Hip Hop Culture in a Small Moroccan City

This paper explores Hip Hop culture by tracing its development from the global level through the Arab world to finally its manifestation in Morocco. Hip Hop culture is defined broadly as a wide range of artistic expressions-rap, graffiti, breakdancing, DJing, etc.-and also a mind-set or way of life. The focus on the Moroccan context starts at the national level, pointing out some of the key artists, issues Moroccan Hip Hop faces, and how this has been explored by scholars of Hip Hop. The paper focuses on an ethnographic exploration of Hip Hop culture in Ifrane, a small Moroccan city. An analytic approach suggested in Patti Lather's 1991 book Getting Smart informs and expands the paper particularly by privileging the emancipatory power of Moroccan Hip Hop, creating a nuanced view of the impact of Hip Hop on the lives of youth in this small community. Finally, the paper employs a self-reflexive stance to critically view the author's own position in the research project in order to name some of the challenges and contradictions of a white male American doing Hip Hop research in the Moroccan context.