I came across this piece of news today : A feature-length documentary called I love Hip Hop in Morocco following a group of young Moroccan Hip Hop artists pursuing their dream of staging Morocco’s first ever Hip Hop Festival is recently released.

I am sorry…call me old fashioned …call me out dated, but I just don’t get this whole hip hop brouhaha in Morocco. I know Moroccans can be darn good at importing and assimilating foreign ideologies quite well, but I can’t help but be amazed by our cultural preferences. For God’s sake….couldn’t we find a more respectable art choice? Could we for once adopt something that actually can benefit our society? Why are we always so good at capturing the lust of things but failing to touch the core?

If we are to analyze hip-hop phenomena from a social view point, we’ll find that although it started as a tool to express certain folks common struggles at one point- should we mention that it happened actually about an ocean’s away?- , nowadays, hip hop has more to do with materialism, women as sex objects and drugs than with any thing else. It is essentially music that expresses social alienation and self-criticism. [ Read more here Hip-Hop: A Repressive Agent or Vehicle for Activism? ] .What good would that do to a society? I mean presumably, this is the youth that represents the future of the Moroccan and Arab world.

I actually went to the ‘documentary‘ website and read about the directors. One of the directors actually received a fullbright grant to study the effect on American hip hop culture on Moroccan youth. Unbelievable!  Kinna of makes you think who is behind the wheel? Doesn’t it? Oh well…I didn’t say anything. After all, I don’t want to be labelled old fashioned

Later,

Naima Alaoui