Hip Hop

Rap across the Arab world, from Cairo’s underground to Casablanca, Ramallah and the diaspora.

Arabic hip hop took hold through the late 1990s and 2000s, when groups working in Palestine, Morocco and Egypt proved the form carried Arabic and darija as naturally as it carried English, and often better, because the dialects are dense with internal rhyme. It broke wide around the 2011 uprisings, when rap turned out to be the fastest medium in the region: a track could be written, recorded and online before a newspaper went to print.

What sits under this term now is not one scene but several, each with its own dialect, production and reference points. Egyptian, Moroccan, Palestinian, Tunisian, Sudanese and Gulf rap sound distinctly different from one another, and the diaspora scenes in France, Germany and North America sound different again.

Trap has its own archive, since most of the artists who work in it are doing something specific enough to search for separately.