(21 September 2007)

Hip Hop in the Holy Land

When you think about Palestine, and about the suffering endured and the struggle maintained by the Palestinian people, hip hop probably isn’t the first thing to come to mind. Nonetheless, there exists a proud and vocal contingent of Palestinian hip hop heads, both within the occupied territories and among the diaspora.

This, of course, is a testament to the art of hip hop itself. From its inception, hip hop has been, at its very core, a tool for struggle against oppression, an expression of resistance, the voice of the voiceless, the have-nots.

And it has proven to be unselfish, willing to widen its embrace far beyond the African-American community of which it was born and take in those who are struggling everywhere. Chuck D has inspired revolutionaries and activists all over the globe. Rage Against the Machine has served as the soundtrack for revolutionary movements in Europe and Latin America. Cultures the world over have embraced hip hop and nurtured it, each in their own way. Hip hop has helped to bring together and unite the downtrodden of this planet. Stories are shared. Traditions are transferred, picked apart, built anew. Strategies are developed and re-developed. Friends are made and kept evermore. Diverse peoples all over the globe, living together in the house that hip hop built, keeping the torch of resistance burning. It’s globalization, to be sure, but the good kind.

Hip hop, in this way, plays a role in the Palestinian fight, and in the maintenance and development of Palestinian culture in the face of the merciless and efficient genocidal effort being leveled at it. Indeed, there are venues for hip hop in the occupied territories, and there is a small, but growing and loyal, audience. English-language rap predominates, but there are plenty of Arabic rappers as well. American hip hop is actually quite popular among the youth of Palestine, and this is despite the fact that Hamas has branded hip hop, an American cultural export, as haraam, or forbidden. The hip hop scene in Gaza is currently facing serious obstacles owing to Hamas’s clampdown on the Strip. A few of the hip hop faithful holding it down in Gaza are the group PR (Palestinian Rappers) and the duo RFM. The political factionalism currently plaguing Palestine has no presence in the hip hop scene. Through hip hop, young Palestinians are building unity in the face of growing political division. In the West Bank, Ramallah Underground is a big name. The Arab-Israeli group DAM is also very big among Palestinian heads.

Other artists to check out are the Philistines (from Tennessee and LA), Patriarch (from the Bay), and the N.O.M.A.D.S. (from Washington DC). The Philistines recently released an album called Free the P, which is “a compilation of hip hop and spoken word, dedicated to the youth of Palestine, inspired by the global struggle for peace and justice,” and which features the incomparable Immortal Technique. It’s available at www.freethep.com, and proceeds go toward Slingshot Hip Hop, which is much-anticipated in-the-works documentary about the Palestinian hip hop scene.

For more on global hip hop culture, check out Where It’s At: Notes From the Frontline of a Hip Hop Planet by Patrick Neate, a great travelogue of hip hop scenes in Johannesburg, Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro, and elsewhere.

The Iron Sheik

Born in 1978 to a Palestinian mother and an American father, the Iron Sheik grew up in a relatively political metro Detroit household. He had an uncle who was a Palestinian rights activist and who the government attempted to deport. When the first gulf war started, his parents sent him on a bus with his aunt to Washington DC to take part in the protests against the war.

The Iron Sheik is the proud father of two albums, Camel Clutch (2003) and Yet We Remain (2004), both independently released, labelless. In fact he’s quite alright with the piracy of his albums, the third and latest of which will be released next year, marking the 60th anniversary of the nakba (Arabic for catastrophe, and the name Palestinians gave to the 1947 ethnic cleansing they endured). His first two albums have sold pretty well for independent releases, circa 4,000 units

I got the chance to interview him recently, and I asked him why he makes hip hop music. “I want to create a space for the idea of there being Arab-American hip hop,” he explains. “And I want to create an audience for it. A lot of other Arab-American emcees are now coming up, even to the point of outshining me.” He also seeks to use hip hop to show other young Arab-Americans and Palestinian-Americans that you can use artistic voice to create change. “You can’t just sit there and complain about things,” he points out.

He found hip hop as a kid, and recorded his own tapes in high school. It wasn’t until college in Dearborn, Michigan, though, that he became politicized, at which point he put hip hop on the back burner and focused on school. “I was looking for new ways to express my activism,” he explains. He got back into hip hop near the end of college, when a friend of his who was making a film called The Tale of Three Muhammads needed an Arab-American rapper to perform a song of the same title for the film’s soundtrack. He soon started performing the song at rallies and other events, and he found that folks were receptive to it.

In his development as an emcee, some of his influences were Public Enemy, KRS-One, and Slum Village. He’s traveled twice to Palestine, each time for a month, where he’s visited family he has there. He’s played shows in both Egypt and Lebanon, performing in Cairo for a packed crowd of 350 and in Beirut for a smaller crowd of activists and artists.

The Sheik closes our interview by pointing out that hip hop is still a growing movement, that there is much more to come of it. And he explains that what he loves about Palestinian hip hop “is that it gets at the basic solidarity that many Palestinians feel between their struggle and the struggles of other communities in the US and around the world.”

He’s definitely an artist worth checking out. Visit www.myspace.com/yetweremain and www.ironsheik.biz for more information.