In making my documentary film about
electronic music, Modulations (1998), I learned a great deal about rap
music. The genius of hip hop emerged first as party sport — the urban poor
salvaging musical parts to create something entirely new — but soon morphed
into an expression of grief and outrage as Ronald Reagan, crack cocaine, and
gang violence sewed misery among African American communities, and ghettos from
Harlem to Compton sprouted up on the map as MCs defiantly chronicled the
uncensored history of Reagan’s America.
Now the cat is out of the bag, and
hip-hop has since expanded beyond our borders to give voice to the muted masses
of places like Gaza, Lebanon, and Iraq — places suffering from racial
inequality and foreign occupation, and the likewise negative fallout of
ill-conceived US policies.
“Fuck the police coming straight from
the underground/ a young nigga’s got it bad cause I’m brown/ and not the other
color/ so police think/they have the authority/to kill a minority.”
These lyrics spoken by Ice Cube, for
instance, could just as easily have been uttered by DAM (Da Arab MCs), a
Palestinian hip-hop trio forced to live as “Israeli Arabs” in an Israeli slum.
My current film, Cultures of Resistance (out Fall 2010), is an
exploration of the variety of activism in a world plagued with war, oppression
and poverty. I pay special attention to creative action, specifically, and in
my travels throughout the Middle East I encountered a hip-hop reborn through
artists like the Ramallah Underground and Shadia Mansour, both Palestinian, as
well as London-based Iraqi rapper Lowkey (who are all part of a larger collective
known as the Arab League of Hip Hop). Their flows cut deep against the tyranny
of Israeli and US occupation of their lands as they call for equality for all
people, and reaffirm their Arab identity despite brutal attempts at cultural
erasure. The goal, Shadia said, was to tell the world “Palestine is on the
map,” and always will remain so.
Fortunately, Shadia and Lowkey are not a
rarity. I had the opportunity to meet many, many other hip-hop artists in the
region; all of who had stories of a life where to simply breathe is an act of
resistance against cultural obliteration. Like Katibe 5. Members of the group,
consisting of Palestinian youths who grew up in refugee camps in Lebanon, mused
philosophically to me on the interconnectedness of the world, and how people
everywhere must understand how their actions, or inaction, might affect others
in far-away places like Palestine. Another popular hip hop crew I met in Gaza
was Da Arabian Revolutionary Guys who had been unable to tour abroad since the illegal
blockade began. The blockade, which has long kept necessary supplies from
reaching the people of Gaza, was also designed to keep the people of Gaza from
exporting their story to the world. This has of course changed since Israeli
commandos massacred nine humanitarian workers on the Mavi Marmara ship and the
Egyptian government was pressured to ease the travel ban on DARG and they are
now touring in Europe and will be coming to the US this Fall.
It is interesting to see how American
policies and their calamitous effects have bred vibrant hip-hop cultures both
here and abroad. Although hip-hop in America has become largely dominated by
consumer culture, the roots of the form remain strong and have spread abroad,
from ghetto to ghetto, as a common tool of resistance and cultural affirmation.
Will rap music alone save Palestine, end the war in Iraq, and end colonialism
once and for all? Probably not. But hip-hop has presented itself to Arab youth
as one of the few tools available to them to remind the western world, in its
own language, that they are still here, and that they will not be silenced.
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