In Senegal, Hip Hop Is About Social Change
December 19, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Many Americans view commercial hip hop as little more than a venue for scantily clad women and shallow lyrics about drugs, fast cars and fast cash. But on the West African stage, hip hop is proving to be a political weapon, capable of inciting rebellion and change.
“We don’t talk about the girls and the bling bling,” says Abdoulaye Aw, the founder of Propagand’Arts, a firm that introduces African artists to the American hip hop industry. “We use our music to educate the people and talk about the real issues.”
The artists say that their desire to educate is what sets Senegalese hip hop apart from its American counterpart. The musicians have a preference for substance over entertainment value.
“We are more focused on giving people information,” says Moussa Sall, a Senegalese rap artist who now lives in Washington D.C. “[In America] it’s all about clubbing and just doing party songs, but we are focused on the message.”
The message is that the country has not been doing so well under the current leadership of President Abdoulaye Wade, and that Senegal is in desperate need of a change.
“The hip hop movement is educating the people on the fact that we need to take this guy out!” says Aw. “The guy we put in power doesn’t really care about the people. He is there for his family and for himself. He is not really ruling the country right now.”
Abdulaye Wade is only the third president of Senegal. First elected in 2000, he won re-election in March of 2007, much to the dismay of many members of the hip-hop community.
Despite the ratification of a new constitution in 2001, and economic reforms that have resulted in a 5percent increase in GDP every year, the country is still highly dependent on outside donor support, and Wade has not been able to fight the high unemployment that ravages the country.
According to a 2001 estimate in the CIA World Fact Book, Senegal had an unemployment rate of 48 percent, with 40 percent being urban youth. A 2004 profile by the Institute for Security Studies, places the unemployment rate in Senegal’s urban sector at 23 percent. And 54 percent of the country’s population lives below the poverty line.
Many citizens choose to flee Senegal and immigrate to Europe or America in search of more job opportunities.
“It’s hard down there in [Senegal],” says Moussa Sall. “We don’t have many opportunities. They are pushing us to leave our country and go somewhere else.”
For the Senegalese, rhyming on the microphone over a hot beat is the only way to push back.
“It’s increasingly obvious that [hip hop] is an important political tool there,” says Magee McIlvaine, the co-director and co-producer of the independent documentary film, “Africa Underground: Democracy in Dakar.” McIlvane adds, “In Senegalese mainstream hip hop, the people appreciate positivity and political consciousness.”
The film, which won honors at the Bronx film festival and the Vibe Magazine Urban World Film Festival, documents the period up to and just after the recent 2007 election. It was that election that the hip hop community hoped would bring about change.
“When we got there for the 2007 elections, there was a lot of tension,” McIlvaine says. “We decided to go in and film the elections from the rapper’s perspective.”
2007 wasn’t the first time that rap would have had an effect on the outcome of a political election.
Ben Herson, the founder and director of Nomadic Wax, a record label that seeks to bring more west African hip hop to the American market, says that in 2000, rap music was a key factor in motivating the regime change. As a result, current president Abdoulye Wade took the place of former president Abdou Diouf.
“In 2000, it’s like hip hop really changed the power.” Says Sall. “We were telling the people what they need to know about politics.”
Senegalese artists were first inspired by the politically conscious American hip-hop of the 1980′s.
“The first real hip hop artist that inspired them to do anything was Chuck D., with ‘Fight the Power’,” McIlvaine says. “It had a political consciousness that really appealed to the way Senegalese people were living.”
The art form may have taken such a strong hold in Senegal because in some form, it existed in Africa before it was discovered in America.
“Senegal has a lot of cultural and musical traditions that are very similar to hip hop,” Herson says. “The traditions go back 5000 years. They just evolved and continued. But more importantly, it’s a medium that is a separate social space that the youth can latch onto and convey their own struggles.”
In fact, youth makes up a large part the Senegalese populace. 70% of the population is under 30 years of age. The average age is only 18.7 years, compared to the U.S., where the average age is 36.6 years.
“It just comes naturally as a way to reach the young people,” Moussa Sall says. “In Senegal, we listen to more hip hop than any other music.
Since gaining its independence from France in 1960, Senegal has been one of the few African countries that has not had a coupe d’etat. But so far, the Senegalese democracy has been unable to produce a leader that can solve the country’s problems.
Under the increased threat of political upheaval, the current regime has kept a tight grip on the rights given to its people by the new constitution.
“I know that some people were exiled,” Aw says. “I know a few people died as well. The climate is not like it used to be, a lot of people are wondering what’s going to happen.”
According to Aw, the government uses violence, exile, and the threat of tax increases to deter young Senegalese artists from speaking out against the regime.
But in the eyes of many that are involved with the Senegalese hip-hop industry, the need to speak out against corruption in government has never been stronger.
“Hip-hop is a form of Fighting,” Aw says. “It came from the ghetto and it gave young African Americas a way to raise their voice. It’s the same in Africa.”
The next step is to bring their fight to the world stage.
“It’s time for Senegalese hip hop to extend itself,” Sall explains. “We need to focus on it, and push it more for people to really listen to what we have to say.”
“I think Senegalese hip hop is going to become more popular,” Abdoulye says, “We are going to get more and more artists holding the government accountable.”
How Phat Conquered Palestine
December 19, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Public Enemy frontman Chuck D once called hip-hop the CNN of urban youth. More recently, rap mogul and entrepreneur Russell Simmons called it a “worldwide cultural phenomena that transcends race.” So it is fitting that hip-hop has found a new home in one of the world’s most volatile regions: the Middle East. Leading the movement is a Palestine trio of lyricists who call themselves DAM, a triple-loaded name: an acronym for ‘Da Arabian MCs, the Arabic for “blood” and the Hebrew for “eternity.” The group doesn’t do the formula, commercialized rap music that gets a lot of radio play; instead DAM is a vanguard for a politically charged subgenre of rap that focuses on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “It’s our life, it’s our window. Whatever has happened to us, we think about it, we write it,” said Tamer Nafar, who partnered with his younger brother Suhell and his friend, Mahmoud Jreri to form the group in 1999. He says his major influence was Tupac Shakur’s music in the 1990s, and artists that came before like Public Enemy and KRS 1. Their flow is almost entirely in Arabic, over music that links them to the region. But the sampling and even the non-English rap style borrows unmistakably from American hip-hop. “Sometimes its about love, sometimes its about who is best on the microphone,” said Jreri who sat with his cohorts backstage after a recent performance in Brooklyn. “We have love for hip-hop and we are not only taking it as political, but politics is part of our life.” In the same way that American rappers react to urban poverty and strife, the Palestinians react to the poverty in the Palestinian territories in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. DAM’s signature tune “Meen Irhabi” (“Who’s The Terrorist”), sparks the same sentiments as songs by Mos Def and Talib Kweli. Other artists like Gaza’s Palestinian Rappers and Egypt’s Arabian Knightz help bolster the popularity of the music. Conservative and fundamentalist religious critics however have made it difficult for hip hop artists to perform in many venues. The group Palestinian Rappers were reportedly chased off the stage during a performance by teenagers said to be linked to Hamas. There has also been scant contact between Arab rap artists and the equally popular Israeli hip-hop movement. But despite the hurdles, the musicians go from gig to gig because they see they are having an effect. “Artists make political statements subtly and not so subtly and those statements have an impact on the audience,” said Bakari Kitwana, who serves as Artist in Residence at the Center for the Study of Race Politics and Culture at the University of Chicago. “This is what hip-hop does at its best, so we we see young people gravitating toward hip hop, seeing their own conditions and have hip-hop giving them a voice.” Jackie Salloum, a filmmaker who is producing a documentary about the Middle Eastern rap scene called Slingshothiphop said the movement had been small, but grew quickly. “In Gaza it caught on and people were influenced by it,” she explained. “When I got there, there were only 10 guys rhyming, but within a year, there were 60.” Hip-hop is seen as one of the gifts of African-American culture to the world’s creative landscape. Rhyme artists like DAM and others spent years listening to their favorite rappers, dressing like them and emulating their beats. Now they want to have the same kind of global impact. “We know about Afro Americans through hip hop,” Suheil Nafar said. “So all the world will know about Palestine through hip-hop.”
In Marseille, Rap Helps Keep the Peace
December 19, 2007 | Leave a Comment
MARSEILLE, France — The other day, a dozen or so teenage rappers in baggy jeans and hoodies gathered outside a community arts center called Le Mille-Patte in Noailles, a poor immigrant neighborhood here, hard by the Old Port.
One of this city’s most successful hip-hop artists, M’Roumbaba Saïd, who calls himself Soprano, lately wrote a track called “Melancholic Anonymous”: “I can’t help it, expressing my feelings, my melancholy in my lyrics,” he rapped. “I can laugh at my sadness. It helps.”
When the slums outside Paris, Lyon, Toulouse and Strasbourg exploded last month, repeating the violence that erupted two years ago, here in Marseille, France’s second-largest city, all remained calm. Back in July, in one of this city’s impoverished northern neighborhoods, a 14-year-old boy named Nelson Lobry-Gazelle was killed by a police car. Four hundred people demonstrated peacefully, so the incident barely made headlines. As it happens, it was also a police car’s killing two teenagers in Villiers-le-Bel, a destitute suburb about 10 miles north of Paris, that sparked the trouble that broke out across France in November. A bus-burning here in October 2006 was considered an isolated incident and failed to ignite a local chain reaction.
The Marseillais have plenty of explanations for this disparity, aside from the obvious one that the poor areas here aren’t segregated on the city outskirts, as they are in Paris — but it is hip-hop, as much a source of local pride as the town’s soccer team, that turns out to be a lens through which to examine why this city didn’t burn.
Melancholy is the word often used to describe the local rap style: melancholy as a reflective state of mind. In contrast to the city’s sun-and-sea context, melancholy actually suits lots of its culture. A Marseille novelist, Jean-Claude Izzo, who died just a few years ago, became famous in France for writing grim, pessimistic detective stories. Robert Guédiguian, also from Marseille, is a filmmaker whose reputation is based on dark movies.
Rappers in Marseille, some of the most original and distinctive ones anyway, compose sad odes to their local neighborhoods and hymns to the whole melting-pot city. The sound of Paris hip-hop, slicker and more aggressive, adopts much from American gangsta rap, as Marseille hip-hop does too, but Marseille boasts a groovier style. It mixes in blues, flamenco, Jamaican ragga.
The number that a decade or more ago helped fixed IAM, the Marseille group, on the French charts, borrows from George Benson to lay down a mellow beat. “Belsunce Breakdown,” about one of the city’s downtown neighborhoods, by Bouga, a rapper from there, begins with a hypnotic piano riff, jazzily syncopated — a little Steve Reich crossed with 50 Cent.
Here the basic interconnectedness of all modern music expresses a local truth about the city’s cultural identity. An ancient, gritty seaport, Marseille flaunts its history as an immigrant magnet. Its population of 820,000 includes 200,000 Muslims, 80,000 North African Jews, 80,000 Armenians. One of the largest immigrant groups is made up of Muslims from the Comoro Islands, near Madagascar. Three of the four musicians in PSY4 de la Rime, Soprano’s band, are Comorians who grew up in the northern part of Marseille where Mr. Lobry-Gazelle died. The fourth member of the band, DJ Sya Styles (of Moroccan background, born Rachid Aït Baar), like many of the teenagers at Le Mille-Patte, comes from Noailles.
Marseille lyrics can be full of rage but they’re not violent, the way those of certain Parisian bands are. Two years ago 152 conservatives in the French Parliament brought suit against seven rap groups, but notably none from Marseille, for fostering hatred and racism against whites and for what one politician called “anti-French ” sentiments.
PSY4, by contrast, wrote a rap not long ago called “Justicier”: “I know all the cops are not that bad, but why do you always ask me for my ID? To your violence I prefer responding with my lyrics. Can’t we have a proper dialogue?”
The other evening PSY4 occupied a recording studio in Grottes Loubières, just northeast of the city. During a break the members talked about the way rappers help one another here, and about how success comes not from landing studio contracts but from earning respect, ground up.
“Rap’s not a business here, the way it is in Paris,” DJ Sya Styles said. “It’s not like Paris, where the suburbs are just concrete. Here you first have to prove yourself in the neighborhoods.”
Stéphane Gallard put it another way: “Paris is more hard-core.” He is the quiet, suave young man in charge of music programming for the nonprofit Radio Grenouille, the city’s most popular hip-hop station. “The fact that hip-hop artists sell their music on their own blocks contributes to their identifying with Marseille, and this explains why there’s no car burning,” he said. “Different communities in Marseille are still quite separate, there’s racism here, but it’s a city in which you have the freedom to move among communities if you choose.”
It’s also true that this city has a contrarian streak going back at least 2,000 years, to when it backed Pompey over Caesar. You might say Marseillais rappers reflect the tradition of “pays,” or local communities, to which their inhabitants maintain more powerful loyalties than to France. At the same time, it’s a place proud of its old Corsican and French-Italian mob heritage (a popular downtown clothing store was named for a famous mob boss), and the prevalence of drug dealers and North African gangs does partly explain why there’s relative calm in destitute areas: Calm is maintained for the sake of their businesses.
Unemployment nears 40 percent in those same parts of town among those 18 to 25; it’s 13 percent citywide, much more than the national average of 8 percent. So clearly job opportunities alone, or their lack, don’t account for the absence of urban violence recently.
It helps that an old, Mediterranean-style civic patronage system doles out favors to earn loyalty and keep the peace. And, as everybody says, unlike Paris, where immigrant poor occupy huge concrete blocks cut off from the city center, Marseille has its neighborhoods, like Noailles, that are smack in the middle of town, while the hard-pressed quarters to the north are linked to the center by cheap public transport and remain inside city limits. So residents feel that they belong to Marseille, because they do, and in turn they feel that Marseille belongs to them.
Out of these communities, where musicians have their own version of a patronage system, the hip-hop scene has emerged — besides PSY4 de la Rime, IAM and Bouga, others, like Keny Arkana, FAF Larage, Fonky Family, DJ Rebel and Prodige Namor, have made it big here.
“Marseille rap never integrated violence the way Paris did,” Philippe Fragione told me. He’s Akhenaton, the leader of IAM. He, like other older musicians here, supports younger Marseille rappers. It was his studio in Grottes Loubières that PSY4 was using. Marseille rap is “more socially conscious,” Mr. Fragione added. “That’s because there is a real sense of community.”
I stopped in the waterfront office of Paul Colombani, the deputy director of the redevelopment program Euroméditerranée. With more than $5 billion in public and private investments, it plans, by 2012, to turn some 2.5 miles of downtown into office towers, mixed-income apartments, museums and esplanades. Zaha Hadid, Jean Nouvel and other archistars have signed on. Outside the porthole office window, the Danielle Casanova, an enormous white ferry, waited to carry passengers to Algeria. Passengers coming back often bring knockoff goods that merchants hawk on sidewalks. “Les jeunes errants,” as migrant street children, some as young as 12, are called, hide in boats, then head for Noailles when they land. A few have become aspiring rappers through community cultural centers like Le Mille-Patte.
Mr. Colombani noticed my gaze. “That will be moved out of this area,” he said about the ferry. He meant to L’Estaque, far to the north, “easier for customs,” he explained. Luxury cruise ships will dock here instead.
Marseille can surely use the money, but hardly at the cost of undoing the social chemistry that has kept the peace and fostered, among other things, the city’s musical life. At Le Mille-Patte those dozen or so young rappers outside were a typical Marseille mix: first-, second- or third-generation immigrants from Algeria, Morocco, the Comoro Islands, Eastern Europe, Argentina.
Habib was a skinny 18-year-old with a doleful face and a band called Urban Revolution. “We all get along because we share music,” he explained. Le Mille-Patte had first encouraged him to rap as a young boy: “I didn’t know what to do with my days, so this place was very important.”
Bacariane, a slightly older rapper wearing a New York Yankees cap, its brim pressed down over his eyes, piped in: “This is a rough neighborhood, but there’s not violence here without meaning, like in Paris. I lived there for a while,” he said, meaning in the isolated suburbs outside the capital. He paused to consider the difference. “Here there is a culture of respect,” he said. “We’re all Marseillais.”
