Hip-hop on the Arab-Israeli frontline

Unites States hip-hop has had many messages beyond the current lyrical obsessions for bling and gangster lifestyles: the good-time party spirit of the Sugarhill Gang’s Rapper’s Delight, the social comment of Grandmaster Flash’s The Message, the black politics of Public Enemy’s Fight the Power or the inclusivity of Eric B and Rakim’s anthem I Know You Got Soul. They are mostly inspired by alienation and a voice of resistance, even when in party mood.

But whatever hip-hop is — and it is many things — its reach is now undeniably a world embrace. Or stranglehold.

Seventeen years after Rakim coolly rolled out his lines, ”even other states come right and exact/ it ain’t where you’re from, it’s where you’re at”, the world has taken him at his word and like a musical McDonald’s, aided by MTV and the artists themselves extending their brand with clothing lines and even fast-food chains, hip-hop has globalised itself.

It can be found commercially thriving everywhere from Tokyo to Havana, either in its sale of big-name United States acts or, as Patrick Neate put it in his critique of hip-hop, ”glocalised” artists — where the aesthetics and style of US rap is adapted by native musicians to local tastes and fashions.

Although the adoption of a rebellious black consciousness hip-hop stance can take a deeply sinister edge — as when it was embraced by a rebel army faction in Sierra Leone, who wore Tupac Shakur T-shirts as uniforms — hip-hop has replaced reggae as the international music of dissent, resistance and alienation, even if its US counterpart has, in the main, lost its political edge and dwells more these days on the vain and vacuous rather than ”fighting the power”.

But for Arab countries and the Middle East, the influence and performance of hip-hop lights a few fuses. First, the debate that hip-hop’s cultural swamping is a harmful western import to Arab music and society. When al-Jazeera reported earlier this year on the Egyptian rappers MTM winning the best modern Arab act in the first Arabian Music Awards, it questioned whether it was a harmful influence — suggesting anxieties about the potentially corrupting lyrics and its harming traditional Arab music. Second, the implication of what has always given hip-hop appeal. Its words.

The rap form allows a powerful voice for political invective, and is being used on both sides of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Clotaire K, a hip-hop artist of Lebanese descent, raps in Arabic, French and American English. The bass-heavy beats on his album, Lebanese, are undeniably hip-hop but the Tarab string music is assertively Arab. The rap, when you can catch it, is a benign criticism of injustice. Maybe he is more assertive in his Arabic sections. However it is expressed, he is not alone.

The appeal of hip-hop has found a voice in the alienated Arab-Israeli/Palestinian communities within Israel, dominated by the Jewish majority and identifying with the sentiments of US rappers in their struggle against discrimination.

Tamer Nafer, an Israeli-Arab rapper from the suburbs of Tel Aviv, riffs in Arabic thus: ”You buried the parents under the stones of their own homes/ and now you call me a terrorist/ Who is a terrorist?/ You are a terrorist.” His rallying cry at a recent Israeli hip-hop event was ”Peace!”, followed by the orchestrated crowd reply of ”Justice”, implying you can’t have one without the other.

But countering this alienated voice, rather disturbingly, is the voice of rightwing Zionism in rap. Subliminal, otherwise known as Kobi Shimoni, makes no bones about his stance. His rallying cry to the crowd at a concert is to ask them to wave their Israeli army dog tags in the air. One of his albums, The Light and the Shadow, has a muddy fist — that looks like a bloody one — on the cover, clutching a medallion Star of David. It’s selling well in Israel, and on one internet chart ranks above the Eurovision winner Dana International.

Dubbed the Israeli Eminem, the former soldier’s shock is not in suggesting Michael Jackson is a paedophile or swearing a great deal, it is in song titles such as Divide and Conquer or lyrics such as ”the country is dangling like a cigarette in Arafat’s mouth” or ”to think that an olive branch symbolises peace / Sorry it doesn’t live here anymore. It’s been kidnapped or murdered / There was peace my friend / Handshakes, fake smile. Treaties signed in blood.” Forget Eminem, this is more like hip-hop’s Sharon.

Here the music of alienation is in danger of becoming one of aggression and oppression.

As globalised hip-hop is used to sell trainers and fashions as well as records, on the ground in the political hotspots it’s finding a divisive voice. And hip-hop’s former cry of ”it ain’t where you’re from, it’s where you’re at” is sinisterly twisted into”you’re not from here, get out”.