This paper seeks to engage the construction of urban “soundscapes” as a potential flashpoint for class conflict by analyzing auditory and visual representations of “the neighborhood” (al-houma) in a handful of Moroccan hip-hop videos. I begin by situating Moroccan hip-hop within transnationally circulating associations of hip-hop with “urban” life, as well as the political dynamics of North Africa’s colonial and postcolonial urban histories. I then analyze four videos comparatively, suggesting that each goes beyond lyrical and musical content of the songs to construct a sensory experience of the city—or neighborhood—for the listener-viewer. In giving attention to the political implications of each video, however, I argue that what distinguishes each is less what sort of “soundscape” emerges in his video but how each video teaches the audience to “hear” the Houma. While videos by mainstream rappers Muslim and Don Bigg figure urban space as threatening and in need of moral recuperation, they enact these pedagogies largely through indexical figurations of their respective soundscapes, that is, by directing the listener to attend to certain (inaudible) sounds and to interpret them in a certain way. By contrast, a video by El Haqed, known as a more staunchly oppositional figure, visually and sonically constructs a peri-urban lifeworld conditioned by neoliberal economic abandonment yet resistant to the postcolonial gaze. This contrast, I suggest, raises crucial questions about how hip-hop is linked to broader dynamics of cultural appropriation and “resistance” politics.
Articles by Ian VanderMeulen
Ian VanderMeulen is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at Kalamazoo College and a research scholar interested in sound, media, Islam, and the politics of performance in the MENA/SWANA region. He holds a PhD in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies from New York University, MA in Middle Eastern Studies from the City University of New York, and degrees in music and religion from Oberlin College. His research has been supported by NYU and the American Institute of Maghrib Studies and appears in American Ethnologist as well as the International Journal of Middle East Studies. In Fall 2023, Ian begins a Junior Research Fellowship at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University.