I Love Hip Hop in Morocco

Pretty soon after reading Heavy Metal Islam, I found out that director Joshua Asen was coming to Lehigh to show his documentary I Love Hip Hop in Morocco. Josh got a Fullbright scholarship to travel to Morocco and document the emerging hip-hop movement there, as well as help put on the country's first hip-hop festival. The film follows Josh throughout Morocco, as he and his co-director Jennifer Needleman bring together performers, producers, and equipment to show Morocco its first festival centered around the hip-hop culture. In short, the movie was inspiring.


The film follows several artists who are participating in the festival. The most well known in Morocco are MC Bigg, H-Kayne, and Fnaire, and each has made quite a name for themselves since the release of the movie. However, the artist I found the most interesting was FatiShow, a teenage girl from Meknes Morocco who raps alongside MC Bougha in the duo Mot de Passe. In the film, Joshua tries to give a little insight into the lives of each artist, going around their hometown, seeing how they put their music together, and interviewing their friends and family. Fati's life seemed the most normal out of all the artists, yet she was definitely the most remarkable. Her parents are interviewed, and they share their trepidation about their daughter's initial entry into Moroccan hip-hop culture. But their attitude seems familiar, if not almost American, and they tell Fati that she can perform at the festival only if her final grades are sufficient. Fast-forward to the end of the movie, where we see Mot de Passe take the stage for the very first time. The crowd, which is almost exclusively male, has come to see H-Kayne and Bigg. FatiShow walks onto the stage and is greeted by a booing crowd. Her voice can hardly even be heard over the jeers, but she takes the microphone with a smile. "Is everyone alright?" Fati asks, completely aware that everyone is against her. Her attitude is the epitome of confidence, and she says something to the effect of "I don't care what you think, I'm just here to rap." What follows is definitely the highlight of the movie: the beat drops, and FatiShow begins to rhyme so fluidly, so smoothly that the entire crowd explodes. Boos turn to cheers, and just like that, all of Fati's hard work and love for the culture is validated. "She killed it," Joshua told us, "we couldn't make that up." The moment was so dramatic, it even caught the attention of the mainstream media:

FatiShow's performance demonstrates the incredible power that music has to subvert culture. In Morocco, where culture is completely male-dominated, all it took was one artist to blow that out of the water. And while FatiShow is nowhere near a hip-hop superstar, she is enjoying a bit of fame as a result of the film, with a growing online fan-base. Her blog, where she releases all of her new songs, can be found at fatishow.skyrock.com (in Moroccan Arabic).

The whole movie struck a chord with me. As I was watching, I felt that if someone had gone back in time to 1970's New York and given a camera to Clive Campbell, we would see the exact same thing. Artists with a passion for their music, who used all the resources available to them to establish a hip-hop community. It really felt like I was watching the birth of a movement, and not just a film about hip-hop.

However, things are not always what they seem. Later, discussing the movie with Joshua, I discovered that the festival and its participants were not as motivated as they seemed, and that the entire operation wasn't nearly as grass-roots as it appeared. The entire festival would not have been possible without a generous grant from the American embassy in Morocco, and the lucrative sponsorship of Sprite. In addition, I found out from Joshua that he ended up doing most of the work in organizing the festival, and at times it was a struggle to engage the artists. According to Joshua, many of the artists were guilty of a false sense of entitlement. Their experiences with hip-hop had all occurred as fans of American hip-hop, and in their eyes, American hip-hop stars just put out music, nothing more. The artists saw their role as strictly musicians, not community organizers, and they didn't see why they should have to both perform and organize. Instead of helping hang up promotional posters, they complained that their name was listed second even though they were obviously more popular than so-and-so. The movie seemed to be rooted in the local, but after speaking with the director firsthand, its obvious that Western influences played a crucial role. The romantic vision of a community coming together to share in their passion is somewhat spoiled when you learn that it was sponsored by Sprite, organized by a white ivy league graduate, and the passionate artists who were supposedly "in it for the music" had adopted the attitude of American prima donnas. It all makes me wonder, if the story had occurred the way it was depicted, would I ever have found out about it?