhoni lee ghunna 3ala benghazi' if they knew him at all.

OK so i'm gonna leave it at that. If you want me to edit it or elaborate on anything just let me know. Salam.

Hip Hop and How Arab Youth Interact With Revolution

2011-12-16T04:56:00.010-05:00

Note: Many thanks to Bassam Gergi and the folks at OpenDemocracy for reaching out to me and kindly publishing the following piece in their Arab Awakening section. To read "Hip Hop Revolution" on OpenDemocracy, please click here.

How Has Hip Hop Impacted the Way Young People Interact With the Revolution?

Hip hop is a fundamentally subversive genre. It has become a universal medium of social and political expression for young, dissident, and marginalized people everywhere. What Arabic hip hop has given the Arab world is a widely-accessible and unfiltered medium for disseminating revolutionary ideas. It's important not to overstate the influence of Arabic hip hop on the Arab uprisings, though. Arabic hip hop is an underground phenomenon. Since there's no real Arabic hip hop industry to speak of, Arabic-language rap artists must distribute their music online or sign with Western labels. Despite this, the genre's popularity and influence are growing remarkably fast because Arabic hip hop powerfully speaks to our desire for dignity, human rights, and a brighter future.

The Internet and the Revolution

Social media and expanded internet access weren't the cause of the Arab uprisings, but they were crucial to their success. In 2008, massive protests erupted in the southern Tunisian mining town of Redeyef. For six months, 3,000 police besieged this city of 25,000 people while its citizens bravely demonstrated against corruption and chronic unemployment. Because of the state's violent repression and its stranglehold on media outlets, the protests failed to spread or gain much attention. Without developed social networks, the thousands of Redeyef's citizens who obtained protest footage on CDs or computers had no way to let most Tunisians see it. Fahem Boukaddous, a Tunisian journalist who covered the protests, said, "In 2008, Facebook wasn't at all well-known, especially in poor cities like here." In fact, fewer than 30,000 Tunisians were on Facebook when Redeyef exploded in early 2008. By the end of 2010, Tunisia's internet landscape had been transformed. A January 2011 survey found that Tunisia, a country of 10 million, had 1.97 million Facebook users - 18.6% of Tunisia's entire population and 54.73% of its online population. By this time, Facebook, along with YouTube and sites such as ReverbNation.com, had become the primary medium for distributing Arabic hip hop. The internet's great gift was that it allowed Tunisians and Arabs, for the first time, to effortlessly share their testimony with each other and with the world.

The Aura of Hip Hop

You can legally download almost any revolutionary Arabic hip hop song for free online - that's exactly what the artists want. As Mark Levine argues, the uncommodified, do-it-yourself character of this hip hop gives it “the aura” that pre-modernity artistic expression enjoyed. This aura, which "previously had given art such aesthetic, and thus social power by highlighting its singularity, irreplaceable and incommensurable value, was for all practical purposes lost" because of the commercialization of the music industry in the 20th century. That's a really complicated way of saying, "Arabic rap is awesome because its rappers aren't sell-outs." Commercialization inevitably leads artists to compromise their politics and their message because every music industry is run by rich, powerful people with a huge investment in the status quo. The Arabic music industry is especially reactionary and patriarchal. "A lot of the music that comes from here, from the region, is pop," El Général told Lauren Bohn. "It's all the same and it isn't art. They're making harmful actions to arts, actually. There's no engagement. And music without engagement isn't art." Many Arab artists, including El Deeb and Arabian Knightz, have lamented how foreign media supports and promotes Arabic hip hop more than Arabic media does. The reason is simple. Arabic hip hop scares Arab elites because it's profoundly subversive, while Western elites like Arabic hip hop because it makes the revolutions seem non-radical and friendly to the West. To understand Arabic hip hop, though, you need to approach it on its own terms, not on yours.

El Général and the Tunisian Revolution

On November 7, 2010, Hamada Ben-Amor, a young rapper from Sfax known as "El Général," posted this jeremiad against the regime of Tunisian dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali on Youtube and Facebook (Full lyrics here):

"Rais Lebled" became an immediate underground sensation. The secret police bugged El Général's phone, blocked his Facebook page, and tailed him wherever he went. On December 17, Mohamed Bouazizi's self-immolation sparked pro-democracy demonstrations across Tunisia. The world media hardly noticed. Then, on January 6, state security, allegedly acting on the orders of the president himself, arrested El Général. The arrest brought Tunisia far more international attention than it had witnessed on any single day since the trouble began. For a few days, the voice of a 21 year-old rapper from Sfax was more powerful than the voice of the dictator of Tunisia. The regime released El Général a few days later. It didn't matter. On January 14, 2011, Ben Ali fled to Saudi Arabia after the Tunisian military refused to guarantee his safety. In his place, a caretaker government promising a transition to full democracy came to power.

There's a delicious irony in Tunisian rap music's role in the events that led to Ben Ali's overthrow. In 2006, the Tunisian and French governments sponsored a (bad) film that promotes hip hop as a counter to jihadi ideology. Much as it used "state feminism" to co-opt women's movements, the regime appropriated Tunisian hip hop for its own ends. The government controlled song lyrics, concert licenses, CD distribution, and all TV and radio access. Tunisia's rappers had a choice: make apolitical, commercial rap and have the chance to earn a livelihood or go underground, rap freely, and face poverty, imprisonment, torture, and death. Most Tunisian rappers chose the first option.

Before the revolution, El Général wasn't well-known even within Tunisia's small underground community. Now, he's an international celebrity and hip hop enjoys wide respect throughout Tunisian society. Even al-Nahda leader Rachid Ghannouchi enjoys it. El Général was interviewed on Al-Jazeera and named one of TIME's 100 most influential people in the world. Demonstrators in Cairo's Tahrir Square and Bahrain's capital of  Manama chanted "Rais lebled" in the streets. Today, the only person who's a bigger icon of the Tunisian Revolution is Mohamed Bouazizi himself. As El Général told Lauren Bohn, "Arab rap is finally on the map, and we're blowing up the world."

[For more on El Général, click here]

Algeria and Morocco: the Cradle of Arabic Hip Hop

Francophone hip-hop's influence helped make Morocco and Algeria the first real Arabic hip hop scenes in the early 1990s. Lotfi Double Kanon, Arabic hop hop's most influential MC, hails from Algeria. Born in 1974 into a modest family from Annaba, Lotfi started his rap career while earning his Master's in engineering in the late 1990s during the height of Algeria's horrific civil war. His music attacks le pouvoir ("the elite") and speaks for the voiceless youth of his dispossessed generation. The Algerian government hates him, of course, but it generally leaves him unhindered (Full lyrics here).

The Moroccan rap scene's size, longevity, commercial sophistication, and Arabic dialect set it apart from other Arab rap scenes to a certain degree. Moroccan hip hop is deeply commercialized and closely integrated into the Arabic music industry, which reflects both the genuine success of Moroccan hip hop and the compromises with power that it's made. Moroccan hip hop gets numbers of hits on YouTube - as many as several million per video - that dwarf those of other Arabic hip hop scenes. Yet, as Zahir Rahman pointed out on Twitter, "The problem with Moroccan hip hop is that the big namers get co-opted by the government." Fnaire's "Mat9drsh bladi" was used as a national unity theme song by the Moroccan government. Don Bigg is a reactionary who performed at the outlandish, government-sponsored Mawazine festival that outraged February 20 activists. At the same time, Morocco has some of the bravest revolutionary hip hop anywhere. The pro-February 20 rapper L7a9ed (Haked) has been imprisoned by the government on trumped-up assault charges. Soultana, a young MC from Rabat, is an incredibly brave woman - just check out her video "Sawt Nssa" and you'll see what I mean.

Malikah: Revolutionary Arabic Hip Hop Ventures into the Mainstream

Lebanese hip hop started taking shape in the mid-1990s. Artists such as Rayess Bek, Fareeq el Atrach, and Malikah 961 make up a vibrant Lebanese scene today. Malikah is an absolutely fearless MC who vies with Palestine's Shadia Mansour for the title of "The First Lady of Arabic Hip Hop." Like Soultana, Malikah's infuses her music with revolutionary themes and powerful advocacy for Arab women. Here's "Ya imra2a" ("O woman!") [Full lyrics here].

The Saudi rapper Qusai, the first host of MTV's Hip HopNa, makes some conscious hip hop but nonetheless fully represents the Arab music industry and the powerful more generally (he made a video for, of all things, Mastercard). Fredwreck, the other host, is an American who produces for Snoop Dogg and other stalwarts of the American music industry. By working with people like them, Malikah has become successful and famous. The industry, however, will use every tool it has to dilute the politically and socially revolutionary message of her music. In the rap game, materialism is the enemy of the subversive. Malikah needs to be very careful about this. In this video, she shows AFP her new Mercedes and says, "This is my car. I've dreamed of buying a car for years. You understand? It must have class because I am Malikah and Malikah must have the car she deserves." Malikah is a true revolutionary, but she will always have to fight the industry ferociously to maintain her authenticity and her artistic freedom. She's such a strong woman, though, that I think she's up to the challenge.

Ibn Thabit and the Libyan Revolution

Although he's largely unknown in the Western press, Ibn Thabit, Libya's leading rapper, enjoys almost universal recognition among the Libyan diaspora and a huge fan base in Libya itself. His pseudonym comes from Hassan Ibn Thabit, the favorite poet of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ. Over the past four years, Ibn Thabit routinely took astonishing risks by releasing his music while moving between living abroad and in Libya itself. His obsession with toppling Gaddafi and his indifference towards fame, money, or other topics give his music as pure a revolutionary ethos as you'll find anywhere. This song came out just days before the Libyan Revolution began (Full lyrics here):

Ibn Thabit's music ranges all the way from love song (Tripoli is Calling, Libya: A Love Song) to diss (Shukrun, Shayateen Al Inss) to celebration (Misrata, Mabruk el Horria, Benghazi, Ms. Revolution) to mourning (Martyrs, Shohada2na) to Arabic (Western Mountains) to R&B (Tassa 7amra, La Shek) to gangsta (Temla, Lookin for Freedom) to whimsical (Hallucination Pills, Warrior Song). His songs tear down Gaddafi's regime, celebrate Libya's society, culture, and people, and explore how to build a new, free Libya. He promotes reconciliation by giving shout-outs to all elements of Libyan society and by arguing that vigilantism and revenge killing have no place in the new Libya. A few weeks ago, Ibn Thabit shocked his fans by announcing his retirement from hip hop (video here). Now, he says, he wants to help build a new Libya in a new way.

[For more on Ibn Thabit, click here]

Egypt and January 25

In Mubarak's Egypt, unlike Libya, Syria, or Bahrain (check out "Athletes of Bahrain"), artists could manage to attach their real names to revolutionary forms of expression while keeping themselves out of jail. Artists such as El Deeb (video here), Ramy Donjewan (video here), Zap Tharwat, MC Amin, Revolutionary Records (video here), and Ismailia Soldiers created a vibrant revolutionary underground scene in the years preceding the revolution. Arabian Knightz even managed to get a little play on Egyptian satellite channels (video here). By being a direct forum for revolutionary expression, Egyptian Hip hop played a small but key role in the decade-long buildup of the movements, organizational infrastructure, and political consciousness that led to the January 25 Revolution. Now, as the massive recent anti-SCAF protests demonstrate, hip hop is an established part of Egypt's political discourse (Full lyrics here).

Ibn Thabit, Libya's Leading Rapper, Retires from Hip-Hop

2011-12-01T21:17:00.012-05:00

Note: I'm happy to announce that the wonderful Muftah.org has brought me on board and made me a contributing blogger. It's quite an honor see my blog's name next to The Moor Next Door, Kamil Pasha, and Muftah's other superstar contributing bloggers, so I'm very grateful for the opportunity.

Ibn Thabit, Libya's leading rapper, announced his retirement from hip hop this week (video here). Although Ibn Thabit is largely unknown by the Western media, he's almost universally known among the Libyan diaspora and has a big fan base in Libya itself. Ibn Thabit is the person who first got me interested in Arabic hip hop, so it's a tough moment for me and for many other fans of his as well. He doesn't give many details about his motivation or future plans in his video, but he did say this: he never wanted his music to bring him fame or money. His only goal was to help Libya overthrow Gaddafi's regime (he's not kidding - every song of his is political and Libya-focused). Now, he says, he wants to help build a new Libya in a different way. On Twitter, he wrote:

for peeps that know me, this is not gonna be a big surprise. for everyone else, jawdropper...All praise to The Merciful. I feel like a huge weight has been lifted from my shoulders.

In 2008, Ibn Thabit began posting songs on YouTube that denounced the government of Muammar al-Gaddafi and called for its overthrow. The pseudonym he chose suggests both deep piety and a respect for the wordsmith's craft, for Hassan Ibn Thabit was the favorite poet of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ. Attaching his real name to his work would have led to certain arrest and torture, for Gaddafi's Libya was one of the world's most suffocating, oppressive, and arbitrary police states. Gaddafi even banned all foreign language instruction in Libya from 1986 until the mid-1990s. When 2011 began, despite Libya's great oil wealth, unemployment was at 33% and 67% of Libyans were living on less than $2 a day. This was the situation that inspired both Ibn Thabit's music and Libya's revolution. His conversations over the phone and internet with Tripoli residents about what the Tunisian Revolution might mean for Libya are what inspired the song "The Question," which he released in late January. On February 14, 2011, one day before the revolution's first protests began, Ibn Thabit released, "A Call to the Youth of Libya" (click here for the full lyrics). He has so much to say that he doesn't even bother with a chorus - the entire song is verse:

When Tribute FM was founded in Benghazi in May, the number of requests for Ibn Thabit songs dwarfed all others. In an interview with Tribute in May, Ibn Thabit said, "I get people telling me all the time, like, old timers! Their parents and even their grandparents, you know, are listening to my music and, to be honest with you, its shocking. I would never even have imagined." Professional producers from all over the world volunteered to help him. When Tribute FM asked him why he raps almost exclusively in Arabic, he replied, "Well, first of all...I really can't rap that well in English. Honestly, it's all for the Libyan people. I'm not trying to reach out to people somewhere else...to a market or anything like that. I'm just trying to, you know, communicate with my people." Ibn Thabit is being quite modest here. His English is flawless and "Lookin for Freedom," his only song with English lyrics, is one of his best (click here for the full lyrics). But the first rule of any form of expression is "know your audience," and Ibn Thabit certainly does.

Over the past four years, Ibn Thabit routinely took incredibly dangerous risks, but he always managed to come out okay somehow. In May, he told Tribute FM that he moved back and forth between Libya and abroad, where he had a job that requires "a lot of driving." In "Shukrun," he taunts his enemies by rapping:

How many times have the people who know me warned me!
They told me [Gaddafi's men] would butcher me if only they discovered me.
You think I was distributing my music from far away?
From my hands, I would give out CDs to those who know my face.

It seems that he visited America in 2009 and ~~helped found~~ met up with Khalas! (EnoughGaddafi.com). In 2010, he was briefly detained in Ras Jdir, but his jailers couldn't figure out who he really was and let him free. A friend who was captured by Gaddafi forces during the spring later told Ibn Thabit that Abdullah Sanussi, the chief of Libya's intelligence service, personally interrogated him about Ibn Thabit's real identity. In July, Ibn Thabit joined up with rebels in the Nafusa Mountains and served with them on the front lines until the fall of Tripoli in a logistical, non-combat role. He documented the Battle of Tikout for EnoughGaddafi.com and proved one of Twitter's most reliable sources of information on front line movements and the final battles in Zawiya and Tripoli. He managed to keep his identity hidden until mid-September, when a miscommunication led the @live2tripoli people to mistakenly include footage of Ibn Thabit in the first "Mabruk el Horria" video they posted to YouTube.

At the time, Gaddafi was still free and his supporters and officials were still fighting on in Bani Walid, Sirte, Fezzan, and in small pockets of Tripoli, so Ibn Thabit wanted to wait to release the footage until the NTC had won its final victory. The @live2tripoli people quickly replaced the YouTube video with the Ibn Thabit artwork and the rapper asked his fans not to circulate his on the internet. The cat was already out of the bag, of course. Libyan girls posting lovey-dovey, heart-filled photos of Ibn Thabit became a running joke in the Libyan Twittersphere. Fortunately, nothing bad happened because of the release. Ibn Thabit formally revealed his identity (although not his real name) in a "Happy Eid!" message in early November. At the end, he announces that he and his colleagues must delay a planned concert in Tripoli's Fashloum neighborhood because of logistical challenges (I don't know whether they still plan to host it or not). Here's the video.

Ibn Thabit's music ranges all the way from love song (Tripoli is Calling, Libya: A Love Song) to diss (Shukrun, Shayateen Al Inss) to celebration (Misrata, Mabruk el Horria, Benghazi) to mourning (Martyrs, Shohada2na) to Arabic (Western Mountains) to R&B (Tassa 7amra, La Shek) to gangsta (Temla, Lookin for Freedom) to whimsical (Hallucination Pills, Warrior Song). He has some of the most advanced flows and lyrics around and his skills only improved as time went on. When he met up with MC Swat in Tripoli in September, it took them only 90 minutes to compose the lyrics to "La Shek" from scratch (click here to listen). In Shayteen Al Inss, where he blasts Gaddafi, the pro-Gaddafi forces, and Gaddafi's "leftist" fellow travelers, he delivers the equivalent of a 1,300 word essay (in English) in about six minutes. Isn't rap great? What other genre can give you the equivalent an entire Jadaliyya or Muftah article in a single song? Most Arabic pop songs, which tend to repeat their verses as well as their choruses, have maybe one-tenth the textual volume of that.

Like almost all revolutionary artists who rap in Arabic, Ibn Thabit distributes his music for free online. As Mark Levine argues, the uncommodified, do-it-yourself character of revolutionary Arabic hip hop gives it “the aura” of pre-modernity artistic expression. This aura, which "previously had given art such aesthetic, and thus social power by highlighting its singularity, irreplaceable and incommensurable value, was for all practical purposes lost" because of the commercialization of the music industry in the 20th century. That's a really complicated way of saying, "Arabic rap is awesome because its rappers aren't sell-outs." Commercialization inevitably leads artists to compromise their politics and their message because every music industry is run by rich, powerful people with a huge investment in the status quo. Ibn Thabit's awareness of this must have contributed to his decision to retire from the rap game.

Ibn Thabit's songs have three main aims: to tear down Gaddafi's regime, to celebrate Libya's society, culture, and people, and to explore how to build a new, free Libya. The anchor of his music is his faith. When Tribute FM asked him to give some advice to young listeners about how they can "shoot for the stars," he said, "It's very simple. Pray and give your blessings five times a day, and your Lord will bless you in your work, God willing. I've never missed a prayer one time, God be praised!" The memory of the 1996 massacre at Abu Sleem Prison looms large in his music. He celebrates Libya's history, denounces the West's reconciliation with Gaddafi during the aughts, and maintains that Libya's anti-colonialist spirit is as alive as ever. He continuously affirms his faith in the Libyan people's piety and strength, as he does here in "A Call to the Youth of Libya":

The Libyan people are honorable.
The Libyan people are moral.
The Libyan people: when they get angry they become bad-ass,
they become crazy. The Libyan people have roots.
The Libyan people pray to and give blessings to the Prophet.
One-fifth of the Libyan people are memorizing the Quran.
The Libyan people are not willing to follow Satan
because the grandfathers of the Libyan people, with the rifle and on horseback,
fought against oppression, against the greatest of crimes.

He also promotes national and communal reconciliation in his music by giving shout-outs to all elements of Libyan society - especially tribes and cities with reputations for being pro-Gaddafi. "The man from Sirte is your brother. What can you blame him for? Fitna [strife within the Islamic community] doesn't come from anyone but the government." This issue has particular poignancy for Ibn Thabit because his beloved hometown of Tarhuna had many pro-Gaddafi residents and was one of the last towns to fall to NTC forces. He calls for Gaddafi-era officials to fully pay for their crimes but only in a fair, well-organized judicial framework. He appeals to Libyans' patriotism and Islamic beliefs to argue that vigilantism and revenge killing have absolutely no place in the new Libya. As he told Tribute FM in May:

I got a lot of comments - mostly positive, God be praised - about the song "Western Mountains." But there were a couple negative ones too - and that's fine. I listen to everything that everybody says, and I just want to say to, you know, folks from out there, from Misrata, from anywhere else [that wants] a shout out - I can't really incorporate every single tribe. I can't shout out to everybody. And I do intentionally...shout out to towns that, with all honesty, people call them traitors...and I'm not cool with that...I don't want to be part of creating a vengeful atmosphere when Gaddafi is gone. So I actually intentionally...shout out [to tribes] I've heard things about...because...this whole struggle is against injustice and oppression, you know?...We can't have a majority that's going to go after individuals who are completely innocent.

In "Libya is," which further explores these themes, Ibn Thabit raps in the Tamazight (the Berber language) of the Nafusa Mountains for what might be the first time (click here for the full lyrics).

Although I'm obviously a big fan of his, Ibn Thabit has disappointed me in one major way: he has never devoted an entire song to denouncing the racism and abuse that thousands of black Libyans and foreign nationals have been suffering under Libya's new authorities. Racism, of course, was a terrible problem in Gaddafi's Libya, too. Gaddafi also trained, financed, and unleashed some of Africa's worst war criminals, including Charles Taylor, Foday Sankoh, and the Janjaweed militias of Darfur. But that's no excuse for what's happening in Libya now. To his credit, Ibn Thabit often speaks out against racism in his songs. He always refers to Gaddafi's mercenaries simply as "mercenaries" and never uses racially-loaded tropes such as "African mercenaries" (or worse) to denounce Gaddafi and his crimes. However, given his moral stature, his audience, and his talent for giving a voice to the voiceless, Ibn Thabit could do a great deal right now to help Libya confront the worst injustices to come out of its revolution.

In his music, Ibn Thabit often speaks movingly about the role of Libyan women in Libya's struggle for freedom. He maintains that Libya's women were the key to the revolution and that they were warriors who were ever bit as brave and important as Libya's men. Here is Ms. Revolution (click here for the full lyrics):

While Ibn Thabit's retirement makes many hip hop fans and Libyans sad, they can take heart in the amazing florescence that Libya's hip hop scene has undergone since February and in Libyan artists who are still going strong, such as Khaled M, Junior, Saleh Ghaly, MC Swat, and Malik L. His contribution to that florescence will certainly be one of Ibn Thabit's enduring legacies. I have a feeling that the non-hip-hop legacies he leaves for his country will be even cooler.

How Egypt's Rappers Warned SCAF About the Current Uprising

2011-11-24T08:52:00.009-05:00

As you're well aware, Egypt is in the midst of a revolutionary uprising against SCAF, the ruling military junta that took over after the January 25th Revolution forced Mubarak from power. This all started on Friday, November 18 when, with parliamentary elections just a few weeks way, various currents and movements of Egyptian Islamism came together for a huge rally in Tahrir Square. They were protesting how the latest draft of the constitutional principles document gives SCAF an overwhelming and permanent influence on Egyptian politics. Most of Egypt's liberal and leftist activists decided against participating because of their differences with the Islamist movements. The Islamist demonstrators went home that night, but about 200 mostly leftist protesters set up tents and staged a modest sit-in in Tahrir to air their grievances, including SCAF's attacks on free expression, its detention of prominent activists, its imprisonment of over 12,000 civilians through military tribunals, and its utter unwillingness to begin reforming any of Egypt's major institutions (particularly the Ministry of Interior's police and security forces) and hold them to account. So when security forces cavalierly stormed the Tahrir encampment and broke it up with extreme prejudice, they unexpectedly created the spark that ignited what could very well become the Second Egyptian Revolution of 2011.

News of the violence spread immediately. Thousands of people poured into Cairo's early morning darkness to confront the security forces and re-occupy Tahrir Square. Violence, tear gas, rubber bullets, bird shot, and reported live ammunition have only inspired more people to join the protests. The past few days have seen Egypt's largest demonstrations since the January 25th Revolution - not only in Cairo but in cities throughout the country, most notably Ismailia and Alexandria. The fiercest fighting has been on Mohamed Mahmoud street, which links Tahrir Square to the nearby Interior Ministry. At least 30 people have died so far, but the protests and sit-ins and clashes have only grown in size and intensity. The protests have passed an important threshold because the security forces cannot forcefully disperse them with anything short of a horrific massacre that would destroy SCAF's ability to govern. SCAF can only get the protesters off the streets with a political solution - and the protesters know it. SCAF has therefore offered concessions by apologizing for "deaths of the martyrs" and promising to hand over power to a civilian government in June. The protesters, though, say they will not stop until SCAF steps down from power and hands the country over to a "national salvation government" that represents the full spectrum of Egyptian politics [update on November 30th: well, the elections broke up the protests in a way the security forces could not. There will definitely be more demonstrations in the coming months, though].

One striking aspect of the current uprising is the prescient way in which revolutionary Egyptian rappers Ramy Donjewan and Ahmed Rock of Revolution Records had threatened SCAF that it would come. Such an uprising seemed far-fetched this summer, when the revolutionaries' continuous sit-ins at Tahrir Square and aloofness from the concerns of ordinary Egyptians turned public opinion overwhelmingly against them. The Egyptian blogger Zeinobia powerfully documented their missteps in a soul-searching blog post from August 3rd. During this gloomy, demoralizing summer, Ramy Donjewan released a brash, brave, and profoundly threatening song entitled "Message to Tantawi." In the chorus, he raps in a haunting tone:

The blood of my brothers is so expensive, so precious, O Tantawi,
and we will NOT be threatened.
And what happened before can happen again, O Tantawi,
if our demands are not implemented.

(Click here for the full Arabic and English lyrics to Ramy Donjewan's "Message to Tantawi")

Donjewan and Ahmed Rock attack the culture of impunity that hasn't put a single Egyptian policeman or officer behind bars for their crimes during the January 25th Revolution. They each also make it clear that Egyptians have broken the fear barrier once and for all and that they will stand up to SCAF very, very soon. Donjewan rhymes:

Your Excellency General Tantawi, were are the trials?
Where are rights of the masses and where are the rights of those who died?
Where are the rights of this country that was plundered for years in silence?
Where are the rights of the martyr who was oppressed until his death?
Your Excellency General Tantawi, the people are having their throats slit,
yet you don't care and your lies are laid bare.
...I'm not scared of you because my heart is a tank!
...If you don't do your duty, you will face the people and they will stand up to you!

Ahmed Rock takes up similar themes in the chorus of his song "No to Military Rule," where he furiously raps:

They seem to have forgotten who we are! They think that we're still scared!
We saw death in front of us and we stood there smiling!
We'll remind them, if they forget, that we're the generation of revolutionaries!
No matter how much the oppression against us increases, we'll break down all the jail cells!

(Click here for the full Arabic and English lyrics to Ahmed Rock's "No to Military Rule")

On November 16, when Ahmed Rock released "No to Military Rule," the January 25th revolutionaries seemed demoralized, reactive, and set to get their clocks cleaned in the upcoming parliamentary elections. One week later, their movement is completely revitalized and their enemy, SCAF, is fighting simply for self-preservation. Most importantly, Egyptian public opinion - the so-called "silent majority" - has been turning sharply against SCAF since September. The public, it seems, is back on the revolutionaries' side, and so is the momentum. Egyptians have many years of the hard work of political mobilization, social change, and institutional reform ahead of them, but they seem much farther along that difficult path now than they were a week ago. To keep up with developments, you can follow the Egypt list I made on Twitter. Peace.

Pre-January 25th Songs:
Ramy Donjewan - Against the Government
Revolution Records - Wa2t El Thawrageya
Revolution Records - Change is Forbidden
Post-January 25th Songs:
Ahmed Mekky - 25 January
Ramy Donjewan - Message to Tantawi
Revolution Records - Down w/ Military Rule

El Général, Hip Hop, and the Tunisian Revolution

2011-10-22T16:17:00.036-04:00

Update, January 2012: David Peisner, author of "Inside Tunisia's Hip-Hop Revolution," shared some great insights with me about Tunisian hip hop via email. Mr. Peisner has graciously allowed me to repost our correspondence here, so please scroll to the bottom of this article to read his comments.

Like many people, I first took notice of Arabic hip hop because of El Général and the Tunisian Revolution. The story has practically passed into mythology now. For a few critical days, a 21 year-old rapper from Sfax had a more powerful voice than the dictator of Tunisia himself. On October 23, Tunisia will hold the first truly free elections in its history when it elects a new constitutional assembly. El Général's story illuminates, with a vividness that few others can match, how Tunisia got to this point and where it might be going from here.

On November 7, 2010, Hamada Ben-Amor, a young rapper from Sfax known as "El Général," posted this jeremiad against the regime of Tunisian dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali on Youtube and Facebook:

Click here for the full Arabic lyrics to "Rais lebled" and their English translation

"Rais lebled"

The video begins with a clip from Tunisian state television of Ben Ali attempting to soothe a sobbing schoolchild. The little boy, whose parents have evidently taught him something of the regime's true nature, must be terrified about being face-to-face with the dictator who destroyed so many Tunisians' lives. Ben Ali, clearly flustered, tells the child, "Why are you worried? Would you tell me something? Don't be afraid!"

Via andymorganwrites.com

The video then cuts to El Général, smoking a cigarette and hiding his face in shadows like Hal Halbrook's Deep Throat in All the President's Men. Général conceals his face with shadows, digital alterations, and a baseball cap throughout the video. Intriguingly, though, he seems to reveal enough of himself and his mannerisms to let his acquaintances (and, presumably, the secret police) figure out his real identity. El Général's friend and fellow rapper RTM told David Peisner of Spin that, "When Hamada recorded ["Rais lebled"], I tried to convince him to be worried. Rap like this may lead him to death. I tried to convince him to convey his message implicitly. He just smiled and told me he's ready for the consequences." El Général acknowledges these entreaties in "Rais lebled" when he raps, "I see so much injustice and that's why I chose to speak/even though many people told me that my end will be execution." In fact, El Général had no idea what was in store for him. "I expected it might get me in trouble but I didn't think the president would be ousted," he told Peisner. "I didn't know there would be a revolution."

In "Rais lebled," El Général wields Ben Ali's consoling words to the crying child as a weapon against the regime. He even opens the second verse by saying, "Mr. President, you told me to speak without fear." The trope of the ruler as father figure is common to government propaganda throughout the world, but it has a particularly strong resonance in the narratives that Middle Eastern regimes have constructed for themselves. El Général turns this paternalistic conceit around on Ben Ali. He condemns the government's severe discrimination against observant Muslim women by rapping, "I see the police beat women for wearing headscarves./Would you accept that for your daughter?.../But you're still a father. You would not accept evil being done to your children. Alors!/This is a message from one of your children." He calls for a society that provides dignity, economic opportunity, clean government, modern infrastructure, and the rule of law for its citizens. By showing how Ben Ali failed to be a "good father" for his country, El Général lays Tunisia's claim to the right of revolution. That El Général doesn't use swear words makes his indictment of Ben Ali's regime all the more damning. Most of all, he strives to make the voices of ordinary Tunisians heard and to inspire them to speak out themselves. "I know there are so many words in the people's hearts that don't reach you," he concludes. "If the situation weren't unjust today, I would not speak."

Tunisia Finds Its Voice

"Rais Lebled" became an underground sensation and went viral almost immediately. "Within hours" of its November 7 release, as Andy Morgan writes, "the song had lit up the bleak and fearful horizon like an incendiary bomb." Before it was banned, Tunivision and other major local media outlets were broadcasting it. The secret police bugged El Général's phone, blocked his Facebook page, and sent agents to follow him wherever he went. It was too late. On December 17, Mohamed Bouazizi, in despair over the police's humiliating treatment of him when they confiscated his vegetable cart, went in front of the local government office in Sidi Bouzid, doused himself in gasoline, and set himself on fire. Almost immediately, pro-democracy demonstrations broke out all over Tunisia. Not even the state security's worst brutality could suppress them. Inspired by this, El Général recorded a new song named "Tounes bledna" ("Tunisia is Our Country") and released it on YouTube on December 22. In the chorus, he furiously rhymes:

Tunisia is our country, with politics or with blood!
Tunisia is our country and her men will never surrender!
Tunisia is our country, the whole people hand-in-hand!
Tunisia is our country and today we must find the solution!

Even though careful observers such as Brian Whitaker of The Guardian quickly grasped the historic nature of the Tunisian protests, Tunisia barely even rated a mention in the Western media at this time. Then, on the morning of January 6, 30 state security officers, acting on "the orders of President Ben Ali himself," arrested El Général at his family's flat in Sfax. As Whitaker wrote on January 8,

In Tunisia itself, the authorities have made a serious public relations blunder by arresting Hamada Ben-Amor ("The General"), a well-known rapper. This generated more than 60 news stories in the world's media about his arrest (many of which also went on to talk more generally about the uprising). The result was exactly what the authorities have been seeking to avoid – far more international attention directed towards Tunisia than on any single day since the trouble began.

Funny enough, for a few days, the voice of a 21 year-old rapper from Sfax became more powerful than the voice of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali himself. The regime, realizing its folly, released El Général a few days later. It didn't matter. On January 14, 2011, Ben Ali fled to Saudi Arabia after the Tunisian military refused to guarantee his safety. In his place, a caretaker government promising a transition to full democracy came to power.

The Internet and the Revolution

Social media and expanded internet access weren't the cause of the Tunisian Revolution, of course, but they were crucial to its success. In the spring of 2008, massive protests erupted in the southern mining town of Redeyef. For six months, 3,000 police besieged this city of 25,000 people while its citizens bravely demonstrated against corruption and chronic unemployment. Because of the state's violent repression and its stranglehold on media outlets, the protests failed to spread or gain much attention. Without developed social networks, the thousands of Redeyef's citizens who obtained protest footage on CDs or computers had no way to let most Tunisians see it. Fahem Boukaddous, a Tunisian journalist who covered the protests, said, "In 2008, Facebook wasn't at all well-known, especially in poor cities like here." In fact, fewer than 30,000 Tunisians were on Facebook when Redeyef exploded in early 2008. By the end of 2010, Tunisia's internet landscape had been transformed. A January 2011 survey found that Tunisia, a country of 10 million, had 1.97 million Facebook users - 18.6% of Tunisia's entire population and 54.73% of its online population. By this time, sites such as Facebook, YouTube, and RerverbNation.com had made internet the most important medium for distributing Arabic hip hop. The internet's great gift was that it allowed Tunisians to almost effortlessly share their testimony with each other and with the world.

The Context

At this point, it's worth stepping back a moment and looking at the context behind these events. The dictatorship of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was one of the Middle East's most nightmarish, totalitarian regimes. Larbi Sadiki, writing in September 2010, described the Tunisian "model" in clear-eyed terms:

In politics, such a ‘model’ is far from exemplary. Riots in the phosphates basin of the centre and the south point to trouble in paradise! The homogenous and EU-linked Arab state with so much democratic potential has poor press, weak political parties, and a brutal security apparatus. There is more civic capital in impoverished Mauritania than in Tunisia with its high literacy and industrious society. Bin Ali and his government must realize that people live not by bread alone. They also live as social contractors with aspirations for free speech, organized political activity, civic and social capital, and political dynamism. Ruling as a ‘Bey’ in modern-day Tunisia betrays the very republican pretensions of the regime.

Before the Tunisian Revolution, many people, including many regime critics like Sadiki, failed to grasp just how badly Tunisia's economic model has failed the Tunisian people. As the Tunisian economist Hassine Dimassi put it in April, "Effectively, we must ask ourselves why [Ben Ali's economic] model totally failed, despite the cascade of praise from so many international financial institutions. It wasn’t just the IMF. The World Bank, Davos...these institutions describe Tunisia as if it was close to paradise." Despite the achievements of Tunisia's education system, Tunisian college graduates' degrees have little relevance to the fields that dominate Tunisia's job market, most notably agriculture, tourism, and light industry. Even today, what few good jobs there seem to go to people with personal connections to the former ruling party, the Rassemblement Constitutionel Démocratique (RCD). As a result, many intelligent young Tunisians - especially those outside the cities and tourist centers - graduate with almost no prospects for decent employment.

While Ben Ali's Tunisia had a genuinely progressive family law code and relatively high levels of female representation in the police and civil service (up to 30% in some fields), the regime did its best to co-opt or destroy all of Tunisia's independent feminist movements. The government barred religiously observant Tunisian women (in effect, most Tunisian women) from public institutions and employment, which was hardly an act of female empowerment. Most importantly, Tunisian women suffered from political repression every bit as much as men did. The Ben Ali regime was an equal opportunity oppressor.

These injustices were what inspired El Général to start rapping and what kept his conscience burning. "Corruption was everywhere here. And it still is everywhere. You could see it everyday," he told Lauren Bohn. "If you had money, you could do anything...The mafia family controlled everything. It was pure dictatorship. We were guests in our own country. We weren't landlords. The suffering of the people made me speak, and I chose rap to do this."

Who is El Général?

When Lauren Bohn met with El Général and his friends in a Sfax café this summer, she posed the question, "How do you see yourself?" His response is admirably thorough:

I'm just a Tunisian citizen. I'm Muslim. I'm an African from a poor country. I'm proud of my heritage. I'm 21. I travel but I mostly stay in Sfax. My family is here. My parents have regular jobs; my mom owns a book store and my dad works at the local hospital. My girlfriend -- I call her my wife -- she's here. We'll probably get married soon. I made her a revolutionary; she's a revolutionary in love. I have a gift given by God. I believe in God strongly, and that human beings can make the impossible possible....I'm a normal Tunisian youth. But, you can tell the American people, I'm dangerous to governments. So if they need my service, I'm ready.

Like just about every revolutionary Arab rapper I've ever come across, El Général cites 2Pac and Algerian hip hop legend Lotfi Double Kanon as his biggest musical influences. Yet he doesn't speak English and even his French is only passable. When asked how he understands 2Pac if he doesn't speak English, he smiled and replied, "The lyrics don't matter." He's right, of course. The sensibility, the flow, the vibe of a good rap song conveys its message just as eloquently as its lyrics can. Like his heroes, El Général has a compulsion to call out the elite's hypocrisy and to give a voice to those who would not otherwise be heard.

Hip Hop and the Ben Ali Regime

There's a delicious irony in the prominence of Tunisian rap music in the events that led to Ben Ali's overthrow. In 2006, the Tunisian and French governments co-sponsored a (bad) film that promotes hip hop as a counter to jihadi ideology. In Nouri Bouzid's The Making of a Kamikaze, a young rapper named Chokri (a.k.a. "Bahta") falls in with a jihadi crowd that pushes him towards suicide terrorism. As Hishaam Aidi writes, "State officials and diplomats introducing the film reiterated the message that hip-hop is the antithesis of radical Islamism, perhaps even the antidote to it." The film and government ignored both the fundamentally anti-establishment character of hip hop and the deep ties between hip hop and Islamism. Many Islamists listen to hip-hop and rappers with Islamist or even Jihadi sympathies are quite common (the 2004 video for Dirty Kuffar is a famous and probably overblown example of the Jihadi variety). In December 2010, the regime banned the dissident Islamist rapper Psycho M from the airwaves after he encouraged listeners to kill Nouri Bouzid for slandering Islam.

Islamist rappers like Psycho M and RTM, though, are exceptional within Arabic hip hop. El Général, like most prominent revolutionary Arab rappers, is a devout Muslim who emphatically rejects Islamist politics. "I'm Muslim, but El-Nahda doesn't represent me," he told Lauren Bohn. "I'm against people who use religion to realize their political goals. Politics has a lot of dirty games. Religion needs to be away from these games. I'm very scared that Islam will be manipulated by El-Nahda." El Général and RTM did release one unsettling song with a militant, Islamist vibe named "Allahu Akbar." The song's anti-democratic Salafi rhetoric - e.g. "The Quran is our only law" - comes from RTM. While El Général avoids any anti-democratic messages and focuses on fighting imperialism and reviving Islam's glory, he still embraces the video's militant, Islamist vibe despite his hatred of Islamist politics. Why is that? Here's my best guess. Revolutionary Arabic hip hop has little scope for an American-style "gangsta" sensibility like that found in the hip hop of the Ivory Coast. Revolutionary Arabic rappers must therefore demonstrate their toughness in one of two ways: by challenging the regime's secret police (the popular choice for most leading rappers, including El Général usually) or by expressing a desire to fight and even die with the Middle East's resistance movements (which can lead rappers to adopt the language of militant Islamism). Since El Général took on Ben Ali's secret police and won, he needs to find a new target. Whatever Général's motivation behind the video, though, it's a good reminder that political transformation in the Middle East will not always be amenable to liberal sensibilities. At the same time, El Général, like most other revolutionary Arab rappers, never swears gratuitously, talks about sex, or talks about women in a disrespectful way - a refreshing break with most current genres of popular music.

Much as it used "state feminism" to co-opt women's movements and crush political dissent within them, the Ben Ali regime and the RCD tried to appropriate Tunisian hip hop for its own ends. The earliest Arabic hip hop scenes took shape in Morocco and Algeria in the late 1980s. A viable Tunisian hip hop scene only began to emerge in the late 1990s when groups such as Wled Bled, T-Men, and the Philosophes gained a following. (By the way, I just found an excellent French-language site called TunisianRap.com, so go there to dig deeper into the current hip hop scene). These rappers faced tremendous obstacles, as David Peisner notes in Spin, because the government controlled song lyrics, concert licenses, CD distribution, and all TV and radio access. In the early 2000s, Balti, a Sousse MC who carefully avoided politics and focused on family, love, and personal struggle, became Tunisia's first real rap star. The songs Ryah Wayne, Mata7kilich , and Shogra (see the embedded video below) provide good examples of his style and flow.

The potential explosiveness of hip hop became clear in 2005 when a Tunisian emigree in Spain named Férid El Extranjero (a.k.a. Delahoja) scored an underground hit with "3bed Fi Terkina." This catchy, cutting track compares Ben Ali's Tunisia to an open-air prison. Many rappers, including Balti, were promptly summoned, interrogated, and threatened by the Interior Ministry. In essence, the secret police told Tunisia's rappers to a) make apolitical, commercial rap and have a chance to earn a livelihood or b) go underground, rap freely, and dodge poverty, imprisonment, torture, and death. Balti chose the former. Yet even if Tunisia had enjoyed freedom of expression, its rappers would have still faced a profound artistic dilemma. "If you sung in Arabic," as Andy Morgan accurately (if indelicately) puts it, "you either cloistered yourself away in anodyne ‘high art’ music or embraced the banal glitz of the local pop production line, prostituting yourself to conglomerates like Rotana, the huge Gulf-owned media and entertainment conglomerate that more or less controls the music industry in the Middle East." Most of the Arab music industry's money comes from the advertising and sponsorship revenues that the dominant Arabic satellite channels generate. The owners of these channels are counter-revolutionary to the core because the revolutions threaten their livelihoods, which they owe to their good relationships with oppressive regimes. "A lot of the music that comes from here, from the region, is pop," El Général told Bohn. "It's all the same and it isn't art. They're making harmful actions to arts, actually. There's no engagement. And music without engagement isn't art."

Peisner notes that the music industry, like everything else in Tunisia, was a racket that well-connected RCD officials gamed and grew rich from. In 2005, party officials tried to hijack a concert organized by Lak3y, a well-known dissident Tunisian rapper, by hanging up an RCD banner at the last minute. When Lak3y ripped down the banner and performed his anti-government songs anyway, five policemen beat the hell out of him for it. Balti, by contrast, signed with the California-based record label Raw Poetix and used the system to become a wealthy man. "I'd play for 12,000 people," he explained. "Tickets might be ten dinars [about $7] each. I'd get 2,000 [dinars] and the rest would go to the Ministry." Balti played many RCD-sponsored shows, hung out on the infamous Imad Trabelsi's yacht, and generally served as "the government's favorite rapper," as the Tunisian journalist Haythem El Mekki put it. Police told him that as long as his songs steered clear of politics and religion, his career could thrive - and it did. Now it's coming back to haunt him. Peisner writes:

After Ben Ali's ouster, rappers here scrambled to burnish their revolutionary credentials. Seemingly overnight, songs praising the uprisings or condemning Ben Ali and his wife, Leila Trabelsi, proliferated. Rappers judged insufficiently supportive of the revolution fell quickly from favor. Chief among them was Balti. "I work the art for the art...I perform music. I don't care about politics." He chalks up the criticism from other rappers to envy.

This "Haterade" defense is weak for many reasons. For one thing, there's a lot less to envy about Balti in the new Tunisia. His manager, Amine Lamari, admitted to Peisner that, "Not a lot of people come to the concerts now. He's not selling a lot of albums...you can see a big difference. Before, it was better." Balti's cluelessness about how the revolution - indeed, how politics - is the best hope for combating Tunisia's poverty and social ills shows how little he really cares about these issues. His dealings with the Ben Ali regime left him hopelessly compromised and willfully blind to the oppression and injustice that most Tunisians suffered.

Balti says that after "Rais Lebled" appeared, the security services visited him. He also had been considering writing a song about the uprisings, but after that visit, his manager talked him out of it. He has no regrets. "It was very risky at that time. It's success or death. I cannot put my family, my career, everything into jeopardy just because of one song. You have to be intelligent enough to deal with the rules of the game. There are certain things more valuable than the music. If I issued a song like that, who will feed my mom?"

Where to begin? Let's focus on the end. Balti's parting line is eerily similar to what Albert Camus, the great humanist, existentialist philosopher, and tormented Pied-Noir, infamously declared in his 1957 Nobel Prize acceptance speech. To justify his support for France's colonialist war to preserve Algérie français, Camus said, "I love justice, but I will defend my mother before justice." Like Camus, Balti justifies his abandonment of his own moral values by making "I'm'a get mine!" his highest principle. It's not exactly, "we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor."

Today, after the revolution, Balti still maintains that "you've got to deal with the rules of the game." Yet the Tunisian people and Tunisia's hip hop artists have changed the game's rules. Lak3y is a great example. After El Général was arrested in early January, Lak3y figured he'd be next. Instead of backing down, he recorded a blistering nine-minute song with Armada Bizerta entitled "Touche Pas á Ma Tunisie" ("Don't Touch My Tunisia"). "I had to continue," Lak3y told Spin. "A rapper here is like a journalist. Rap reflects the reality of Tunisian society. It's the only music that supported the revolution. The youth appreciate that."

Balti tries to justify himself by emphasizing his role as an innovator and pioneer of Tunisian hip hop:

I'd like to add something else...If there's no Balti, there's no rap in Tunisia. Everyone knows this. The first topics I tackled are the problems of the people -- unemployment, illegal immigration, delinquency. Things I dared to say, the journalist couldn't write. This is how I contributed to the revolution.

Balti's claim that, "If there's no Balti, there's no rap in Tunisia" or that he bravely broke taboos is, to put it kindly, absurd. It's whack. For one thing, raï music, the Algerian fusion genre, made its name in the late 1970s by subversively tackling topics such as sex, poverty, injustice, and hogra ("humiliation"). By then, raï had become a powerful cultural force throughout Francophone North Africa and Europe's Arab communities. When raï was shattering taboos and reaching the peak of its popularity in the 1980s, Arabic rap didn't even exist. In fact, many media observers hailed raï as the soundtrack to the momentous 1988 youth uprisings that compelled the Chadli regime to initiate a democratic transition in Algeria (note: sound familiar, anyone?). Arabic hip hop blew up in Algeria, Morocco, and France in the early 1990s. Tunisian hip hop would be blowing up today whether or not an indigenous Tunisian hip hop scene had developed during the early aughts. Music-sharing social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and Reverbnation allow hip hop's influence to transcend any border. "Right now, [Balti's] argument isn't playing very well in the rap community here," Peisner told NPR, "but it's not totally invalid." To be fair, Balti and the rap scene that he helped pioneer probably helped accelerate the development of the Tunisian hip hop by, say, 3-5 years.

"We're Blowing Up the World"

Before the revolution, El Général wasn't well-known even within Tunisia's small underground community. That obviously began to change after he released "Rais lebled." The publicity surrounding his arrest and the collapse of the Ben Ali regime made him a full-blown international celebrity. After Ben Ali fled, Al Jazeera, which reaches well over 50 million viewers, played a clip of "Rais lebled" and interviewed Général during a live prime time broadcast from Tunis. As El Général told Bohn, "Arab rap is finally on the map, and we're blowing up the world."

Soon afterwards, demonstrators in Cairo's Tahrir Square and Bahrain's capital of Manama were chanting "Rais lebled" in the streets [update, January 2012: MERIP's Ted Swedenburg is highly skeptical about this]. El Général was named one of TIME magazine's 100 most influential people in the world. Today, the only person who's a bigger icon of the Tunisian Revolution is Mohamed Bouazizi himself. Nine months after Ben Ali's flight, people of all ages are still bumping El Général's music in the streets and approaching him for pictures and autographs. "El Général himself has yet to perform anywhere else in the Arab world, partially for fear of his own safety," writes Peisner, "but he remains a potentially influential power broker."

Some Tunisian rappers like Sousse's Fils2Bled grumble that luck, good timing, and Al Jazeera are what made El Général a star. DJ Costa, a veteran rapper with puzzling politics, told Peisner that, "it's not a real success because [El Général] doesn't know the basics of rap. He has only one topic: the revolution. His success is bound to a period of no more than this summer." El Général can give back as good as he gets, though. Here's a great exchange that Peisner had with him:

I ask why "Rais Lebled" became so influential while many other protest songs barely created a ripple. His answer makes him sound like a guy who's been reading his own press. "I revealed the reality of what's happening in Tunisia," he says. "I conveyed a message that's never been conveyed before. I'm the first to have conveyed that message directly to the president. No one dared do that before."

I suggest that fortuitous timing also may have played a role, and he seems mildly offended, as if I'm accusing him of opportunism.

"I already posted that song before Bouazizi set himself on fire," he says.

"But what if you'd posted it a year earlier?" I ask. He doesn't hesitate.

"Probably the revolution would've started a year ago."

El Général's claim here is unconvincing, of course, but bravado is one of the keys to success in the rap game. El Général has that swagger in spades.

The revolution has dramatically changed the way Tunisian society views hip hop. Before, it was seen as music for thugs and gangsters. El Général's parents strongly discouraged him from pursuing it. Now, they're proud of his profession. Rap music's main audience, the youth of Tunisia, is the demographic made the revolution happen. "Now everyone is looking at rappers as the new elite of the country," says the journalist Haythem El Mekki. "When everyone was silent, they spoke up. When everyone was at home, they went to the streets shouting and fighting against the police. So today the old generation are feeling guilty and giving rap much more respect."

After the Revolution

A few weeks after Ben Ali fled, El Général and fellow Tunisian rapper Mr. Shooma released "Tahya Tunis," a celebration of the revolution, of its martyrs, and of a democratic Tunisia. The song captures many of themes that resonate throughout revolutionary Arabic hip hop: revolution, reconciliation, national unity, participatory engagement, and the modern human rights discourse.

Tunisian to Tunisian, with compassion for one another, we opened the door.
2011! The entire intifada comes from the youth!
We are the solution, not the problem. We are the ones who seized freedom.
Hand in hand, the whole nation, long live democracy!

A new type of pan-Arab sensibility, one based on shared experiences a common desires for social and political change, infuses the lyrics. At the conclusion of the second verse, the song reflects the tension in revolutionary Arabic rap - and in Arab societies more generally - between a violent, vengeful desire for justice and a sincere desire for reconciliation and good governance. While his words against "treason and apostasy" carry an implicit hint of violence, they're quickly superseded by El Général's most passionate demand: he wants an effective anti-corruption campaign!

This is a message to the rulers, to those who committed treason and apostasy:
Egypt, Algeria, Libya, Morocco, they all must be liberated!
The final word that my voice brings is for the next president of the country:
Tunisia, integrity is within your grasp! You must eliminate corruption!

Tunisia's transition to democracy is making uneven but unmistakable progress. The army, which has resolutely stayed out of Tunisian politics, still enjoys the public's deep respect. The explosion of public discourse and the winter protests that compelled many ancien régime RCD members to resign from the transitional government testify to the vitality of Tunisia's new political culture. On October 23, Tunisia will hold its first elections since Ben Ali's overthrow. Tunisian voters will elect a constituent assembly to write the country's new constitution. Because the transitional government mandated that every party list alternate between male and female candidates (i.e., male-female-male-female), approximately 50% of the constituent assembly's members should be women. In all the world, only in Rwanda and Andorra do women make up more than 45% of the national legislature. All of the major movements in Tunisian society have accepted the democratic game and are willing to play it.

Despite these achievements, Tunisia still faces overwhelming economic and political challenges. The Islamist Al-Nahda party's front-runner status and the transitional government's clumsy mishandling of the election schedule have created an atmosphere of mistrust and polarization that threatens to destroy the post-Ben Ali political consensus. Many Tunisians worry that al-Nahda, despite its leaders' assurances, will roll back women's legal, social, and political freedoms. The revolution still hasn't reached Tunisia's civil service or economy. The economy and government bureaucracy of the Ben Ali era remain largely intact. In light of this, many of Tunisia's young people have lost faith that the transition will deliver anything like genuine social justice or democracy.

El Général recoils from partisan politics because he sees himself as a voice of conscience for the revolution and an independent representative of the Tunisia's popular will. When he learned that a charity concert he performed had actually been organized by the PDP, a centrist party, he was furious. "I'm not participating in elections in November. No one is convincing me," he told Bohn. "I will not participate because I want to criticize all the mistakes of the people in power. If I vote, then I will not be able to criticize them...I was invited to the American embassy in Tunis to arrange a meeting with the Essebsi and I will tell him the things that are wrong." It will be fascinating to see how El Général grows as a speaker and activist and what role he eventually assumes in Tunisian public life. He might never do anything as influential as "Rais lebled" again. Yet if he helps mobilize a popular movement that effectively pushes the government to implement genuine social justice and good governance, he might be remembered as an iconic figure of Tunisian history. He has certainly set lofty enough expectations for himself. El Général powerfully articulates what he thinks Tunisia needs.

Ben Ali left. But did anyone else? Caid-Essebsi, the prime minister -- I'm against him. He has a long history and friendship with Ben Ali...Nothing has changed. All young people are jobless. We need a new revolution...We will take to the streets if we do not see change...[to] make people understand how dangerous the Tunisian situation is right now. I need support from scientists, politicians, educators. Everyone. We need massive participation..

He set these sentiments to a beat in his song "Deuxieme Revolution," which he released in August.

Despite the hardships, injustices, and uncertainties of Tunisia today, the Tunisian people have an immensely powerful weapon against all challenges they face: the freedom to discuss them openly and freely. By voicing their feelings about the challenges they face, they have taken the first step towards meeting them.

Update, January 2012: Here is what SPIN magazine's David Peisner, author of "Inside Tunisia's Hip-Hop Revolution," wrote to me about the Tunisian hip hop scene. He gave me permission to post it on my blog a while ago and I've finally gotten around to it. Thank you again, Mr. Peisner!

Thanks for the heads-up. Great post. I think you zeroed in on all the most important points from my story, particularly about Balti. I mean, on a human level, I understood his basic point--that he wasn't a revolutionary ("I'm not Che Guevara"), just an entertainer, so why should he be held to this political standard? Yet, he had such a big ego that he couldn't just leave it at that. He wanted to try to take some credit as one of the revolution's pioneers by virtue of the fact that he was older than most of the other rappers and had been doing it longer. It just didn't really wash. Strangely, one thing that probably isn't reflected that much in my story is how much in-fighting there was in the world of Tunisian rap. Not just everyone hating on Balti, but everyone hating on everyone (or at best, offering back-handed compliments). Psyco-M might have been more hated than Balti. (Though when I met him, he seemed a pretty nice guy.) In that way, I worry that they were sometimes emulating the least productive elements of American rap culture. That said, I found the whole scene completely fascinating. I was bummed I didn't have more space to write more about it. There were probably a dozen other rappers I spoke to who didn't even make it into the story.

...One other thing about Balti which was kind of interesting (if somewhat paradoxical): He had a much, much deeper knowledge of American rap culture than any of the other rappers I met there. He really was well-versed in rap history and could talk knowledgeably about it. Conversely, El General knew very, very little about American hip-hop beyond Tupac. He had never heard of Public Enemy or N.W.A. I played him a little PE on my iPhone, but he just stared at me pretty blankly. I mention this not as an indictment of El General or an endorsement of Balti, but rather as a little context. Most of these guys don't really know much about American hip-hop, and therefore Tunisian rap culture is not mere appropriation of American rap culture but rather something closer to its own messy invention. I got the feeling that the widespread love for Tupac--which was near universal over there--had more to do with Tupac the Icon than Tupac the Rapper. (As evidenced by El General's quote in the story about not understanding the lyrics.) As I'm sure you know, Tupac the Rapper was a complicated character and one that I think many devout Muslims (and even many not very devout ones) would have a hard time reconciling with their beliefs. But Tupac the Icon is just a revolutionary on a t-shirt, no different than Che Guevara or whoever else.

...As for who I spoke to, here's a list below:

Balti

BMG

Big Boss Mascott

DJ Costa

El General

Haythem El Mekki (journalist)

Bechir Zioudi (manager/promoter)

Lak3y

MC Hassan (fairly unknown MC from Sidi Bouzid)

Psyco-M

RTM

Sheb Karim (rai singer)

Sofien Cherni (video director/studio owner)

Sofien Siala (manager for El General and Psyco-M)

Guito'n

Big Gueb

Black Wolf

T-MC

Big Dresh

MC R.A.R

Fils2Bled

MC Saber

Mastaziano

Raw Poetix guys

There were a few other guys who I spoke to for just a few minutes here or there or who were sitting in during my interviews with other people and chimed in, but that's a list of most of the people I spoke to.

Introduction: Welcome!

2011-08-31T06:16:00.013-04:00

Welcome to Revolutionary Arab Rap! This blog aims to explore what Arabic hip hop can tell us about the current Arab uprisings and the changing relationship between Arab citizens and their governments. My objectives are:

1. To help new audiences enjoy, understand, and celebrate Arabic hip hop.
2. To help people improve their Arabic and find resources for studying the language.
3. To provide a useful resource for people interested in high-quality journalism, social media, and academic work on the Middle East.
4. To show solidarity with Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, Syria, and everywhere else where people fight for their freedom.

What I call "my blog" is actually two blogs:
1. Revolutionary Arab Rap (my main site). My posts about the key players, themes, contexts, and local scenes in the Arabic hip hop game go here.
2. Revolutionary Arab Rap: The Index (a companion site). In each post here, I provide a song's Arabic lyrics and their English translation in a Universal Subtitles video (above the jump) and in a full written text (below the jump).

Hip hop has become a universal medium of social and political expression for young, dissident, and marginalized peoples. It's helping the people of Arab world, most of whom are younger than 30, find new ways to raise their voices. It's important, though, not to overstate the influence of Arabic hip hop on the Arab uprisings. Arabic-langauge hip hop is an underground phenomenon, not a mainstream one like Al Jazeera is. There's no real hip hop "industry" to speak of in the Arab world. Arabic-language rap artists must promote their work online or sign with Western record labels. Despite all this, the genre's popularity and influence are growing remarkably fast. Rappers in Libya and Tunisia have shaken the most nightmarish of regimes to their cores. Arab hip hop is blowing up because it speaks so powerfully to Arabs' desire for dignity, human rights, and a brighter future.

Lastly, here's a couple shout-outs to people who inspired me to start this blog.

The people at Khalas/EnoughGaddafi.com: The Khalas Mixtape Vol. 1, entitled "Mish B3eed," is what made Arabic hip hop accessible and engaging to me for the first time. I learned about it when I read the interviews that Abdulla Darrat, a Libyan-American activist and Khalas co-founder, did with NPR's On The Media and The World in February. So I downloaded Mish B3eed and started listening to it just when the Libyan Revolution was getting started.

Ibn Thabit, @TasnimQ, and Mohammad Nabbous: The music of the Libyan rapper Ibn Thabit is opened what my eyes to Arabic hip hop. I liked his music so much - and I was so frustrated that I could find no written Arabic lyrics for it - that one day I simply started writing the words down myself. Tasnim's Ibn Thabit translations and videos inspired me to start translating them myself. Tasnim has been a wonderful teacher of Libyan Arabic and she has helped me with most of my Libyan song translations. As for Mohammad Nabbous, I intently watched Libya Alhurra TV, Libya's first independent news channel, from his first broadcasts on February 19th until a sniper shot him dead on March 19th. He was a true revolutionary.

Andy Morgan, Lauren Bohn, and David Peisner are journalists who have put out the best pieces on Arabic hip hop that have appeared in Western media. In February, The Guardian published Morgan's "From fear to fury: how the Arab world found its voice." In July, Foreign Policy published Bohn's "Rapping the Revolution." In August, SPIN published Peisner's Inside Tunisia's Hip-Hop Revolution. I liked these articles because they helped make Arabic hip hop more accessible, addressed the heart of its concerns, and presented it on its own terms and with its artists' own voices. I hope to do the same with this blog.

As of posting this, I've posted the Arabic lyrics and English translation for about 20 songs (please take a look at them here). I have posts coming soon on El Général, Ibn Thabit, #Jan25, reconciliation, women in Arabic hip hop, and Islam's role in the genre, so stay tuned and follow me @ArabRevRap on Twitter. If you have any questions, topics you'd like me to treat, or songs you would like me to translate, please drop me a line via ulysses [dot] rap [at] gmail.com or Twitter. Thank you.