http://www.alternet.org/story/15366...partment_uses_rap_to_spread_propaganda_abroad
January 4, 2012 |
Photo Credit: Agence France Presse
Since 2005, the US State Department has been using hip-hop as a bridge for foreign cultural diplomacy. Operating under the auspices of then-public diplomacy undersecretary Karen Hughes, the “Rhythm Road” program began sending “hip-hop envoys” to, mostly, the Middle East, hoping to promote transnational understanding through music and dance.
Al-Jazeera ran an excellent piece on the program this week, which begins with this quote from Hillary Clinton in 2010: “Hip-hop is America,” she told CBS—certainly a true statement, but not one anyone would have expected to hear before the Obama adminstration, even from culturally savvy Bill Clinton, whose most famous exchange with hip-hop was when he accused Sistah Souljah of reverse racism.
And while President Obama has done a good job of finally welcoming into the White House the most important musical movement of the last 35 years (both culturally and commercially), his olive branch to the culture has been met with controversy. Most recently, right wingers expressed outrage over his invitation to rather innocuous rapper Common on poetry night, with Sean Hannity wrongly painting him as a controversial "cop-killer"—an absurd assertion to anyone who listens to his music.
The aforementioned Al-Jazeera piece, which chronicles hip-hop's relatively new embrace within the state department, also discuss the music's role in the Arab Spring, which was declared "le printemps des rappeurs" by the French and thought to be a spark in both Syria and Tunisia. Of course, hip-hop's role cannot be quantified in those instances, and in Morocco and Algeria—where hip-hop enjoys a vast audience—there has been no revolution. Al-Jazeera blames the enthusiasm of Western media to lionize hip-hop's role in actual revolutions on their idea that "a taste for hip hop among young Muslims is a sign of moderation, modernity, even 'an embrace of the US.'"
Yet regardless of its impact on the revolutions—something that's impossible to gauge—rap has spread everywhere. The State Department is using hip-hop as a diplomatic concern in an effort to piggyback and control it, yet hip-hop has already been its own diplomat. Notoriously begun in the South Bronx of New York in the mid 1970s, flourishing despite urban blight and extreme disenfranchisement by the government, as it grew as a phenomenon its spirit resonated across the world. Nearly every country across the globe has its own interpretation of hip-hop—Russia, Denmark, and Turkey, as well as Tunisia and Morocco and Algeria—and not just because it conveyed cool cache. The rebellious notion of it, and the fact that it's a really effective way to express political malcontent, translates across cultures and languages (Public Enemy's rise to global popularity in the late 1980s certainly had a hand in it.)
And, quantifiable or no, the Arab Spring was not the first time protests have been inextricable from hip-hop. For instance, in 2006, after the banlieues of Paris erupted in response to rampant anti-immigration and racist sentiment in France, President Sarkozy blamed what he called "ruffians" but some of whom were, in fact, rappers who spoke against him. (Take Alibi Montana and Menace Crew's "Monsieur Sarkozy," and feel free to read my 2006 article on the topic in SPIN magazine.)
The State Department's actions mirror its efforts during the Cold War, when they dispatched prominent jazz musicians to counter Soviet propaganda about life in America. The Al-Jazeera piece brings up that this program sends Muslim hip-hop artists, in particular, to Muslim-majority countries to discuss their experience in the United States. It also points out the irony in the concept of using hip-hop in foreign diplomacy, when rap has been blamed for America’s worst aspects for so long. But clearly, rank hypocrisy is embedded in the program: the true rap voices of American youth have long been maligned by the government—and if the government expended more effort helping the blighted and impoverished black communities most of it comes from, it wouldn't be so reviled there. Further, there's the institutional existence of "hip-hop cops"—state-organized task forces within police departments created especially to target rap's high-profile stars—which have plagued the genre since the mid-1980s.
But first, some history. During the Cold War, the jazz musicians who went out in the name of American diplomacy were world-famous, like Dizzie Gillespie. This initiative doesn't parallel that--the groups it sends are generally unknown among hip-hop fans, despite many American rappers being both political and popular. For instance, Legacy, one of the groups in the program, is a four-person, live instrumental hip-hop crew, and while their pedigrees certainly guarantee an underground audience (they are all trained professionals, and have played mostly with jazz ensembles), that probably wouldn’t have much cache among most US hip-hop consumers.
The program's site explains that the groups are chosen for their "artistic integrity, music ability and educational skills." They're also painting a portrait of acceptance and cultural understanding in America that is counteracted daily by reports of physical violence against Muslims.
Plus, as Al-Jazeera points out, most hip-hop artists American Muslim youth respect are, too, making anti-capitalist, anti-regime statements, including Lupe Fiasco, Mos Def, Talib Kweli (the latter three have given support to Occupy), as well as Philadelphia legend Freeway.
Enlisting these or any number of Muslim rappers—who enmesh their religion with their lyrics—would make more sense from the cultural standpoint of a hip-hop fan, though clearly not an ambassadorship one.
And as for the "society-ruining" rap music that people like Hannity and Bill O'Reilly constantly harp on—nothing would curtail hard rap quicker than if the government ended the drug war, whose racist policies have ruined the lives of so many young black men that discontent is inherent. (And you have to wonder what the State Department would make of Shyne, the immensely popular Diddy associate who, after spending nine years in prison for a 2001 shooting, emerged an Orthodox Jew and began showing support for Zionist spy Jonathan Pollard.)
But nuance is not the most questionable part of this program. It’s the absurd idea that it exists, when other branches of the government—the FBI in collusion with the NYPD in particular—have been so adamant about profiling (and taking down) well-recognized stars of the genre. The “hip-hop cops” are also known as the “rap task force,” and their existence solely for the surveillance of rappers’ movements has deepened the mistrust of police within hip-hop (and young blacks and Latinos by extension).
Certainly some well-known rappers have been involved in illegal activities and have even made millions off of bragging about them (50 Cent, who began his career as a crack dealer and was shot nine times before his career skyrocketed, is probably the best known example). Nevertheless, the purpose of monitoring rappers has echoes of COINTELPRO. For years, the existence of the hip-hop cops was rumored in New York (though the LAPD involvement with the murder of the Notorious BIG suggests it spread elsewhere). Bronx rapper Fat Joe told MTV in 2005:
"It's definitely a task force," Fat Joe said. "You go to hip-hop spots now and they ain't just your normal walking-the-beat cops. There's cops out there in undercover cars like they know something we don't know. Like bin Laden's in the club, B."
Some may have thought it a paranoid conceit, but in the mid 2000s, around the time the monitoring seemed to pique, the NYPD was capturing a disproportionate amount of rappers doing minor offenses. The insane amount of times rapper Busta Rhymes has been pulled over for minor traffic infractions alone suggests the force assigned him his own personal detail. Running red lights, talking on the phone, speeding, you name it—more than just garden variety racial profiling, hip-hop was getting busted and the NYPD seemed out for vengeance. In 2007, Lil Wayne was arrested in New York after performing at a show with a hulking police presence. (I was there, covering the show for VIBE magazine, and the amount of cops made it look something like an Occupy protest.) The popular rapper was charged with possession of a gun the police found on his tour bus, and though he denied it was his, the prosecution used a disputed, highly controversial DNA test to link him to it. He spent a year at Riker's Island as a result.
If it felt like the cops were fiending to arrest a high-profile rapper at that show (it did), they might have been. In 2006, Derrick Parker, a former police officer tasked with creating a "Rap Intel" squad, published the book "Notorious C.O.P.," detailing his experience on the NYPD for 20 years—and proving the existence of the Hip-Hop Task Force.
Ironic, no? It would behoove all to look behind the State Department's motives and wonder whether it’s trying to paint a pretty picture abroad, while punishing citizens at home—even now, with a more hip-hop friendly presidency (for the time being).
Leveraging hip hop in US foreign policy
Diplomats and officials use the music of the oppressed to connect with disaffected Muslim youth.
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/10/2011103091018299924.html
In April 2010, the US State Department sent a rap group named Chen Lo and The Liberation Family to perform in Damascus, Syria.
Following Chen Lo's performance, US secretary of state Hillary Clinton was asked by CBS News about US diplomacy's recent embrace of hip hop. "Hip hop is America," she said, noting that rap and other musical forms could help "rebuild the image" of the United States. "You know it may be a little bit hopeful, because I can't point to a change in Syrian policy because Chen Lo and the Liberation Family showed up. But I think we have to use every tool at our disposal."
The State Department began using hiphop as a tool in the mid-2000s, when, in the wake of Abu Ghraib and the resurgence of the Taliban, Karen Hughes, then undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, launched an initiative called Rhythm Road. The programme was modelled on the jazz diplomacy initiative of the Cold War era, except that in the "War on Terror", hip hop would play the central role of countering "poor perceptions" of the US.
In 2005, the State Department began sending "hip hop envoys" - rappers, dancers, DJs - to perform and speak in different parts of Africa, Asia and the Middle East. The tours have since covered the broad arc of the Muslim world, with performances taking place in Senegal and Ivory Coast, across North Africa, the Levant and Middle East, and extending to Mongolia, Pakistan and Indonesia.
The artists stage performances and hold workshops; those hip hop ambassadors who are Muslims talk to local media about being Muslim in the US. The tours aim not only to exhibit the integration of American Muslims, but also, according to planners, to promote democracy and foster dissent.
"You have to bet at the end of the day, people will choose freedom over tyranny if they're given a choice," Clinton observed of the State Department's hip hop programme in Syria - stating that cultural diplomacy is a complex game of "multidimensional chess".
"Hip hop can be a chess piece?" asked the interviewer. "Absolutely!" responded the secretary of state.
Much has been said about the role of hip hop in the Arab revolts. French media described [fr] the Arab Spring as le printemps des rappeurs ["The spring of the rappers"]. Time Magazine named Tunisian rapper Hamada Ben Amor (aka El General) - a rapper who was arrested by Tunisian dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali - as one of the "100 Most Influential People of 2011", ranking him higher than President Barack Obama.
Hip hop revolution
It is true that since protests began in Tunisia in December 2010, rap has provided a soundtrack to the North African revolts. As security forces rampaged in the streets, artists in Tunis, Cairo and Benghazi were writing lyrics and cobbling together protest footage, beats and rhymes, which they then uploaded to proxy servers. These impromptu songs - such as El General's Rais Lebled - were then picked up and broadcast by Al Jazeera, and played at gatherings and solidarity marches in London, New York and Washington.
But the role of music should not be exaggerated: Hip hop did not cause the Arab revolts any more than Twitter or Facebook did. The cross-border spread of popular movements is not a new phenomenon in the Arab world - the uprisings of 1919, which engulfed Egypt, Libya and Tunisia, occurred long before the advent of the internet, social media or rap music.
And the countries in the region with the most vibrant hip hop scenes, Morocco and Algeria, have not seen revolts. Western journalists' focus on hip hop - like their fixation on Facebook and Twitter - seems partly because, in their eyes, a taste for hip hop among young Muslims is a sign of moderation, modernity, even "an embrace of the US".
Interviewer: "Hip hop can be a chess piece?"
Hillary Clinton: Absolutely!"
What is absent from these discussions about rap and the breakdown of Arab authoritarianism is the role that states - in the region and beyond - have played in shaping and directing local hip hop cultures. From deposed Tunisian dictator Ben Ali's mobilisation of hip hop culture against Islamism to the embattled Syrian regime's current support of "pro-stability rappers", to the US government's growing use of hip hop in public diplomacy, counter-terrorism and democracy promotion, regimes are intervening to promote some sub-styles of hip hop, in an attempt to harness the genre towards various political objectives.
The jazz tours of the Cold War saw the US government sent integrated bands led by Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman to various parts of Africa, Asia and the Middle East to counter Soviet propaganda about American racial practices, and to get people in other countries to identify with "the American way of life".
The choice of jazz was not simply due to its international appeal. As historian Penny Von Eschen writes in her pioneering book Satchmo Blows Up the World, in the 1950s, the State Department believed that African-American culture could convey "a sense of shared suffering, as well as the conviction that equality could be gained under the American political system" to people who had suffered European colonialism.
Similar thinking underpins the current "hip hop diplomacy" initiatives. The State Department planners who are calling for "the leveraging of hip hop" in US foreign policy emphasise "the importance of Islam to the roots of hip hop in America", and the "pain" and "struggle" that the music expresses.
A Brookings report authored by the programme's architects - titled "Mightier than the Sword: Arts and Culture in the US-Muslim World Relationship" (2008) - notes that hip hop began as "outsiders' protest" against the US system, and now resonates among marginalised Muslim youth worldwide. From the Parisian banlieues to Palestine to Kyrgyzstan, "hip hop reflects struggle against authority" and expresses a "pain" that transcends language barriers.
An ironic choice
Rappers whom Muslim youth relate to often disagree with US foreign policy [GALLO/GETTY]
Moreover, note the authors, hip hop's pioneers were inner-city Muslims who "carry on an African-American Muslim tradition of protest against authority, most powerfully represented by Malcolm X". The report concludes by calling for a "greater exploitation of this natural connector to the Muslim world".
The choice of hip hop is ironic: The very music blamed for a range of social ills at home - violence, misogyny, consumerism, academic underperformance - is being deployed abroad in the hopes of making the US safer and better-liked. European states have also been disptaching their Muslim hip hop artists to perform in Muslim-majority countries. Long before the fall of the Gaddafi regime, the British Council was organising hip hop workshops in Tripoli, and sponsoring Electric Steps, "Libya's only hip hop band", as a way to promote political reform in that country.
Rap is also being used in de-radicalisation and counter-terrorism initiatives. American and European terrorism experts have expressed concerns over "anti-American hip hop", accenting the radicalising influence of this genre. Others have advocated mobilising certain sub-genres of hip hop against what they call "jihadi cool".
Warning that Osama bin Laden's associate Abu Yahya al-Libi has made al-Qaeda look "cool", one terrorism expert recommends that the US respond "with one of America's coolest exports: hip hop", specifically with a "subgroup" thereof.
"Muslim hip hop is Muslim poetry set to drum beats," explains Jeffrey Halverson in an article titled Rap Is Da Bomb for Defeating Abu Yahya. "Add in the emotional parallels between the plight of African-Americans and, for example, impoverished Algerians living in ghettos outside of Paris or Palestinian refugees in the West Bank and the analogy becomes even clearer."
But it's unclear how "Muslim hip hop" will exert a moderating or democratising influence: Will a performance by an African-American Muslim group trigger a particular calming "effect", pushing young Muslim men away from extremist ideas? Nor is it clear what constitutes "Muslim hip hop": Does the fact that Busta Rhymes is a Sunni Muslim make his music "Islamic"?
Moreover, while references to Islam in hip hop are - as these public diplomacy experts note - legion, they are not necessarily political or flattering. In December 2002, Lil Kim appeared on the cover of OneWorld magazine wearing a burqa and a bikini, saying "F*** Afghanistan".
50 Cent's track "Ghetto Quran" is about dealing drugs and "snitchin'". Foxy Brown charmed some and infuriated others with her song "Hot Spot", saying, "MCs wanna eat me but it's Ramadan."
More disturbing was the video "Hard" released in late 2009 by the diva, Rihanna, in which she appears decked out in military garb, heavily armed and straddling a tank's gun turret in a Middle Eastern war setting. An Arabic tattoo beneath her bronze bra reads, "Freedom Through Christ"; on a wall is the Quranic verse: "We belong to God, and to Him we shall return" - recited to honour the dead, and not an uncommon wall inscription in war-torn Muslim societies.
The point is that not all Islam-alluding hip hop resonates with Muslim youth. Those hip hop stars - Lupe Fiasco, Mos Def, Rakim - who are beloved among Muslim youth are appreciated because they work their Muslim identity into their art and because they forthrightly criticise US foreign policy.
At the recent BET hip hop Awards, Lupe Fiasco performed his hit "Words I Never Said", with a Palestinian flag draped over his mic. ("Gaza Strip was getting burned; Obama didn't say sh**," he rapped.) But neither Lupe nor Mos are likely to be invited on a State Department tour.
For State Department officials, the hip hop initiatives in Muslim-majority states showcase the diversity and integration of post-civil rights America. The multi-hued hip hop acts sent overseas represent a post-racial or post-racist American dream, and exhibit the achievements of the civil rights movement, a uniquely American moment that others can learn from.
But it's unclear how persuasive this racialised imagery is. Muslims do not resent the US for its lack of diversity. Where perceptions are poor, it is because of foreign policy, as well as, increasingly, domestic policies that target Muslims.
Perhaps the greatest irony of the State Department's efforts to showcase the model integration of US Muslims, and to deploy the moral and symbolic capital of the civil rights movement, is that these tours - as with the jazz tours - are occurring against a backdrop of unfavourable (and racialised) media images of Quran burnings, anti-mosque rallies and anti-sharia campaigns, as one of the most alarming waves of nativism in recent US history surges northward.
US diplomacy's embrace of hip hop as a foreign policy tool has sparked a heated debate, among artists and aficionados worldwide, over the purpose of hip hop: whether hip hop is "protest music" or "party music"; whether it is the "soundtrack to the struggle" or to American unipolarity; and what it means now that states - not just corporations - have entered the hip hop game.
Hip hop activists have long been concerned about how to protect their music from corporate power, but now that the music is being used in diplomacy and counterterrorism, the conversation is shifting.
The immensely popular "underground" British rapper Lowkey (Kareem Denis) recently articulated the question on many minds: "Hip hop at its best has exposed power, challenged power, it hasn't served power. When the US government loves the same rappers you love, whose interests are those rappers serving?"
Hishaam Aidi is editor, with Manning Marable, of Black Routes to Islam (Palgrave Macmillan 2009), and a fellow at the Open Society Foundation in New York. For more on race, hip hop and geo-politics, please see this longer study by Dr Aidi.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
January 4, 2012 |
Photo Credit: Agence France Presse
Since 2005, the US State Department has been using hip-hop as a bridge for foreign cultural diplomacy. Operating under the auspices of then-public diplomacy undersecretary Karen Hughes, the “Rhythm Road” program began sending “hip-hop envoys” to, mostly, the Middle East, hoping to promote transnational understanding through music and dance.
Al-Jazeera ran an excellent piece on the program this week, which begins with this quote from Hillary Clinton in 2010: “Hip-hop is America,” she told CBS—certainly a true statement, but not one anyone would have expected to hear before the Obama adminstration, even from culturally savvy Bill Clinton, whose most famous exchange with hip-hop was when he accused Sistah Souljah of reverse racism.
And while President Obama has done a good job of finally welcoming into the White House the most important musical movement of the last 35 years (both culturally and commercially), his olive branch to the culture has been met with controversy. Most recently, right wingers expressed outrage over his invitation to rather innocuous rapper Common on poetry night, with Sean Hannity wrongly painting him as a controversial "cop-killer"—an absurd assertion to anyone who listens to his music.
The aforementioned Al-Jazeera piece, which chronicles hip-hop's relatively new embrace within the state department, also discuss the music's role in the Arab Spring, which was declared "le printemps des rappeurs" by the French and thought to be a spark in both Syria and Tunisia. Of course, hip-hop's role cannot be quantified in those instances, and in Morocco and Algeria—where hip-hop enjoys a vast audience—there has been no revolution. Al-Jazeera blames the enthusiasm of Western media to lionize hip-hop's role in actual revolutions on their idea that "a taste for hip hop among young Muslims is a sign of moderation, modernity, even 'an embrace of the US.'"
Yet regardless of its impact on the revolutions—something that's impossible to gauge—rap has spread everywhere. The State Department is using hip-hop as a diplomatic concern in an effort to piggyback and control it, yet hip-hop has already been its own diplomat. Notoriously begun in the South Bronx of New York in the mid 1970s, flourishing despite urban blight and extreme disenfranchisement by the government, as it grew as a phenomenon its spirit resonated across the world. Nearly every country across the globe has its own interpretation of hip-hop—Russia, Denmark, and Turkey, as well as Tunisia and Morocco and Algeria—and not just because it conveyed cool cache. The rebellious notion of it, and the fact that it's a really effective way to express political malcontent, translates across cultures and languages (Public Enemy's rise to global popularity in the late 1980s certainly had a hand in it.)
And, quantifiable or no, the Arab Spring was not the first time protests have been inextricable from hip-hop. For instance, in 2006, after the banlieues of Paris erupted in response to rampant anti-immigration and racist sentiment in France, President Sarkozy blamed what he called "ruffians" but some of whom were, in fact, rappers who spoke against him. (Take Alibi Montana and Menace Crew's "Monsieur Sarkozy," and feel free to read my 2006 article on the topic in SPIN magazine.)
The State Department's actions mirror its efforts during the Cold War, when they dispatched prominent jazz musicians to counter Soviet propaganda about life in America. The Al-Jazeera piece brings up that this program sends Muslim hip-hop artists, in particular, to Muslim-majority countries to discuss their experience in the United States. It also points out the irony in the concept of using hip-hop in foreign diplomacy, when rap has been blamed for America’s worst aspects for so long. But clearly, rank hypocrisy is embedded in the program: the true rap voices of American youth have long been maligned by the government—and if the government expended more effort helping the blighted and impoverished black communities most of it comes from, it wouldn't be so reviled there. Further, there's the institutional existence of "hip-hop cops"—state-organized task forces within police departments created especially to target rap's high-profile stars—which have plagued the genre since the mid-1980s.
But first, some history. During the Cold War, the jazz musicians who went out in the name of American diplomacy were world-famous, like Dizzie Gillespie. This initiative doesn't parallel that--the groups it sends are generally unknown among hip-hop fans, despite many American rappers being both political and popular. For instance, Legacy, one of the groups in the program, is a four-person, live instrumental hip-hop crew, and while their pedigrees certainly guarantee an underground audience (they are all trained professionals, and have played mostly with jazz ensembles), that probably wouldn’t have much cache among most US hip-hop consumers.
The program's site explains that the groups are chosen for their "artistic integrity, music ability and educational skills." They're also painting a portrait of acceptance and cultural understanding in America that is counteracted daily by reports of physical violence against Muslims.
Plus, as Al-Jazeera points out, most hip-hop artists American Muslim youth respect are, too, making anti-capitalist, anti-regime statements, including Lupe Fiasco, Mos Def, Talib Kweli (the latter three have given support to Occupy), as well as Philadelphia legend Freeway.
Enlisting these or any number of Muslim rappers—who enmesh their religion with their lyrics—would make more sense from the cultural standpoint of a hip-hop fan, though clearly not an ambassadorship one.
And as for the "society-ruining" rap music that people like Hannity and Bill O'Reilly constantly harp on—nothing would curtail hard rap quicker than if the government ended the drug war, whose racist policies have ruined the lives of so many young black men that discontent is inherent. (And you have to wonder what the State Department would make of Shyne, the immensely popular Diddy associate who, after spending nine years in prison for a 2001 shooting, emerged an Orthodox Jew and began showing support for Zionist spy Jonathan Pollard.)
But nuance is not the most questionable part of this program. It’s the absurd idea that it exists, when other branches of the government—the FBI in collusion with the NYPD in particular—have been so adamant about profiling (and taking down) well-recognized stars of the genre. The “hip-hop cops” are also known as the “rap task force,” and their existence solely for the surveillance of rappers’ movements has deepened the mistrust of police within hip-hop (and young blacks and Latinos by extension).
Certainly some well-known rappers have been involved in illegal activities and have even made millions off of bragging about them (50 Cent, who began his career as a crack dealer and was shot nine times before his career skyrocketed, is probably the best known example). Nevertheless, the purpose of monitoring rappers has echoes of COINTELPRO. For years, the existence of the hip-hop cops was rumored in New York (though the LAPD involvement with the murder of the Notorious BIG suggests it spread elsewhere). Bronx rapper Fat Joe told MTV in 2005:
"It's definitely a task force," Fat Joe said. "You go to hip-hop spots now and they ain't just your normal walking-the-beat cops. There's cops out there in undercover cars like they know something we don't know. Like bin Laden's in the club, B."
Some may have thought it a paranoid conceit, but in the mid 2000s, around the time the monitoring seemed to pique, the NYPD was capturing a disproportionate amount of rappers doing minor offenses. The insane amount of times rapper Busta Rhymes has been pulled over for minor traffic infractions alone suggests the force assigned him his own personal detail. Running red lights, talking on the phone, speeding, you name it—more than just garden variety racial profiling, hip-hop was getting busted and the NYPD seemed out for vengeance. In 2007, Lil Wayne was arrested in New York after performing at a show with a hulking police presence. (I was there, covering the show for VIBE magazine, and the amount of cops made it look something like an Occupy protest.) The popular rapper was charged with possession of a gun the police found on his tour bus, and though he denied it was his, the prosecution used a disputed, highly controversial DNA test to link him to it. He spent a year at Riker's Island as a result.
If it felt like the cops were fiending to arrest a high-profile rapper at that show (it did), they might have been. In 2006, Derrick Parker, a former police officer tasked with creating a "Rap Intel" squad, published the book "Notorious C.O.P.," detailing his experience on the NYPD for 20 years—and proving the existence of the Hip-Hop Task Force.
Ironic, no? It would behoove all to look behind the State Department's motives and wonder whether it’s trying to paint a pretty picture abroad, while punishing citizens at home—even now, with a more hip-hop friendly presidency (for the time being).
Leveraging hip hop in US foreign policy
Diplomats and officials use the music of the oppressed to connect with disaffected Muslim youth.
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/10/2011103091018299924.html
In April 2010, the US State Department sent a rap group named Chen Lo and The Liberation Family to perform in Damascus, Syria.
Following Chen Lo's performance, US secretary of state Hillary Clinton was asked by CBS News about US diplomacy's recent embrace of hip hop. "Hip hop is America," she said, noting that rap and other musical forms could help "rebuild the image" of the United States. "You know it may be a little bit hopeful, because I can't point to a change in Syrian policy because Chen Lo and the Liberation Family showed up. But I think we have to use every tool at our disposal."
The State Department began using hiphop as a tool in the mid-2000s, when, in the wake of Abu Ghraib and the resurgence of the Taliban, Karen Hughes, then undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, launched an initiative called Rhythm Road. The programme was modelled on the jazz diplomacy initiative of the Cold War era, except that in the "War on Terror", hip hop would play the central role of countering "poor perceptions" of the US.
In 2005, the State Department began sending "hip hop envoys" - rappers, dancers, DJs - to perform and speak in different parts of Africa, Asia and the Middle East. The tours have since covered the broad arc of the Muslim world, with performances taking place in Senegal and Ivory Coast, across North Africa, the Levant and Middle East, and extending to Mongolia, Pakistan and Indonesia.
The artists stage performances and hold workshops; those hip hop ambassadors who are Muslims talk to local media about being Muslim in the US. The tours aim not only to exhibit the integration of American Muslims, but also, according to planners, to promote democracy and foster dissent.
"You have to bet at the end of the day, people will choose freedom over tyranny if they're given a choice," Clinton observed of the State Department's hip hop programme in Syria - stating that cultural diplomacy is a complex game of "multidimensional chess".
"Hip hop can be a chess piece?" asked the interviewer. "Absolutely!" responded the secretary of state.
Much has been said about the role of hip hop in the Arab revolts. French media described [fr] the Arab Spring as le printemps des rappeurs ["The spring of the rappers"]. Time Magazine named Tunisian rapper Hamada Ben Amor (aka El General) - a rapper who was arrested by Tunisian dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali - as one of the "100 Most Influential People of 2011", ranking him higher than President Barack Obama.
Hip hop revolution
It is true that since protests began in Tunisia in December 2010, rap has provided a soundtrack to the North African revolts. As security forces rampaged in the streets, artists in Tunis, Cairo and Benghazi were writing lyrics and cobbling together protest footage, beats and rhymes, which they then uploaded to proxy servers. These impromptu songs - such as El General's Rais Lebled - were then picked up and broadcast by Al Jazeera, and played at gatherings and solidarity marches in London, New York and Washington.
But the role of music should not be exaggerated: Hip hop did not cause the Arab revolts any more than Twitter or Facebook did. The cross-border spread of popular movements is not a new phenomenon in the Arab world - the uprisings of 1919, which engulfed Egypt, Libya and Tunisia, occurred long before the advent of the internet, social media or rap music.
And the countries in the region with the most vibrant hip hop scenes, Morocco and Algeria, have not seen revolts. Western journalists' focus on hip hop - like their fixation on Facebook and Twitter - seems partly because, in their eyes, a taste for hip hop among young Muslims is a sign of moderation, modernity, even "an embrace of the US".
Interviewer: "Hip hop can be a chess piece?"
Hillary Clinton: Absolutely!"
What is absent from these discussions about rap and the breakdown of Arab authoritarianism is the role that states - in the region and beyond - have played in shaping and directing local hip hop cultures. From deposed Tunisian dictator Ben Ali's mobilisation of hip hop culture against Islamism to the embattled Syrian regime's current support of "pro-stability rappers", to the US government's growing use of hip hop in public diplomacy, counter-terrorism and democracy promotion, regimes are intervening to promote some sub-styles of hip hop, in an attempt to harness the genre towards various political objectives.
The jazz tours of the Cold War saw the US government sent integrated bands led by Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman to various parts of Africa, Asia and the Middle East to counter Soviet propaganda about American racial practices, and to get people in other countries to identify with "the American way of life".
The choice of jazz was not simply due to its international appeal. As historian Penny Von Eschen writes in her pioneering book Satchmo Blows Up the World, in the 1950s, the State Department believed that African-American culture could convey "a sense of shared suffering, as well as the conviction that equality could be gained under the American political system" to people who had suffered European colonialism.
Similar thinking underpins the current "hip hop diplomacy" initiatives. The State Department planners who are calling for "the leveraging of hip hop" in US foreign policy emphasise "the importance of Islam to the roots of hip hop in America", and the "pain" and "struggle" that the music expresses.
A Brookings report authored by the programme's architects - titled "Mightier than the Sword: Arts and Culture in the US-Muslim World Relationship" (2008) - notes that hip hop began as "outsiders' protest" against the US system, and now resonates among marginalised Muslim youth worldwide. From the Parisian banlieues to Palestine to Kyrgyzstan, "hip hop reflects struggle against authority" and expresses a "pain" that transcends language barriers.
An ironic choice
Rappers whom Muslim youth relate to often disagree with US foreign policy [GALLO/GETTY]
Moreover, note the authors, hip hop's pioneers were inner-city Muslims who "carry on an African-American Muslim tradition of protest against authority, most powerfully represented by Malcolm X". The report concludes by calling for a "greater exploitation of this natural connector to the Muslim world".
The choice of hip hop is ironic: The very music blamed for a range of social ills at home - violence, misogyny, consumerism, academic underperformance - is being deployed abroad in the hopes of making the US safer and better-liked. European states have also been disptaching their Muslim hip hop artists to perform in Muslim-majority countries. Long before the fall of the Gaddafi regime, the British Council was organising hip hop workshops in Tripoli, and sponsoring Electric Steps, "Libya's only hip hop band", as a way to promote political reform in that country.
Rap is also being used in de-radicalisation and counter-terrorism initiatives. American and European terrorism experts have expressed concerns over "anti-American hip hop", accenting the radicalising influence of this genre. Others have advocated mobilising certain sub-genres of hip hop against what they call "jihadi cool".
Warning that Osama bin Laden's associate Abu Yahya al-Libi has made al-Qaeda look "cool", one terrorism expert recommends that the US respond "with one of America's coolest exports: hip hop", specifically with a "subgroup" thereof.
"Muslim hip hop is Muslim poetry set to drum beats," explains Jeffrey Halverson in an article titled Rap Is Da Bomb for Defeating Abu Yahya. "Add in the emotional parallels between the plight of African-Americans and, for example, impoverished Algerians living in ghettos outside of Paris or Palestinian refugees in the West Bank and the analogy becomes even clearer."
But it's unclear how "Muslim hip hop" will exert a moderating or democratising influence: Will a performance by an African-American Muslim group trigger a particular calming "effect", pushing young Muslim men away from extremist ideas? Nor is it clear what constitutes "Muslim hip hop": Does the fact that Busta Rhymes is a Sunni Muslim make his music "Islamic"?
Moreover, while references to Islam in hip hop are - as these public diplomacy experts note - legion, they are not necessarily political or flattering. In December 2002, Lil Kim appeared on the cover of OneWorld magazine wearing a burqa and a bikini, saying "F*** Afghanistan".
50 Cent's track "Ghetto Quran" is about dealing drugs and "snitchin'". Foxy Brown charmed some and infuriated others with her song "Hot Spot", saying, "MCs wanna eat me but it's Ramadan."
More disturbing was the video "Hard" released in late 2009 by the diva, Rihanna, in which she appears decked out in military garb, heavily armed and straddling a tank's gun turret in a Middle Eastern war setting. An Arabic tattoo beneath her bronze bra reads, "Freedom Through Christ"; on a wall is the Quranic verse: "We belong to God, and to Him we shall return" - recited to honour the dead, and not an uncommon wall inscription in war-torn Muslim societies.
The point is that not all Islam-alluding hip hop resonates with Muslim youth. Those hip hop stars - Lupe Fiasco, Mos Def, Rakim - who are beloved among Muslim youth are appreciated because they work their Muslim identity into their art and because they forthrightly criticise US foreign policy.
At the recent BET hip hop Awards, Lupe Fiasco performed his hit "Words I Never Said", with a Palestinian flag draped over his mic. ("Gaza Strip was getting burned; Obama didn't say sh**," he rapped.) But neither Lupe nor Mos are likely to be invited on a State Department tour.
For State Department officials, the hip hop initiatives in Muslim-majority states showcase the diversity and integration of post-civil rights America. The multi-hued hip hop acts sent overseas represent a post-racial or post-racist American dream, and exhibit the achievements of the civil rights movement, a uniquely American moment that others can learn from.
But it's unclear how persuasive this racialised imagery is. Muslims do not resent the US for its lack of diversity. Where perceptions are poor, it is because of foreign policy, as well as, increasingly, domestic policies that target Muslims.
Perhaps the greatest irony of the State Department's efforts to showcase the model integration of US Muslims, and to deploy the moral and symbolic capital of the civil rights movement, is that these tours - as with the jazz tours - are occurring against a backdrop of unfavourable (and racialised) media images of Quran burnings, anti-mosque rallies and anti-sharia campaigns, as one of the most alarming waves of nativism in recent US history surges northward.
US diplomacy's embrace of hip hop as a foreign policy tool has sparked a heated debate, among artists and aficionados worldwide, over the purpose of hip hop: whether hip hop is "protest music" or "party music"; whether it is the "soundtrack to the struggle" or to American unipolarity; and what it means now that states - not just corporations - have entered the hip hop game.
Hip hop activists have long been concerned about how to protect their music from corporate power, but now that the music is being used in diplomacy and counterterrorism, the conversation is shifting.
The immensely popular "underground" British rapper Lowkey (Kareem Denis) recently articulated the question on many minds: "Hip hop at its best has exposed power, challenged power, it hasn't served power. When the US government loves the same rappers you love, whose interests are those rappers serving?"
Hishaam Aidi is editor, with Manning Marable, of Black Routes to Islam (Palgrave Macmillan 2009), and a fellow at the Open Society Foundation in New York. For more on race, hip hop and geo-politics, please see this longer study by Dr Aidi.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.