Just as many people might have thought the Institut du monde arabe in Paris had entered into a period of slumber, with the library closed for renovation and favourite events like the Arab book fair and film festival either cancelled or indefinitely postponed, the institution has roared back into life with an original exhibition on Arab hip hop that will be open to visitors until July. Curated by the French musician Akhenaton, real name Philippe Fragione, a leading hip hop artist and producer from Marseilles, the exhibition traces the origins of Arab hip hop from New York in the 1970s and argues that France acted as an essential transmission point for the spread of hip hop among young people in the Arab world from the 1990s and up until the present day. French hip hop artists, often members of Arab or African Diaspora populations and second or third generation immigrants to France, adopted hip hop music in the early 1980s, moulding it to serve their purposes and making it into a powerful vehicle for self-expression and political and social protest. Having established an extensive, often underground, audience in France in the 1980s, hip hop then made the leap across the Mediterranean, establishing itself in the Maghreb countries of Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria in the 1990s. Hip hop played an important role in the Arab Spring revolutions in 2011, the exhibition says, its lyrics and sometimes aggressive style being used to challenge the incumbent regimes. While in the United States hip hop has been criticised for harming the communities it originally sought to represent by glamourising violence and consumerism, along with misogyny and racism, in the Arab world hip hop has retained its political and social charge, even giving rise to an alternative youth idiom that challenges commercial Arab pop music and appeals to young people across the Arab world. According to Akhenaton, interviewed in the exhibition catalogue, Arab hip hop artists like the Egyptian group Arabian Knightz and others including Omar Offendum, Shadiya Mansour and the Narcisyst are close to the original spirit of protest associated with American ensembles like Public Enemy in the 1980s. Perhaps they are even more authentic expressions of the hip hop spirit than today's American groups themselves. “I've heard a lot of really good groups that are more attracted to committed or socially aware rap music than they are to entertainment,” Akhenaton comments. “Things started between 1988 and 1990 and continued with groups like Boykutt and Edd de Fariq el Altrash. There have been really good groups in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia for years, along with really good MCs [rap singers]. There has also been real technical progress, as well as huge improvements in the flow of the music and the compositions.” Writing elsewhere in the catalogue, University of California professor Mark Levine, a specialist in US hip hop, says that in the US while “African-American communities continue to fight against racism, poverty, inequality and endemic police violence, most US rappers today are happy to be part of the hyper-consumerist mainstream culture” of the United States, living the kind of lives that the US media expects of the country's show-business elite. However, in the Arab world, hip hop has retained its political charge, he says, challenging the existing social order and the political regimes. Levine even goes further and says that “hip hop is quite simply the most globalised art form in the history of humanity, a veritable mélange of neo-African rhythms and narrative styles, European techno, American funk and the latest technologies. Not only has hip hop spread as a result of neo-liberal globalisation, but it has also reached new parts of the world, in particular Latin America, Africa and the Middle East, thanks to the new technologies, computers, cheap recording equipment and the Internet and social networks, allowing it to retain its political meaning even as its influence has spread worldwide.” NEW YORK AND NORTH AFRICA: The exhibition begins by reminding visitors of the early years of hip hop in the deprived boroughs of New York in the United States, where chiefly African-American artists like Grandmaster Flash and The Sugarhill Gang began experimenting with a new style of music that typically used sampling, the citation of musical material, rapping, a heightened form of rhythmic speech, and scratching, forms of sound made by reversing vinyl records on turntables. These early hip hop artists simultaneously pioneered forms of group expression and identification that included graffiti art, certain styles of clothing and dance, and particular linguistic and behavioural codes. In France, these forms were taken up by young people generally from the African and Arab Diasporas in the 1980s who refunctioned club venues to play the new music and made use of the new private radio stations that were opening at the time. “From the end of the 1970s, Paris already had a handful of DJs known for playing soul and funk music, and it was in their clubs that the first French rappers appeared,” writes historian Karim Hammou in the exhibition catalogue. “Figures such as Jhonygo, Destroyman, Lionel D and Richie appeared, distinctive for the creativity of their writing and the flow of their music. They established French as the language of French hip hop” – some French rappers had previously written in English – “and a new generation followed in their footsteps that had grown up with hip hop, including Saliha, New Generation MC, 93 NTM, Assassin, EJM, Destinée, MC Solaar and M. Widi.” The new music was also beginning to develop in Morocco, though in the initial absence of transmission networks such as the Internet and satellite television it was slow to take off and reach wider audiences. According to the contribution by Moroccan hip hop historian Reda Zine in the exhibition catalogue, “in the 1980s people had to wait for cousins to come back from a visit to Europe before they could copy the cassette tapes they had brought back with them,” underlining the role of French hip hop in spreading the new music in North Africa. By the 1990s, an indigenous hip hop scene had developed, inspired by groups such as Micro Brise le Silence (MBS) in Algeria and Intik working between Algeria and Marseilles. This part of the exhibition is particularly valuable because it features maps showing the main transmission lines of US and then French hip hop throughout the Maghreb, identifying the major figures in each North African country and providing video and sound extracts of their performances. DJs such as DJ Abdel and DJ Khaled were particularly important in spreading hip hop in Morocco, followed by early groups such as H-Kayne in Meknes and Fnaire in Marrakesh. In Algeria, Hamidou pioneered the new sound with his single Jawla f'lil (Night Walk) in 1985, a phantasmagoric promenade through Algiers, and he was followed by Bnette bladi and Kamikaz, the first hip hop albums to appear in the Maghreb in the 1990s. In Tunisia, hip hop took off particularly after 2000 with the development of the Internet, the new social networks and the wider availability of cheap computers and recording equipment. An important figure here was Ben Amor, also known as El General, whose songs inspired the youth movement that eventually brought down the Ben Ali regime in the Tunisian Revolution in 2011. According to the exhibition, music of this sort “has long been the expression of young people looking to find their place in civil society and to explore their identity, along with language, pan-Arabism, and freedom of expression.” Elsewhere in the Mediterranean, the exhibition points to Da Arabian MCs (DAM) in Palestine, originally from Lod (Lydda) in Israel and rapping in Arabic, English and Hebrew. The group's single Meen Irhabi? (Who's the Terrorist?), released in 2001, was an important expression of Israeli Arab youth protest at officially encouraged marginalisation. It was, the exhibition says, “a foundational text for the Palestinian hip hop scene, articulating themes of freedom, togetherness and Arab identity.” In Lebanon, rapper Wael Kodeih, also known as Rayyes Bek, did much to denounce what he saw as the corruption and superficiality of Lebanese society. RAP ARTEFACTS: The second part of the exhibition looks at materials taken from Arab hip hop culture, including graffiti, dance, clothing, and behavioural and linguistic codes. As the introductory texts comment, the styles of movement and spatial awareness associated with the music “carry values with them, such as physical excellence and the beau geste.” Hip hop music in New York had originally been associated with the spread of technologies such as the vinyl record, useful for scratching and sampling, the cassette tape and the portable cassette-player, or “ghetto-blaster,” stacked up in a display at the exhibition entrance. At the same time, cheap computers such as the Atari 1040 St, allowed music to be synthesised cheaply in ad hoc home studios, these later giving way to more sophisticated equipment associated with early hip hop and now in demand from collectors, such as the Akai MPC, the EMI SPI200 and the Ensoniq ASR10. “Rap is above all a creative space in which expression can take place, along with verbal inventiveness, linguistic jousting, and rhythmic bodily performance,” the exhibition says. Some of the associated items of clothing are on display, signaling identity and belonging as well as hip hop style, including branded sneakers (trainers) and leisure wear. The appropriation of such branded goods by hip hop artists has raised concerns in the United States that the music has become an exercise in shopping, the sub-culture being recuperated as another marketing niche. This has been particularly the case of hip-hop inspired street graffiti, first appearing in New York in the 1970s and then swiftly taken over by the art market. The careers of originally graffiti artists like Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, both of whom became art-market superstars, are relevant here. “Graffiti is a mobile form of art that has had to find its way between trendy galleries and urban walls,” the exhibition says. Arab graffiti, often inspired by western forms but drawing on a different iconography and the graphic resources of the Arabic alphabet, has retained an oppositional charge, it adds. Graffiti is a way for unrepresented or marginalised populations to take over urban space, even if only temporarily, and to remind others of their existence. Some of the material in this part of the exhibition will of interest mainly to followers of French hip hop, and there are many documents from the history of the form in France. The manuscripts of songs by Akhenaton and the French group IAM, touchingly written in school exercise books and solemnly laid out in glass display cases, take up the central aisle. “C'est pas drôle, le chien mord enfermé dans la cage” (it's no joke, the dog bites locked in its cage) reads the heavily emended opening lines of Demain c'est loin (1996). Press cuttings and other materials relating to the reception of hip hop in France are also on display, with various commentators fulminating against what they saw as a corrupting American import and attack on French culture. Even those who are not followers of French hip hop, or hip hop tout court, will find much to interest them in the exhibition, perhaps most of all because of the role that this music has come to play for many Arab young people. In the catalogue, French academic Jean-Pierre Filiu usefully passes this subject under review, pointing to works such as Rais leBled by El General, Meen Irhabi? by DAM, #Jan25 by Omar Offendum, a work referencing the 25 January Revolution in Egypt, United States of Arabia by Arabian Knightz and Fear of an Arab Planet by the Narcicyst. The career of the latter singer, born in Dubai, of Iraqi background and living and working in Canada, underlines the international character of today's Arab hip hop. It also calls into question the role assigned by the exhibition to France, seeing the country performing its traditional role as an international arbiter of style. There is something charmingly, or absurdly, gallocentric about an exhibition on an American musical form, and its fortunes in the Arab world, that nevertheless claims that the really important role of international transmission was played by Paris. Works recommended on the playlist constructed by Reda Zine for Maghreb hip hop include Bnette bladi by Double Canon, Ouled El Bahdja by MBS, Issawa Style by H-Kayne, Tunis by Night by Balti, and O'kmou la'yout by Mr Mostafa F. Fhenix. In this music, as in hip hop from elsewhere in the Arab world, the forms of US hip hop have remained largely stable, while the content has been Arabised. Hip Hop, du Bronx aux rues arabes, Institut du monde arabe, Paris, until 26 July
