Rappers provide anthems for the

Arab Spring

By THOMAS ERDBRINK

TEHRAN — With lyrics that tread on ultrasensitive topics and an album cover that shows the dome of a mosque in the shape of a woman’s breast, Shahin Najafi is an international rapper who elicits an intense reaction here.

Schahryar Ahadi/dapd

But Mr. Najafi’s latest song, “Naghi,” named after a Shiite saint, has prompted a particular uproar. Opponents of Mr. Najafi are using a recent fatwa by a leading cleric, Ayatollah Lotfollah Safi-Golpayegani, which labels all those insulting the 10th Shiite imam, Ali al-Hadi al-Naqi, also known as Imam Naghi, as apostates. An Islamist Web site then offered a $100,000 bounty to anyone who kills Mr. Najafi, who was born in Iran, raps in Persian but lives in Germany.

The US government wants to improve its tarnished image abroad by sending out ‘hip hop envoys’ [GALLO/GETTY]

In April 2010, the US State Department sent a rap group named Chen Lo and The Liberation Family to perform in Damascus, Syria.

Following Chen Lo’s performance, US secretary of state Hillary Clinton was asked by CBS News about US diplomacy’s recent embrace of hip hop. “Hip hop is America,” she said, noting that rap and other musical forms could help “rebuild the image” of the United States. “You know it may be a little bit hopeful, because I can’t point to a change in Syrian policy because Chen Lo and the Liberation Family showed up. But I think we have to use every tool at our disposal.”

The State Department began using hiphop as a tool in the mid-2000s, when, in the wake of Abu Ghraib and the resurgence of the Taliban, Karen Hughes, then undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, launched an initiative called Rhythm Road. The programme was modelled on the jazz diplomacy initiative of the Cold War era, except that in the “War on Terror”, hip hop would play the central role of countering “poor perceptions” of the US.

In 2005, the State Department began sending “hip hop envoys” – rappers, dancers, DJs – to perform and speak in different parts of Africa, Asia and the Middle East. The tours have since covered the broad arc of the Muslim world, with performances taking place in Senegal and Ivory Coast, across North Africa, the Levant and Middle East, and extending to Mongolia, Pakistan and Indonesia.

The artists stage performances and hold workshops; those hip hop ambassadors who are Muslims talk to local media about being Muslim in the US. The tours aim not only to exhibit the integration of American Muslims, but also, according to planners, to promote democracy and foster dissent.

“You have to bet at the end of the day, people will choose freedom over tyranny if they’re given a choice,” Clinton observed of the State Department’s hip hop programme in Syria – stating that cultural diplomacy is a complex game of “multidimensional chess”.

“Hip hop can be a chess piece?” asked the interviewer. “Absolutely!” responded the secretary of state.

Much has been said about the role of hip hop in the Arab revolts. French media described [fr] the Arab Spring as le printemps des rappeurs ["The spring of the rappers"]. Time Magazine named Tunisian rapper Hamada Ben Amor (aka El General) – a rapper who was arrested by Tunisian dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali – as one of the “100 Most Influential People of 2011″, ranking him higher than President Barack Obama.

Hip hop revolution

It is true that since protests began in Tunisia in December 2010, rap has provided a soundtrack to the North African revolts. As security forces rampaged in the streets, artists in Tunis, Cairo and Benghazi were writing lyrics and cobbling together protest footage, beats and rhymes, which they then uploaded to proxy servers. These impromptu songs - such as El General’s Rais Lebled - were then picked up and broadcast by Al Jazeera, and played at gatherings and solidarity marches in London, New York and Washington.

But the role of music should not be exaggerated: Hip hop did not cause the Arab revolts any more than Twitter or Facebook did. The cross-border spread of popular movements is not a new phenomenon in the Arab world – the uprisings of 1919, which engulfed Egypt, Libya and Tunisia, occurred long before the advent of the internet, social media or rap music.

And the countries in the region with the most vibrant hip hop scenes, Morocco and Algeria, have not seen revolts. Western journalists’ focus on hip hop – like their fixation on Facebook and Twitter – seems partly because, in their eyes, a taste for hip hop among young Muslims is a sign of moderation, modernity, even “an embrace of the US”.

What is absent from these discussions about rap and the breakdown of Arab authoritarianism is the role that states – in the region and beyond – have played in shaping and directing local hip hop cultures. From deposed Tunisian dictator Ben Ali’s mobilisation of hip hop culture against Islamism to the embattled Syrian regime’s current support of “pro-stability rappers”, to the US government’s growing use of hip hop in public diplomacy, counter-terrorism and democracy promotion, regimes are intervening to promote some sub-styles of hip hop, in an attempt to harness the genre towards various political objectives.
The jazz tours of the Cold War saw the US government sent integrated bands led by Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman to various parts of Africa, Asia and the Middle East to counter Soviet propaganda about American racial practices, and to get people in other countries to identify with “the American way of life”.

The choice of jazz was not simply due to its international appeal. As historian Penny Von Eschen writes in her pioneering book Satchmo Blows Up the World, in the 1950s, the State Department believed that African-American culture could convey “a sense of shared suffering, as well as the conviction that equality could be gained under the American political system” to people who had suffered European colonialism.

Similar thinking underpins the current “hip hop diplomacy” initiatives. The State Department planners who are calling for “the leveraging of hip hop” in US foreign policy emphasise “the importance of Islam to the roots of hip hop in America”, and the “pain” and “struggle” that the music expresses.

A Brookings report authored by the programme’s architects – titled “Mightier than the Sword: Arts and Culture in the US-Muslim World Relationship” (2008) – notes that hip hop began as “outsiders’ protest” against the US system, and now resonates among marginalised Muslim youth worldwide. From the Parisian banlieues to Palestine to Kyrgyzstan, “hip hop reflects struggle against authority” and expresses a “pain” that transcends language barriers.

An ironic choice

Rappers whom Muslim youth relate to often disagree with US foreign policy [GALLO/GETTY]

Moreover, note the authors, hip hop’s pioneers were inner-city Muslims who “carry on an African-American Muslim tradition of protest against authority, most powerfully represented by Malcolm X”. The report concludes by calling for a “greater exploitation of this natural connector to the Muslim world”.

The choice of hip hop is ironic: The very music blamed for a range of social ills at home – violence, misogyny, consumerism, academic underperformance – is being deployed abroad in the hopes of making the US safer and better-liked. European states have also been disptaching their Muslim hip hop artists to perform in Muslim-majority countries. Long before the fall of the Gaddafi regime, the British Council was organising hip hop workshops in Tripoli, and sponsoring Electric Steps, “Libya’s only hip hop band”, as a way to promote political reform in that country.

Rap is also being used in de-radicalisation and counter-terrorism initiatives. American and European terrorism experts have expressed concerns over “anti-American hip hop”, accenting the radicalising influence of this genre. Others have advocated mobilising certain sub-genres of hip hop against what they call “jihadi cool”.

Warning that Osama bin Laden’s associate Abu Yahya al-Libi has made al-Qaeda look “cool”, one terrorism expert recommends that the US respond “with one of America’s coolest exports: hip hop”, specifically with a “subgroup” thereof.

“Muslim hip hop is Muslim poetry set to drum beats,” explains Jeffrey Halverson in an article titled Rap Is Da Bomb for Defeating Abu Yahya. “Add in the emotional parallels between the plight of African-Americans and, for example, impoverished Algerians living in ghettos outside of Paris or Palestinian refugees in the West Bank and the analogy becomes even clearer.”

But it’s unclear how “Muslim hip hop” will exert a moderating or democratising influence: Will a performance by an African-American Muslim group trigger a particular calming “effect”, pushing young Muslim men away from extremist ideas? Nor is it clear what constitutes “Muslim hip hop”: Does the fact that Busta Rhymes is a Sunni Muslim make his music “Islamic”?

Moreover, while references to Islam in hip hop are – as these public diplomacy experts note – legion, they are not necessarily political or flattering. In December 2002, Lil Kim appeared on the cover of OneWorld magazine wearing a burqa and a bikini, saying “F*** Afghanistan”.

50 Cent’s track “Ghetto Quran” is about dealing drugs and “snitchin’”. Foxy Brown charmed some and infuriated others with her song “Hot Spot”, saying, “MCs wanna eat me but it’s Ramadan.”

More disturbing was the video “Hard” released in late 2009 by the diva, Rihanna, in which she appears decked out in military garb, heavily armed and straddling a tank’s gun turret in a Middle Eastern war setting. An Arabic tattoo beneath her bronze bra reads, “Freedom Through Christ”; on a wall is the Quranic verse: “We belong to God, and to Him we shall return” – recited to honour the dead, and not an uncommon wall inscription in war-torn Muslim societies.

The point is that not all Islam-alluding hip hop resonates with Muslim youth. Those hip hop stars – Lupe Fiasco, Mos Def, Rakim – who are beloved among Muslim youth are appreciated because they work their Muslim identity into their art and because they forthrightly criticise US foreign policy.

At the recent BET hip hop Awards, Lupe Fiasco performed his hit “Words I Never Said”, with a Palestinian flag draped over his mic. (“Gaza Strip was getting burned; Obama didn’t say sh**,” he rapped.) But neither Lupe nor Mos are likely to be invited on a State Department tour.

For State Department officials, the hip hop initiatives in Muslim-majority states showcase the diversity and integration of post-civil rights America. The multi-hued hip hop acts sent overseas represent a post-racial or post-racist American dream, and exhibit the achievements of the civil rights movement, a uniquely American moment that others can learn from.

But it’s unclear how persuasive this racialised imagery is. Muslims do not resent the US for its lack of diversity. Where perceptions are poor, it is because of foreign policy, as well as, increasingly, domestic policies that target Muslims.

Perhaps the greatest irony of the State Department’s efforts to showcase the model integration of US Muslims, and to deploy the moral and symbolic capital of the civil rights movement, is that these tours – as with the jazz tours – are occurring against a backdrop of unfavourable (and racialised) media images of Quran burnings, anti-mosque rallies and anti-sharia campaigns, as one of the most alarming waves of nativism in recent US history surges northward.

US diplomacy’s embrace of hip hop as a foreign policy tool has sparked a heated debate, among artists and aficionados worldwide, over the purpose of hip hop: whether hip hop is “protest music” or “party music”; whether it is the “soundtrack to the struggle” or to American unipolarity; and what it means now that states – not just corporations – have entered the hip hop game.

Hip hop activists have long been concerned about how to protect their music from corporate power, but now that the music is being used in diplomacy and counterterrorism, the conversation is shifting.

The immensely popular “underground” British rapper Lowkey (Kareem Denis) recently articulated the question on many minds: “Hip hop at its best has exposed power, challenged power, it hasn’t served power. When the US government loves the same rappers you love, whose interests are those rappers serving?”

Hishaam Aidi is editor, with Manning Marable, of Black Routes to Islam (Palgrave Macmillan 2009), and a fellow at the Open Society Foundation in New York.  For more on race, hip hop and geo-politics, please see this longer study by Dr Aidi.

Cairo’s MC Amin playing to the crowd for the “Voice of the Streets” event (Lens ©Laith Majali/Immortal Entertainment)

CAIRO – Last November, 12 of the re­gion’s best-known Arab rappers were set to per­form together at a public youth center in the swanky central Cairo district of Zamalek. Or­ganizers billed Voice of the Streets as a concert to re­mind people about “the contin­ued struggle for freedom of ex­pression in the wake of the Arab uprisings.” Indeed, it was an Arab hip-hop event without precedent.

Unlikely rap torchbearer, Tunisia’s MC El Général whose song Rayess Labled (Head of State) was a musical anthem for the uprisings, and MC Swat from Libya, who was featured in numerous international stories about the musical scions of the Libyan rebel movement, were both “prize-winning” elements to the stellar line-up.

But the day before the event was scheduled to take place, event organizer Martin Jakobsen, director of the educational NGO Turntables in the Camps and founding member of the legendary Danish DJ collective Den Sorte Skole (The Black School) told WHHM that neither rapper was going to make it.

Classic hip-hop prima-donna-ism or conspiracy theory to dim the luster of the event?

“Do you expect any trouble at the event or with the event?” I asked Jakobsen in a late-night interview at an activist hostel on Abd El Khaliq Tharwat street downtown – about one half-klick northwest of Egypt’s protest epicentre, Tahrir Square.

“We sure as hell hope not,” he said, clearly worried about the contingencies. “We got our security clearances. Actually, we had to pay for the security clearances.”

He told me that they got through to the “right” people in the military regime.

I’d heard from activists and journalists for months that changes to the regime since the fall of longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak were cosmetic at best. Jakobsen one-upped that. ”Everything has stayed the same. You have to bribe your f*#@ng way through the process. The bribes we had to pay off to organize this event were unbelievable,” he said.

In the two days leading up to the event, Jordanian organizers Immortal Entertainment – owner and photographer Nasser Kalaji and his partner, filmmaker, editor and street photographer Laith Majali – were out with the MC’s shooting footage of them breaking into impromptu guerrilla raps on the streets of Cairo.

The energy with the MC’s was manic according to Kalaji. “What we did was hit areas with high concentrations of students. And to see the reaction of kids and students walking by pausing – totally dialled in to what these guys were spitting – that was incredible.”

It was a bold move. Besides the marketing potential of the stunt, such actions would have landed the MC’s (and entourage) in jail pre-Mubarak. “One time we were shooting a video for Arabian Knightz,” Kalaji explained referring to Egypt’s power rap crew, “And while we were shooting, a national security officer almost arrested us. Luckily, we were able to buy him off with $20.”

Mai’a, a blogger in Cairo who runs guerrilla mama medicine wrote:

“on wednesday night, happened to be sitting next to a group of guys at a bar.  when one of them starts beat boxing and another starts rhyming in arabic. it was this beautiful unexpected moment.  after that me and my friends took pictures of them and talked with them and found out that they were holding a show called, the voice of the street, based on the arab spring, two days later.” 

Ground Zero

On the day of the event, I headed over to the Gezira Youth Center in Zamalek. It was not the location I had envisioned for the concert itself – more upper West side Manhattan than South Bronx – home to a preponderance of European expats.

The concert venue was adjacent to the members-only Gezira Sporting Club, built by the British in 1882, but the youth center itself was community enough, with 3 football pitches and a fair amount of green-space for the general public to enjoy.

Ariel view of Zamalek – the swanky island district in Cairo

I arrived around 2 in the afternoon to interview the artists and record the sound check, having bought some wheat paste for the organizers in a Zamalek art store so heads could bomb Cairo with posters later on.

As I walked through the gates of the Gezira Youth Center, the massive stage was being built on one of the soccer pitches, but with three hours until the start of the show, it was far from ready. (Par for the course in Egypt, my homies told me.)

What was worse was the presence of two suited spooks skulking around the youth center grounds asking questions of the organizers as the stage hands continued to build.

“Where are all the MC’s?” I asked photographer Majali.

He pointed to a small cafe on the youth center grounds that had little kiddie rides and plastic picnic tables scattered near the center’s admin building. “All the guys are there,” he told me.

Over the years I had been in contact with or worked with nearly all of the artists assembled for the event, but asthey must have felt when meeting all of their hip-hop peers for the first time, I was nervous when I walked up to their table to greet them.

Jordanian hip-hop stalwart, Hicham Ibrahim aka DJ Sotusura, that unpretentiously smooth musical/DJ backbone of the Jordanian hip-hop underground and the DJ for the Voice of the Street event, was the first to greet me.

“Yo! Brother Jacks. What’s up!?”

After a pound, a hand-shake and a hug, I looked up to see an Arab hip-hop summit in full effect. They all extended an obligatory hip-hop “What ups?” with their hands raised, and I was fully humbled.

Cairo’s MC Amin (center) in Egypt hip-hop 101 (from l to r): Nasser Kalaji (Immortal Entertainment), Khotta Ba (Jordan), Amin, DJ Sotusura (Jordan/Palestine), and Boikutt (Palestine). ©Laith Majali

There was Boikutt formerly of Ramallah Underground repping Palestine; two young lions Khotta Ba and Tareq Abu Kwaik aka El Far3i from Jordan; veterans Edd from the Lebanese live hip-hop group Fareeq al Atrash andMalikah also from Lebanon representing as the lone female MC of the event; and you had your bevy of the best Egyptian talent – Deeb and the Arabian Knightz(E-Money, Sphinx, Rush) and MC Amin from a dusty-city called Mansoura 120km north of Cairo.

I made my way around table giving pounds to the MCs from Jordan and from Egypt who, with the exception of Deeb, I hadn’t met yet. It didn’t take me long to notice that despite the historic occasion, these MC’s were serious about their purpose in Cairo. While the stage was frantically getting built, these homies were making the most of the delayed soundcheck.

Sotusura went over set lists with the artists while they figured out where the collabo tracks were going to fit in with the solo sets. He played Instrumentals off his computer and the MC’s each took turns spitting their verses around the table, tweaking things until they were tight. Listening in to the various sessions was this rare glimpse at their talent, especially because the laptop speaker volume wasn’t very loud. (Shit was so impressive.)

Then the first sounds came from the stage and slowly the MC’s made their way across the football pitch. The time was 5:30 in the afternoon or thereabouts – a full 30 minutes after the intended start time and more than 4 hours later than the originally scheduled pre-performance warm-up.

By that time the crowds were beginning to grow outside the Gezira Youth Center gate, and the organizers and local MC’s all began getting calls that people were being refused entry at the gate.

Hip-hop response

For nearly 3 hours the crowds grew outside the gates of the youth center. Egyptian b-boys and b-girls, college students, activists, ex-pats, and a group of people invited by the organizers who had been injured during the revolution – all clamored to get in.

As the impatience grew on both sides of the gates, people that had managed to get into the venue early – mostly young MCs and hip-hop heads – started to mingle with some of the performers.

“What’s going on? Are you guys going to perform?” came the question -in Arabic – from a young head with a Philadelphia Phillies straight brim on.

“Yo! Whatever happens…even if it has to be on the streets…we’ll perform for you,” Rush from Arabian Knightz yelled back – flashing a peace sign.

What happened next will go down as the essence of hip-hop cultural response to pressure. Impromptu freestyle rap cyphers began forming in little pockets around the soccer pitch as the lights from the stage shined down on the 80 or so people gathered there.

One MC after another started facing off. Locals flexed their lyrical games with veterans that had come to Cairo from around the region to perform – shit was serious. And in those cyphers, all bets were off – the playing field was leveled. One cypher in particular put Boikutt, Khotta Ba, and El Far3i together with a local MC Shamsedein.

El Far3i set down the gauntlet first with a devastating set of punch-lines and half-written flows from his up-coming album. Then Khotta Ba and Shamsedeine jumped in – Khotta Ba’s flow more measured and smooth Shamsedein’s like an Egyptian version of Supernatural – fast and furious incorporating everything he was seeing around him.

Boikutt came in and kind of slapped all the crowd-goers and the MC’s with this ill, developed delivery – clear and concise – about being in Egypt and being from Palestine. He talked about the brotherhood of the revolutionaries on the streets and with the MC’s, and then Khotta Ba and Shamsedein got into a rap head-cutting contest to the sheer admiration of each. When it ended the bond between the MC’s was like soul epoxy.

Limbo

Then the news came in. (Peep the end of the above audio to hear it literally.) Security was not letting the wounded of the revolution into the venue, with Gezira club security accusing the event organizers of using their hip-hop event  as a “cover to honor the victims and their families.”

The organizers talked to the director of the Gezira Sports Club whose position was that the wounded – many visibly scarred, some on crutches and others wearing eye patches – were “criminals who were at the event to cause trouble.”

Kalaji, who had spent time taking photographs of these wounded members of the revolution offered to ask them to leave. “I was close enough with these people that they wouldn’t be insulted,” Kalaji told WHHM.

The Gezira director refused saying that if they were told to leave then the press would accuse the club of refusing the victims entry. Then Kalaji told the director that they would stay with the victims during the performance with the private security hired, but she denied that request as well, saying they might have weapons and could hurt people.

The Interior Ministry of Egypt sent their final decree at around 8pm. Without new permitting, organizers were in danger of being hauled off to jail, and with more than 300 people having been refused entry at the gate, effectively 2 months of planning the biggest Arab hip-hop event to date was suddenly a “non-event!”

Epic Switch

One distinguishing element of hip-hop organizing is its ability to adapt. It’s a code of the streets that anything can happen at anytime – forced power outages, police crackdowns, squeamish venue owners – are all aspects of hip-hop event history that have often led to the most memorable performances.

With all of the hype from the controversy at the gate and the energy of the MC’s that had come from so many different places to perform for the people, frantic calls went out to resuscitate the Voice of the Streets. Would the MC’s take it to the streets? Would the Cairo Jazz Club – friendly to performers in the past – be the next venue?

As the MC’s all made their way to the crowd waiting outside, a local arts and culture center Darb 17 18 assumed responsibility for salvaging the event – and the word went out through facebook, twitter and mobile telephones.

Darb 17 18 was in an industrial part of Old Cairo, and was described in a local zine as “one of the main cultural venues of Cairo despite its not so central location.” After a herculean effort to get the sound ready and set up the space for an ad hoc concert, the MC’s and organizers wondered how many people would make their way across town to attend.

They did come, in droves, lining the street below the 2^nd floor balcony of the space that served as the stage for the night.

MC Amin opened the show with his street anthems Rap 5aleni Abuqueda, Madinat al Khataya (Sin City) and upcoming new release The Arabs are the Roots Part 3, showing why he is widely regarded as the future of Egyptian rap with his direct connections to the Egyptian street – his philosophical Egyptian turns of phrase punctuating condemnations of the government.

Malikah then took the stage and joined Amin on an unnamed collaboration. Malikah continued -lyrical guns blazing – showing the audience that there was at least one female MC living in the Arab world that could hold it down in a sea of testosterone.

What came next was perhaps the most fun collaboration of the evening, Malikah was joined on the stage by Edd and MC Amin for the tentatively titled song Hip-Hop that melded into the refrain of the chorus the phrase “Cairo City,” which the crowd all chanted back in a rousing call-and-response.

“The energy was crazy out there, but I’m so tired,” Malikah told me after her performance. She’d told the story earlier at the youth center that two days prior to the event she was in Columbia for a hip-hop festival in Cali with the revolutionary female Columbian rapper Diana. She’d slept hardly at all and was suffering from a serious case of jet-lag.

“But nothing’s gonna stop me on a night like this!” she said, and the fans uniformly praised the press-dubbed “Queen of Arab hip-hop” who after 5 solid years in the game had carved near celebrity status – her raps an homage to her home city Beirut.

After the trio left the stage it was another Beirut-city MC that showed just how good the Lebanese hip-hop scene is. Edd, one of two veteran MC’s from Fareeq al Atrash (a word play on the famous Syrian-Egyptian T’arab singer, composer, actor Farid al Atrash) proceeded with three songs from the bands repertoire ending his set with a track from their new album Baladi.

Edd’s flow, a mixture of hard-hitting political intonations with a laid back but sharp delivery, earned him a sort of rappers fan-base among the MC’s themselves, and in a nod to the Egyptian revolution, a track that had burned up the internet airwaves with Arab hip-hop fans, Edd performed the self-produced track Alamna Marfou3 with Egyptian MC, Mohammed el Deeb aka Deeb, formerly of the Egyptian crew Asfalt. Deeb dropped the track at the height of the revolution at the same time as his EP Cairofornication.

“When the people in Egypt heard it, they got the sense that all Arabs were facing the same problems -unemployment, corruption, lack of social and cultural awareness -and were in a constant battle to remember a past before Mubarak” Deeb explained.

His song Masrah Deeb or “Deebs Stage” was a crowd favorite, not the least because of the production of the song that features a perfectly placed BB King sample. “It’s a song reflecting on my daily experiences; my personal relationship with music,” Deeb told me, adding, “now people are yearning for songs against oppression with meaning that will also reflect their daily lives.”

During one part of the song that night, Deeb intoned, “The microphone is my true friend that appreciates my honesty,” and in the hook of the song, what Deeb calls an affaya or punchline, he mentions to the crowd how he is trying to wake people up to the situation in Egypt – a track which he incidentally recorded in the weeks before the January 25 protest date.

After Deeb performed an a capella version of Um al Masri, the Jordanian contingent proved why they were on the bill with more veteran rappers. Khotta Ba and El Far3i cut through a gruff, hard-hitting set of political tracks from their up-coming solo albums that are sure to put Jordan on the map in the Arab hip-hop massive like never before.

Boikutt formerly of the seminal Palestinian hip-hop crew Ramallah Underground ©Laith Majali

In the most polished performance of the night, having just played in the Shatilla Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut a month earlier and having gone through a series of events with his experimental audio-visual group Tashweesh also in Beirut, was Boikutt representing Ramallah in the West Bank.

No doubt the liquid clarity of Boikutt’s mic control set the bar for the night as there was no one better than the slight-of-frame Palestinian rhyme-styler at getting his lyrical content through to the audience with a sound system that was pushed to its max the entire night. For many in the audience, it was their first time seeing Boikutt, whose rep as a co-founder of the now defunct Ramallah Underground preceded him.

Rounding out the night before the more unknown local MC’s capped off the event was the mega-crew and the local crowd favorites – Arabian Knightz. A crew that rolls around 15-deep at its periphery had all three of its core members on stage – Rush, E-Money and Sphinx, recently back from his stint with US Immigration Services in California justifying his life as a rapper in Egypt.

Sphinx of Arabian Knightz ©Laith Majali

There songs Rebel with Palestinian singer and rapper Shadia Mansour and Not Your Prisonerwere the most listened to Egyptian hip-hop tracks of the revolution. Preparing for the release of their debut LP Unknighted State of Arabia, they performed to a thinned out crowd at around 2 in the am. But, it was a crowd that literally knew all the lyrics to their songs, and who definitely were not going to miss out after the Gezira Youth Center gig was shut down.

The three MC’s showed that they were still psyched to be performing despite constant sound struggles with their microphones, and no doubt, they left you wanting another follow-up concert that would better showcase their skills after a night that favored solo performances.

End Game

Finally, when the last speaker was carted out, people continued to mill about well after the performances ended, endorphin’s running high, wondering where to go for the after-party. Fans and MCs were lost in conversation in the chill-night air, sweating and amazed, as dozens of empty orange bean bags set out by the organizers hours earlier formed what looked like a huge art installation on a grassy knoll in the middle of the street below the stage.

Jordan’s El Far3i in a moment of lyrical contemplation ©Laith Majali

One conversation with Jordan’s El Far3i summed up the evening. Speaking about his own amazement at the show, he recognized that as in any underground rap scene, since hip-hop time began, there were your abstract rappers, your grind-time rappers, your conscious rappers and your street rappers. Certainly, that was what such an historic event was able to convey – that there is an evolution of styles coming through in Arabic detailing the realities of rappers in their various locales.

As the Arab uprisings have shown in the last year, resistance has become a truism for the Arab youth. They have made up the overwhelming majority of the bodies in the crush against state authorities throughout the region. And while the Arab hip-hop heads can be seen as presaging the messaging of these revolutions and their calls to stand up against the machinations of state oppression, until this year, Arab hip-hop was mostly an insular clique whose music had little impact on the larger society.

Now it’s fair to say that if ever there was a sense of this elusive idea of an Arabic hip-hop movement that had often seemed more hypoth­esis than cultural fact, in Cairo on November 4 at the Voice of the Streets event – that hypothesis became tangible.

MC Sphinx and the other members of the Arabian Kinghtz – E-Money [left] and Rush [center] (photo courtesy of Arabian Knightz)

By Alex Billet (originally published in Electronic Intifada, republished with a blessing from World Hip Hop Market)

The Egyptian revolution is easily one of the most significant uprisings in decades. Millions of workers, students and unemployed took to the streets demanding that the US-backed dictator Hosni Mubarak step down; it’s a struggle that continues even now, several months after Mubarak was overthrown.

Like any true revolution, the massive demonstrations and strikes sent a shock wave through the nation’s culture. Left-wing reporters and bloggers gained global attention, revolutionary poems were written and performed often on the fly in Tahrir Square, and countless songs dedicated to the uprising rocketed around the Internet.

Two of these songs, “Rebel,” and “Not Your Prisoner,” came courtesy of the trio Arabian Knightz, widely regarded as the first hip-hop group in Egypt. Both quickly became anthems of the revolution. After being vaulted to a national and international profile, Arabian Knightz are preparing their first international tour, and are releasing their new album Uknighted States of Arabia on 25 January — the one-year anniversary of the protests that sparked the revolution.

One of their members, Hesham Alofoq (aka “Sphinx”) spoke to The Electronic Intifada about the history of hip-hop in Egypt and the Middle East, the future of the Egyptian uprising, and the role that music plays in the revolt.

Alexander Billet: There may be a good amount of our audience who don’t know of Arabian Knightz. Can you tell us how the group came together?

HA: Well, I was born and raised in Los Angeles, but my family’s from Egypt. I went out to Cairo about six years ago for vacation, and when I was out there I met up with Karim and E-Money. I was always an MC, and they said “we do Arabic rap,” and I thought “yeah, right; there’s no such thing as Arabic rap.” So Karim spit a few bars for me and I liked it, and then E-Money came through, and he started rapping and I was like “that’s it, I’m sold! Let’s do something!” We put up a song on MySpace, and we got 30-40,000 views in the first week or something like that! So we thought maybe this can do something; without any promotion, with just word of mouth, our stuff was getting out there and we were getting really good responses. From there, we just said, let’s keep going and see what we can do with this. That was the summer of ‘05.

AB: Hip-hop in the Arab world — in particular Egypt — has a history that people in the West just don’t know about. Could you tell me what you know about the scene out there?

HA: Well, I’ve heard that people were rapping back in the early ’90s and late ’80s, a couple of tapes could get passed around, but there was no real “scene” at that point. Another group came out, maybe in the early 2000s, and they dropped a couple albums. And I don’t want to give names, but they weren’t really hip-hop. They were rapping in the songs, but it wasn’t really rap — it’s hard to explain, you’d have to hear it. People weren’t really feeling it.

So, when we came in, we wanted to take it to the next level. We did the first actual Arabic hip-hop show in Egypt. We rocked the house and people started feeling it, and people started actually believing that rap could happen in Egypt. I didn’t see the scene really start to spread until after we started playing shows and dropping our videos.

AB: Was there a conscious decision for you guys to write political lyrics or did that come more organically?

HA: Well, whenever I was writing in my art or in my poetry, there would always be some political element to it. And whenever I’m talking with somebody, politics always comes up. It’s something that’s always been really dear to us, because seeing everything that’s been going on in the Middle East for so long, you want to speak some truth on it. Maybe you want to debate about it a little bit and let people know what’s going on out there, but politics is always on all of our minds.

AB: Is that one of the things that initially attracted you to hip-hop?

HA: Aw, yeah man. I mean, I was in college when I started getting into Immortal Technique and some of the really dope underground hip-hop — you know, besides all of the old school stuff that paved the way for it like Public Enemy and whatnot. Before I went out to Cairo I was always thinking about American politics. Especially after 11 September 2001, I would do open mics and spoken word, whatever I could do to shed some light on the situation with Islam and Arabic culture.

AB: Do you notice a difference now in the way hip-hop is received in Egypt since the revolution?

HA: Oh yeah! Everybody’s rapping now! Literally! I mean people used to tell us, you’ll never be able to do anything with rap in Egypt, nobody understands hip-hop. Now, just about every university or high school kid, even elementary school kid, is spitting verses in Egypt! You can go on YouTube or on their Facebook accounts and see that they’re spitting their rap, they’re doing something. It’s amazing because I saw it happen from while I was there!

AB: I read an interview with Arabian Knightz from well before Mubarak fell in which you said that “we’re as political as possible without going to prison.” So how did Arabian Knightz survive before the revolution kicked off?

HA: Well you know that song “Not Your Prisoner” is a four-year-old song. We didn’t actually write it during the revolution. Before the revolution it was crazy because the government hated that song! After we recorded it, there would be cops outside our shows saying you can’t perform that song. They warned us, you have to give us your lyrics, you have to let us know everything you’re going to say from the stage, and if you say anything political you’re going to go to jail. So we’d have to give the cops our lyrics before every show we did, and I would take “Not Your Prisoner” and all of our songs and completely change the words. I would just make it as poppy and rainbow-bright as possible and tell the cops, yeah, that’s what we’re rapping about: money and rainbows and stars in the sky and all that bullshit.

Sometimes they’d just leave and sometimes they’d stay and listen, but I guess because we rap too fast or something like that they didn’t catch on most of the time. But still I’d get phone calls about our songs late at night. People would call and say things like, I know what you’re doing, or, if you don’t stop making these songs you’re going to be thrown behind the sun. We’d get email threats and all sorts of crazy shit too.

AB: So it’s pretty fair to say that Mubarak’s regime was pretty repressive toward the hip-hop scene.

HA: Not just hip-hop man, all art. He came out and said, let the artists be artists. You talk about art. Leave the politics to the politicians and just go paint” So it was any kind of art. There are a lot of poets in Egypt that really dig against the government. There are some of them that are still in jail until recently because of their poetry. So it was all forms of art: artists who would paint pictures about Egyptian politics, cartoonists who would go to jail, bloggers that would go to jail, everything. Anyone that went into the realm of politics it was open season on.

AB: Is that why you think “Not Your Prisoner” took on a whole new life after the revolution?

HA: Yeah, because it was always banned! But after the revolution took off we just chose to put it on the Internet. It was released maybe the 1st or 2nd of February, so it was maybe a week before Mubarak stepped down. Everyone knew he was good as gone, though, so we just said, okay, now’s our chance, and just took it.

AB: There are also apparently a lot of folks in Egypt who would go after you for being too “westernized.” How do you respond to that?

HA: You know, we’ve always been about Arab unity and Arab culture or Islamic culture. And yet, because we’re wearing “hip-hop clothing” and because the music we perform is “western music” they say that kind of shit. But what they forget is that there were people in Saudi Arabia fourteen hundred years ago beating on drums and battling each other with poetry even before Islam. That’s hip-hop. Yes, it developed in America before it became hip-hop itself, but it’s international.

I think hip-hop is ultimately music for the oppressed, a place where the voiceless can have a voice. You know, when you watch TV you see Arabs you see a lot of them wearing Dolce and Gabbana or whatever Paris Hilton’s wearing. How is that any less western? All cultures have already started to merge together by now; there’s no single culture anymore in any one place. And I think that’s how it should be, you know? There should be a give-and-take and we should be using culture to learn from each other. That’s what Islam teaches us in the first place.

AB: Is that one of the reasons you guys rap in Arabic as well as English? To reach across cultures?

S: Well yeah; you know, it’s a message, and we want everyone to understand it. We want the Arabs to understand that the west isn’t all that bad — the governments are fucked up, but the people in general are good. And vice versa when we talk to English-speaking people; we want to talk about Islam and Arabic culture and show people that terrorism is not synonymous with either of those to things.

AB: So tell me about the song “Rebel.” This is another one of the songs that Arabian Knightz have become really well-known for outside Egypt. Its lyrics pull heavily on the themes of protest, Arab unity, the corruption in Mubarak’s regime, and really everything that you said could get you arrested. The rumor is that it was written and recorded the night before Egypt’s first big “Day of Rage” just as the revolution was beginning to gain steam.

HA: Not really. I got the beat from a German producer named Iron Curtain eight months before the revolution. And the song was basically the same: I just wanted people to rebel, for there to actually be an Arab revolution with the oppressed Palestinians and Iraqis and Egyptians. And then, the day before they shut the Internet off in Egypt, I said, Rush [another member of Arabian Knightz], throw a verse on there! We’re gonna release it today! I had it ready and wasn’t sure if it would just be a throw-away, but I didn’t mix it or anything. Before that I didn’t even know if I was going to use that beat, but I just sent it to Rush and he put a verse on it and uploaded it to YouTube. Two minutes after it uploaded, the Internet was shut off in Egypt for a week!

AB: Did you have any idea how much attention the song was going to get?

HA: Nah! Like I said, we just wanted to get our voice out there. Maybe someone will hear it, maybe they won’t, but we just wanted it out there. We didn’t expect everyone to be screaming it in Tahrir Square. I mean they were singing the part from Lauryn Hill out there in the street while they were protesting. It was amazing to see and hear that.

AB: You left the country not long before Mubarak fell, though. What made you want to leave?

HA: The reason I had to leave Egypt was because I live in a neighborhood in Cairo that’s surrounded by all the jails. So when the interior minister released all the prisoners and told them to go crush the protests, they had to pass right by my house to get further into the center of Cairo. They’re passing right by my neighborhood and these motherfuckers were given AK-47s, tech nines, any kind of automatic weapon. They were on trucks and motorcycles just shooting at random.

All the ex-military people in our neighborhood still had their guns, though, so they just started shooting back. I was literally watching the Wild West off of my balcony — and I’m on the first floor. I have a little daughter, and so when I saw that they were doing evacuations I just decided we’d evacuate. So I’ve been out here in LA ever since, but I’ll be back there in Egypt soon.

AB: That’s another thing that the US media didn’t really talk about — how all the neighborhoods organized to defend themselves when the government fought back.

HA: Oh yeah. At that point we would just go downstairs with sticks or knives or whatever weapon we had — because not everybody had guns. There were people already out there and we couldn’t just leave them by themselves. You know, seven or eight people with guns going up against all these motherfuckers? So we just set up roadblocks and hid behind them and when they’d come by we’d do everything we could to stop them. It was nuts, though man, I can still see it so freshly right now. And I’m from LA.

AB: That leads me into my next topic. Mubarak’s gone, but the protests haven’t stopped. According to the western media it’s chaos, but in reality it’s just that the revolution is continuing.

HA: You’ve got to keep reminding the government that the people are still here. It’s completely obvious that the so-called Salafists that Mubarak warned us about are just out there because of him. Some people say that the fundamentalists or Salafists are going to take over and we’ll be just like Iran. But no, the people don’t want to live in Iran; they’re going to vote for who they want to vote for.

AB: What do you think needs to happen for the people’s side to win?

HA: Well, I already know that there’s no such thing as a perfect government — absolute power corrupts absolutely. But we’ve got to be organized. We’ve got to start somewhere. There are still people in Egypt who are going hungry and we need a way to get those people food. We need to fix everything that needs fixing in Egypt — period.

AB: Are you encouraged by the strikes that are continuing since Mubarak left power?

HA: Oh yeah. Because so many people are saying, well, Mubarak’s out so let’s just get back to normal life. No. Normal life has to start once the things we’ve requested have been implemented. You know, people died in this revolution, we can’t just forget about that.

AB: That brings me back to the music. I hear a lot of different themes that keep coming back in your music — Arab unity, radical and responsive democracy, redistribution of wealth, an end to US meddling in Egypt. Do you think these can ultimately be won? And what do you think the role of music is in fighting for these things?

HA: Well, everyone listens to music first of all. It’s a voice for us. It’s a way to reflect what’s happening in the streets back to the masses. You know, for us as Arabian Knightz, we have a lot to say and we want to put it out there. And luckily, a lot of people are agreeing with us nowadays. I think our music has helped encourage people to keep going — I mean, people were out in Tahrir Square singing our songs.

We used to get made fun of because our songs are so political. People used to say to us, you guys really think a revolution is going to happen in the Middle East? You guys are crazy. But we believed in it, we kept talking about it. And now, well, it’s funny how turned out.

AB: Tell me if you’ve heard of this: Al Jazeera recently reported on a program being initiated by the US State Department to recruit hip-hop acts as “cultural diplomats” to the Arab world. In the article, certain officials are quoted as saying this is a direct attempt to gain greater support for American policy.

HA: Whether the US is using hip hop as a tool for “diplomacy” or not doesn’t change the fact that hip-hop was already growing in the region. They might have just realized that and tried to infiltrate it for their own gains as they always do, but hip hop in Arabia is still pure and for the people by the people. So on the contrary, we’re using hip hop to re-educate the youth as a push to get them to question their surroundings, and a realization that they do have a voice.

AB: It’s interesting to me that Arab hip-hop has been around for so long but it’s taken a revolution for it to start getting more attention in the West.

HA: Well, if you look at even the most oppressed countries like Palestine — Palestinian hip-hop has been around since the early ’90s. You know, we work with the group DAMand they’ve been doing their thing for a while. And they’re out partners; they’re part of Arab League Records like we are, which also has artists from all around the Middle East as well as Arab rappers in the West holding it down.

So all this reflects that hip-hop in the Arab world has been around for a long time, it’s just now that the revolutions have taken place and people are fighting back, now it’s getting attention. It was already progressing and getting bigger and better regionally, but the fact that it’s getting the attention it is now — I’ll definitely blame that on the revolution.

——–

Alexander Billet, a music journalist and socialist based in Chicago, runs the websiteRebel Frequencies. He is a columnist for SOCIARTS and has appeared in Z Magazine, SocialistWorker.org, New Politics and TheNation.com. He can be contacted at rebelfrequencies AT gmail DOT com.

Arabian Knightz’ website is http://www.myspace.com/arabianknightz.

The Mixtape of the Revolution

By SUJATHA FERNANDES

Published: January 29, 2012

RABAT (Reuters) – A Moroccan rapper who has become one of the monarchy’s boldest critics was freed on Thursday, activists said, after he served a four-month sentence for assault, a charge which his lawyers say was a ploy to muzzle the popular singer.

“El-Haqed walked out of prison a little while ago shouting ‘long live the people’,” said activist Omar Radi, near Casablanca’s main Oukacha prison.

Earlier on Thursday, a court in Casablanca sentenced 24-year-old Mouad Belrhouat, better known as El-Haqed (“The Sullen One”), to four months and three days in jail and fined him 500 dirhams, sources in the court said.

Belrhouat was arrested in September after a brawl with a monarchist. Bail requests by his lawyers were rejected and the trial was adjourned six times.

“It’s a bittersweet victory for us,” said activist Maria Karim.

El-Haqed has become the singing voice of the protest movement, inspired by Arab world uprisings, demanding a constitutional monarchy, an independent judiciary and a crackdown on corruption.

Morocco’s main human rights group, AMDH, considers him to have been a prisoner of conscience.

His lyrics telling Moroccans to “wise up” have angered many monarchists. In one song, he says the king spends so much time giving orders that he has little time to count his money in Switzerland.

Belrhouat has struck a chord with young Moroccans who are disenchanted with the lack of jobs and one song “Bite just as much as you can chew” has had more than 600,000 hits on Youtube.

By LIAM STACK (Published: January 10, 2012)

TRIPOLI, Libya — A small crowd of boys huddled around the open door of a concrete shed turned recording studio to gawk at a trio of Libyan rappers in black baseball caps and oversize hoodies mixing tracks on a wide computer screen.

The men paid little attention to their wide-eyed audience and labored through take after take of their latest project: a public service announcement for a local television station urging trigger-happy rebel fighters to lay down their arms, something they still have not done four months after Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi was driven from power.

“Don’t open fire into the air; our lives are more valuable than the cost of bullets,” said Siraj Kamal Jerafa, 28, locked inside an improvised sound booth whose walls were covered in worn sofa upholstery. At the end of the night, he emerged smiling to a roomful of high fives. With nothing more to see, the little boys outside wandered back to their homes.

Mr. Jerafa, who performs under the stage name Lantern, is part of the GAB Crew, a Libyan hip-hop group whose members, like many young people, are reveling in and grappling with the new freedom of expression that has flourished here since the fall of Colonel Qaddafi.

Libyans lived for decades in the shadow of the long-ago revolution that swept Colonel Qaddafi, who called himself “Brother Leader,” into power. His rule was nasty, brutish and long. But it is over now, ended by a revolution whose fighters are overwhelmingly young.

Under Colonel Qaddafi’s repressive rule, Libyans kept their personal and political opinions to themselves, and unedited thoughts were shared with only a trusted few. Now all that has changed. In a country where politics and public life were for generations violently and obsessively policed, young people are now breathing and speaking more freely than ever before.

Mocking graffiti have replaced the reverential portraits of Colonel Qaddafi that once hung on walls across the city, and a new generation of colorful, independent newspapers speculate on the activities of his surviving children the way Western tabloids cover the lives of celebrities.

Even on a day when there are no classes, students gather on the campus of Tripoli University, where political prisoners were once publicly hanged. The students swap stories from the revolution and debate the merits of the postwar transitional government.

Many find the new freedom to speak one’s mind both exhilarating and disorienting.

“We are free, but we don’t know how to live as free people,” said Kareem Saqer, 23, a student studying economics. “So we talk.”

The new political environment offers a virtually unrestricted creative license to artists like Mr. Jerafa, who can finally try to make music with a message.

“Before the revolution, music was just a way to kill time because we didn’t have any freedom of speech,” he said. “If you talked about politics or stepped on any of the government’s red lines, they would put you behind bars. You’d be dead.”

His group traditionally avoided politics altogether. The bandmates performed primarily in English “to stay off the government monitor,” he said, and sang almost exclusively about partying with girls, in a conservative country with no nightclubs. “We had our own nightclubs, up here,” he said, tapping his temples.

In 2008 they recorded one song, titled “Pain,” with a hidden political message about the bleakness of life under Colonel Qaddafi. Its vague lyrics were easily passed off as an unremarkable song about teenage angst.

“I open my eyes, and am cursed with pain,” they sang. “I try to smile, but end up with tears again.”

Today, they laugh at the memory of that song, a sly act of rebellion that pales in comparison with all they have seen since. They have recorded several overtly political songs in the past several months, some attacking Colonel Qaddafi and his government and some dedicated to the memory of those who died in the revolution. Other songs urge Libyans to drop their weapons, embrace nonviolence and work together for the good of the country.

They wrote their first anti-Qaddafi song in March, “Libya Bleeds Just Like Us,” a track inspired to varying degrees by both rebel fighters and the American rapper Notorious B.I.G. The song mockingly quotes Colonel Qaddafi’s televised diatribes against the rebels — “He asks: ‘Who are you? Who are you?’ Like he never knew us!” — and its chorus is punctuated with gunshots.

“When we were doing the song I just thought, I am going to write this song and then whatever, I am ready to die,” said Hamad Araby, 25, a member of the group with a scraggly beard and black baseball cap who performs under the stage name Brown Sugar. “It was suicide, man.”

The song leaked online in May, months before Tripoli fell and shortly after a Qaddafi loyalist and family friend of Mr. Araby asked the group to record a hip-hop song that supported the government. Horrified, the group’s members went underground. While some stayed in Tripoli, Mr. Araby hid on a family farm outside the city, and Mr. Jerafa joined a rebel militia from his hometown, Zuwarah, on the front line. Security forces raided their houses, taking the Jerafa family’s car when they could not find the singer himself.

Hiding from the security forces “was a bad situation, man,” Mr. Araby said. “The first rule was that you couldn’t trust anybody. Even if a girl looked at you, you would think, What are they doing?”

The bandmates did not see one another again until rebel forces took the capital in August. To celebrate the fall of Colonel Qaddafi, they decided to film their very first music video, for “Libya Bleeds Just Like Us,” inside Bab al-Aziziya, the former leader’s fortresslike compound.

They drafted Kalashnikov-toting rebel fighters to appear as extras; the fighters, wearing dark sunglasses, bobbed their heads and struck poses atop pickup trucks mounted with antiaircraft guns. They rapped amid the shattered remains of Colonel Qaddafi’s home, and took care to stand in the same spots the ousted leader did when he delivered speeches against the uprising.

It was an extraordinary moment, a chance for the men to live out a revenge fantasy they never thought would come true. While filming in the compound, they said they thought of how much pain Colonel Qaddafi had inflicted on them, their families and their country.

“The same way he came into my house, I went into his house and I was dissing him,” Mr. Jerafa said. “He wasn’t brave enough to come to my house himself, but I went there myself.”

Somali hip-hop band fighting al-Shabaab for hearts and minds

Waayaha Cusub remain defiant despite bearing the scars of the Islamist group, whose reach has extended to Nairobi

Clar Ni Chonghaile in Nairobi

Shine Ali doesn’t scare easily. If he did, he would not be with his band in a basement studio in Nairobi, rapping lyrics that challenge the Islamist rebels who control much of his homeland, Somalia – and whose reach extends deep into the Kenyan capital.

Ali is well aware of the risks he is running. Three years ago, members of the al-Shabaab group broke into his home in Nairobi’s Eastleigh neighbourhood and shot him.

“They said, ‘Your message is anti-jihad. You are telling the youth to give up jihad,’” the 29-year-old says in halting English. Ali edges down his baggy checked shorts, pulls up his hooded sweatshirt and shows a scar on his right hip. He has another one on his left arm.

“When they shot me, I knew that if I stopped the music, they would win but if I continued, my power would win.”

Ali is a founding member of Waayaha Cusub, an 11-member hip-hopgroup that includes Somalis, Kenyans, an Ethiopian and a Ugandan.

The band is, in its composition, a defiant challenge to the al-Qaida-linked rebels of al-Shabaab and to the thorny political realities of the Horn ofAfrica.

He started Waayaha Cusub, which can be translated as New Era or New Dawn, in 2004. They have produced several albums since then as well as making waves with the 2010 song No to al-Shabaab.

Al-Shabaab, which means “youth” in Arabic, controls much of south and central Somalia where its fighters enforce a harsh form of sharia law: they carry out beheadings and cross-amputations and in some areas have banned musical ringtones on mobile phones, as well outlawing films and football.

Waayaha Cusub’s songs are recorded in Nairobi but find their way home on pirated CDs, and through the radio and internet. As well as calling for peace and condemning al-Shabaab, the band deal with traditionally taboo subjects such as Aids and clan rivalries.

Ali and his group have angered conservatives with their lyrics and becausetheir videos show women dressed in trousers and dancing.

One of their female singers was slashed across the face in Nairobi a few years ago and is still in hiding. In the concrete-floored studio lined with the bottoms of cardboard egg boxes, Ali and fellow singers in the band, Lixle Dikriyow and Burhan Ahmed, belt out lyrics from a new song about piracy. Two women, wearing headscarves and long skirts, sit silently in a corner. They will join in later.

Other members of the band were too afraid to come to the rehearsal.

Fear is a constant companion for Kenya‘s Somali community these days, caught between an increasingly hostile host population and al-Shabaab.

After Kenyan soldiers crossed the border in October to push al-Shabaab back, the rebel group threatened to hit back. This has turned every Somali into a suspect in some Kenyans’ eyes, despite the fact that the only attacks in Nairobi since the incursion were carried out by a Kenyan who said he was a member of al-Shabaab.

Ali, who was born in central Somalia, came to Nairobi when he was a child, joining hundreds of thousands of people fleeing decades of violence that started when warlords overthrew President Mohamed Siad Barre after more than 21 years in power.

But the Kenyan capital is no longer the haven it once was.

“Nairobi or Mogadishu: it is the same now,” Ali says. Al-Shabaab are present in Eastleigh, which is known as “Little Mogadishu”.

The rapper is also worried about how Kenyans will react if their forces take heavy losses on the battlefield. He knows what he does is risky but says that the only way to fight the Islamist group is by raising awareness among the Somali youth.

He taps his head to make his point. “Awareness,” he says. “These youth have bad ideology. If we give them good ideology, talk to them about life, marriage, children … If we show them these things, we can stop them.

“You cannot fight someone who wants to die, you can only save them.”

Asked if he wants to perform in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, Ali pounds the table and says: “Yeah.”

Mogadishu has enjoyed some respite from violence since al-Shabaab fighters pulled out in August and African Union peacekeepers extended their control across the crumbling seaside city. But there are still suicide attacks, roadside bombs and sporadic gunfights.

That is not the problem, though, for Ali and Waayaha Cusub. “If I get support, I will go to Mogadishu,” he says. “It’s a good time for us because we need to tell our youth that al-Shabaab is not good, we need to tell them to support their government.”