‘Hip-hop didn’t just come out of nowhere,” explains young teacher Anas to his even younger class in Casablanca Beats. He speaks of the “poverty, racism and humiliation” experienced by hip-hop’s African-American founders, and how the genre became a vehicle for self-empowerment and social change. “It’s rap that speaks of our lives, of our problems, things people aren’t supposed to know.”
The Moroccan teenagers listening to Anas can relate to this. Hip-hop is now a commercial industry in the US, but around the world rap has become the lingua franca for disempowered and disaffected youth, and the soundtrack to revolution. Nowhere more so than north Africa. During the Arab spring in the 2010s, protesters in Tunisia and Egypt chanted the lyrics of Tunisian rapper El Général’s anti-corruption anthem Rais Lebled: “Misery is everywhere and the people haven’t found a place to sleep / I am speaking in name of the people who are suffering and crushed beneath the feet.” In Algeria, too, the recent Hirak movement has been backed by anti-government rap tunes such as Raja Meziane’s Allo le Système!. Even in relatively stable Morocco, there are still plenty of problems for young people to talk about, and plenty of people who don’t want them to talk, or sing, let alone dance.
