Morocco

Artists from Morocco, where Gnawa, Amazigh music and one of the Arab world’s biggest rap scenes sit side by side.

Morocco carries more distinct living traditions than almost anywhere else in the region. Gnawa, the ritual trance music of brotherhoods descended from enslaved West Africans, is both a spiritual practice and, since the Essaouira festival, an international export. Amazigh-language music has its own deep repertoire across the Rif, Middle Atlas and Souss. Chaabi runs underneath everything as the country’s popular music.

Nass El Ghiwane reframed all of it in the 1970s, turning chaabi instrumentation and traditional forms into something closer to protest song, and the effect on Moroccan music has never really worn off.

Casablanca now hosts one of the largest rap scenes in the Arab world, in darija, with its own festival infrastructure dating to the late 1990s and an audience that does not need any other market’s approval.