UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title The Networked Self: Hip Hop Musicking and Muslim Identities in Neoliberal Morocco Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3jm9z2n7 Author Salois, Kendra Renée Publication Date 2013 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California The Networked Self: Hip Hop Musicking and Muslim Identities in Neoliberal Morocco By Kendra Renée Salois A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Music in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Jocelyne Guilbault, Chair Professor Benjamin Brinner Professor Charles Hirschkind Fall 2013 The Networked Self: Hip Hop Musicking and Muslim Identities in Neoliberal Morocco Copyright 2013 by Kendra Renée Salois Abstract The Networked Self: Hip Hop Musicking and Muslim Identities in Neoliberal Morocco by Kendra Renée Salois Doctor of Philosophy in Music University of California, Berkeley Jocelyne Guilbault, Chair This dissertation explores the emergence of a postcolonial neoliberal subjectivity amongst urban Moroccan Muslim youth through an ethnography of Moroccan hip hop practitioners’ aesthetic preferences, performance practice, disciplinary strategies, and socio-musical networks. The hip hop arts, including emceeing, deejaying, b-boying or b-girling (dancing), and graffiti, were first introduced to Morocco in the early 1990s through existing networks of migrants to and from Francophone Europe. Today hip hop music-making flourishes in the nation’s major cities and in smaller enclaves throughout the country. Under the late King Hassan II and his son, King Mohamed VI, the Moroccan state has adopted neoliberalizing policies and forms of governance since the early 1980s with far-reaching social and economic consequences. In this context, I ask how hip hop practitioners’ musical work enables and expresses new modes of citizenship and belonging while neoliberalization renders older forms of political participation less effective. To do this, I first situate Moroccan hip hop in relation to local musico-poetic traditions, already informed by previous generations’ encounters with processes of globalization, and translocally circulating hip hop aesthetics. Drawing from an archive of interactions, interviews, observations, documents, recordings, and live performances, I then show how practitioners use hip hop to intervene in national debates, and to respond to, critique, and take advantage of the effects of neoliberalization. While bringing the insights of network theory and Foucault’s notion of governmentality to an ethnography of neoliberalization, I describe practitioners’ techniques of self-management and self-care as they strive towards musical competence as well as greater economic and social mobility. In contrast with much scholarship on hip hop beyond the United States, I show that Moroccan hip hop music-making is critical, but not resistant. By locating their critiques in the terrain of the self rather than in movement-based politics, artists and their audiences effect political quietism through, not despite, their embrace of the transnational hip hop tradition’s normative ideology of critique and opposition as both a stylistic and an ethical goal. The 1 practitioners’ construction of valued selves within their socio-musical networks prompt a reconsideration of agency, citizenship, and political action in a neoliberalizing postcolonial environment. Explicitly attracted by the discourses of freedom and resistance which hip hop and other Afro- diasporic sounds evoke in many parts of the world, members of Moroccan hip hop networks depend on those discourses to create music that enables local and translocal connections, even as their music-making and entrepreneurship conform to the goals of the neoliberalizing state. In a conjuncture profoundly shaped by Morocco’s adherence to neoliberal economic orthodoxy, Moroccan hip hop practitioners offer to the national imaginary an alternative expression of pious “modern” citizenship, to transnational markets a calculated balance of proficiency and difference, and to music scholarship an alternative to the frequently unquestioned association of hip hop production and oppositional politics. 2 Table of Contents List of figures iii Acknowledgements iv Translation and Transliteration v Chapter One Hip Hop Musicking in Neoliberalizing Morocco 1 Hip Hop: Style, Politics, and Agency Under Neoliberalization 4 Neoliberalization: Economic Orthodoxy, Political Ideology, Lived Experience 9 Musickers 12 Translocal Circulation 16 Methods and Sites 19 Chapter Outlines 23 Chapter Two The Urban Soundscape: Nostalgia, Recontextualization, and Nass el-Ghiwane 32 Popular Musicking in the 1970s: Nass el-Ghiwane 34 Hip Hop After the “Ghiwanien Generation” 52 Conclusions 62 Chapter Three The Emergence of Moroccan Hip Hop, 1990-2010 68 First Encounters: 1990-1996 70 A Series of Firsts: 1996-2003 74 State Interventions: 2003-Present 78 New Technologies and Enhanced Networks: 2006-2011 84 i Chapter Four Financing Change: Hip Hop, Tourism, and Moroccan Music Festivals 100 Modernization, Neoliberalization, and the Tourism Industry 102 Sponsorship, Representation, and Hip Hop in Moroccan Music Festivals 109 Conclusions 136 Chapter Five From Subject to Citizen: Embodied Listening, Ethical Citizenship, and the Formation of a Hip Hop Counterpublic 147 Listening and Agency in the Public Sphere 149 Two Live Performances 157 Citizenship 169 Conclusions 176 Chapter Six From Citizen to Subject: Professionalism, Translocal Networking, and Neoliberalizing Subjectivities 184 The Self as Entrepreneur: Professionalism Discourse 185 Becoming Professional 192 Translocal Connections Through Social Media 203 Conclusions: The Impossibility of Politics for the Neoliberal Subject 210 Conclusion: Neoliberalization, Citizenship, and Translocal Forms of Belonging 216 Works Cited 226 Appendix I: Hip Hop Musicians by City 249 Appendix II: Selected Discography 252 Appendix III: Tables 254 ii List of Figures Fig. 1. Solo and antiphonal singing in the first two lines of “Es-Siniyya” (1970) 44 Fig. 2. Nass el-Ghiwane in concert, Fes, June 5 2011 45 Fig. 3. Antiphonal singing in the third stanza of “Es-Siniyya” 46 Fig. 4. Time Unit Box System notation for Amine Snoop’s rap of “Lebṭana” (1979) 54 Fig. 5. The program for the Festival de la Ville, 2010 112 Fig. 6. The audience in Place Boujloud waiting for Muslim’s performance 116 Fig. 7. Muslim on stage at Place Boujloud, Fes, June 7 2011 119 Fig. 8. An early frame in Rwapa Crew’s “Allah Ya Moulana” (2010) 125 Fig. 9. Rwapa Crew and friends walking away from the Koutoubia Mosque 126 Fig. 10. DJ Key juggling “Issawa Style” (2005) 158 Fig. 11. H-Kayne in concert, Meknes, July 20 2010 160 Fig. 12. Poster for Maroc Hit Parade, Rabat, 2010 164 Fig. 13. Poster for “Festival HipHop Non Stop,” Sala al-Jadida, 2010 193 Fig. 14. A limited network map for Amine, September 2009-September 2010 206 Fig. 15. ‘Adil and Amine at Borj Sud shooting “M’dina Majnouna” (2010) 208 iii Acknowledgments I cannot do justice to all my friends, relatives, colleagues, teachers, mentors, and interlocutors have enabled me to acheive, but it is a pleasure to acknowledge some of them here. At Berkeley, my appreciation and thanks go to the staff of the Music Department, especially Melissa Hacker. My gratitude also goes to colleagues, friends, and elders in the graduate program; the members of the Hip Hop Studies Working Group, especially Rickey Vincent; and Professors Percy Hintzen and Donald Moore, whose seminars challenged and inspired all who took them. In addition, I thank Professor Emily Gottreich, who urged me to “think like a historian” when I did not realize I wasn’t doing so. My dissertation committee also deserves my heartfelt thanks for their unwavering support: Charles Hirschkind, who somehow always asks the question that reveals the heart of the issue, and Benjamin Brinner, from whom I have just begun to realize how much I have learned. My dissertation committee chair, Jocelyne Guilbault, has been a scholarly model, but has also read countless drafts and always known what to say. I can only hope to become a similarly dedicated and inspiring mentor in the future. I have been very lucky to be surrounded by colleagues who have read my work, listened to my presentations, or just given thoughtful advice. My thanks go to Rebekah Ahrendt, Shalini Ayyagari, Carla Brunet, Leon Chisholm, Timothy Fuson, Pattie Hsu, Miki Kaneda, Nina ter Laan, Adeline Mueller, Allan Mugishagwe, Ulrike Petersen, Sumitra Ranganathan, Francesca Rivera, and especially Larisa Mann, who read nearly every word of this dissertation in our Brooklyn-based writing group. In Brooklyn, I thank all the folks at Greenpoint Coworking, especially Sara Bacon and Sushi the dog. At NYU, I thank Deborah Kapchan and J. Martin Daughtry for welcoming me into their most recent seminar. I also thank the Marxist feminist reading group for helping me keep up my critical reading skills (and all the snarky conversation). In Morocco, I was supported by the Institute for International Education and my Fulbright cohort, especially Alma Heckman, Kimberly Junmookda, Cath Skroch, Rod Solaimani, and Matthew Streib; the Moroccan-American Commission for Educational and Cultural Exchange; the American Institute for Maghrebi Studies; the Center for Cross-Cultural Learning; everyone at Qalam wa Lawh Center for