I haven't read this yet but it will probably find its way to my booklist:
This fascinating, timely, and important book on the connection between music and political activism among Muslim youth around the world looks at how hip-hop, jazz, and reggae, along with Andalusian and Gnawa music, have become a means of building community and expressing protest in the face of the West’s policies in the War on Terror. Hisham Aidi interviews musicians and activists, and reports from music festivals and concerts in the United States, Europe, North Africa, and South America, to give us an up-close sense of the identities and art forms of urban Muslim youth.
We see how the current cultural and political turmoil in Europe’s urban periphery echoes that moment in the 1910s when Islamic movements began appearing among African-Americans in northern American cities, and how the Black Freedom Movement and the words of Malcolm X have inspired the increasing racialization and radicalization of young Muslims today. More unexpected is how the United States and some of its allies have used hip-hop and Sufi music to try to deradicalize Muslim youth abroad.
Aidi’s interviews with jazz musicians who embraced Islam in the post–World War II years and took their music to Europe and Africa recall the 1920s, when jazz inspired cultural ferment in Europe and North Africa. And his conversations with the last of the great Algerian Andalusi musicians, who migrated to Paris’s Latin Quarter after the outbreak of the Algerian War in 1954, speak for the musical symbiosis between Muslims and Jews in the kasbah that attracted the attention of the great anticolonial thinker Frantz Fanon.
Illuminating and groundbreaking, Rebel Music takes the pulse of the phenomenon of this new youth culture and reveals not only the rich historical context from which it is drawn but also how it can foretell future social and political change.
Excerpt:
PrologueOne muggy afternoon in July
2003, I headed up to the South Bronx for the Crotona Park Jams, a small
festival that is little-known locally, but manages to draw hip-hop fans
from around the world. The annual event is organized by Tools of War, a
grassroots arts organization that invites artists from across the
country and Europe to perform in the Bronx, hip-hop’s putative
birthplace, and to meet some of the genre’s pioneers, figures like
Afrika Bambaataa and Kurtis Blow. I arrived at the park and asked around
for Christie Z, a local promoter and activist. Christie, who has blue
eyes and a ruddy complexion and wears a white head scarf, is the founder
of Tools of War and a smaller group called Muslims in Hip Hop. She is
married to Jorge Pabón (aka Fabel), a well-known dancer and master of
ceremonies (MC), who appeared in the classic 1980s hip-hop film
Beat Street
and currently teaches “poppin’ ” and “lockin’ ” dance styles at NYU.
The two—Christie Z & Fabel, as they’re known—are a power couple on
the East Coast’s hip-hop scene, but they’ve become significant players
internationally as well, organizing shows in Europe and bringing artists
from overseas to perform in America.
Christie’s story is
unusual. “People always ask me,” she says with a laugh, “how did a white
girl from central Pennsylvania become a Muslim named Aziza who
organizes turntable battles in the Bronx? I say the lyrics brought me
here. I was in high school when I heard ‘The Message,’ ” she says,
referring to the 1982 breakout song by Grandmaster Flash, which vividly
described life in the ghetto during the Reagan era, and was one of
hip-hop’s earliest mainstream hits. “I heard that track and I followed
the sound to New York.”
I had arrived early hoping for a
pre-show interview with the French rap crew 3ème Œil (Third Eye), who
had flown in from Marseille to perform that evening. The rap trio is
known in France for its socially conscious lyrics. Since the invasions
of Afghanistan and Iraq, the group had become even more political,
rapping about what they call the West’s “stranglehold” on the East. I
stood around the stage waiting. A circle had formed with a group of boys
clapping and dancing, as the DJ on duty that evening—another pioneer,
DJ Tony Tone of the Cold Crush Brothers—spun rap and Latin soul
classics. Soon Third Eye’s manager, Claudine, a brown-haired woman in
her early twenties, appeared and led me backstage. I explained that I
was a researcher at Columbia writing about global hip-hop. Her face lit
up. “We’ve been wanting to talk to you for a while,” she said, as she
walked me through a backstage tent and out into the open. Later I found
out Claudine had thought I was a representative of Columbia Records,
about to offer her group a contract.
The sun was setting, a blue
glow had enveloped the park, and I walked up to the four young men
lounging on a bench facing the spectacular Indian Lake, which sits at
the park’s center. Soon I was chatting with the rappers—Boss One
(Mohammed) and Jo Popo (Mohammed), both born in the Comoros Islands off
the coast of East Africa, but raised in Marseille—and their DJ, Rebel
(Moustapha). They were dressed similarly in sagging denim Bermudas,
eighties-style Nike high-tops, and baseball caps. Jo Popo gave me a copy
of their new hit single, “Si Triste” (So Sad). I told him I’d already
seen bootlegged copies at African music stands in Harlem. He nodded and
gave me a fist bump. The song, popular among West African youth in New
York, offers social commentary over a looping bass line, decrying police
brutality and mass incarceration (with a special shout-out to the
American death-row prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal). I asked them how the
French press responded to their lyrics, and about the anti-immigrant
National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen’s claim that hip-hop was a
dangerous musical genre that originated in the casbahs of Algeria.
Boss
One shook his head, “For Le Pen, everything bad—rap, crime, AIDS—comes
from Algeria or Islam.” This was mid-2003; the War on Terror was in its
early years. “The more Bush and Chirac attack Islam and say it’s bad,”
said Boss One, “the more young people will think it’s good, and the more
the oppressed will go to Islam and radical preachers.” His tone became a
little defensive when talking about the
banlieues, the poor suburbs that ring France’s major cities, stating that life in France’s
cités was
better than in the American ghettos. “Life is hard in France, but we
have a social safety net. Here there is no such thing”—he stood up to
emphasize the point—“and it will get worse with Bush, the cowboy,
le rancheur!”
Their
bluster disappeared when I asked what they thought of the Bronx. They
grew wistful talking about the Mecca of hip-hop. Jo Popo smiled
describing their meeting the day before with hip-hop legend Afrika
Bambaataa. “
C’était incroyable!” Bam, as he is known, is
particularly loved in France, where he was instrumental in introducing
hip-hop in the early 1980s. The group’s music mixer, DJ Rebel, who
previously hadn’t said a word, suddenly spoke up. “I have dreamed of
visiting the Bronx for all thirty-six years of my life. This is where
hip-hop started, this music which has liberated us, which has saved us,”
he said with apparent seriousness. “Yesterday we met Bambaataa and Kool
Herc. I thanked them personally for what they have done for us blacks
and Muslims in France—they gave us a language, a culture, a community.”
His voice broke a little.
I was struck by the emotion and
sincerity of their words, and I had a few academic questions to ask: Why
was the Bronx so central to the “moral geography” of working-class kids
in Marseille? Where did this romantic view of the American ghetto come
from? Why were they more fascinated by Bronx and Harlem folklore than by
the culture of their parents’ countries of origin? Claudine suddenly
reappeared and asked them to return to the tent. Grandmaster Flash, the
legendary DJ and another iconic figure of global hip-hop, had arrived,
and they were scheduled to meet him. “Flash invented scratching—I get
paid to teach scratching in France,” said DJ Rebel getting up to leave. “
A bientôt,” and the rap trio and their thoughtful DJ walked off. Half an hour later they were on the stage, waving their arms: “
Sautez! Sautez! Sautez!” Boss One translated: “That means, ‘Jump! Jump! Jump!’ ”