A Brief Introduction to the Female Voices in Arab Hip Hop

Women in hip-hop music? Forget Nicki Minaj, let’s talk about Soultana, Malikah and Shadia Mansour.

The growing hip hop scene in the Middle East and North Africa, often highly political and under a mix of influence from Near Eastern musical traditions to Tupac, has a fabulously strong-voiced female contingent. The West has its Nicki Minajes, sure, but the Arab World comes out on top with hard-hitting female empowerment sounds from artists like Lebanese Malikah (aka MC Lix, aka Lynn Fattouh), Palestinian Shadia Mansour and Moroccan Soultana.  This isn’t to say that the Arab language rap scene isn’t male-dominated. It is. But the atmosphere is overall less antagonistic to the idea of positive, constructive female voices. The notable male rappers and rap groups like DAM, Y Crew, Arabian Knightz, or El General (check out a fuller spectrum of artists here) don’t infuse their music with machismo and misogynistic peacocking. As far as I can tell, there is no Arab equivalent to “99 Problems.” In fact, quite the opposite. (For example, “Sisters” by the Arabian Knightz celebrates and honors the female contribution to Egyptian revolutionary activism.)

Soultana on being a female MC:

To be a female MC, I think, all over the world, it is so hard. Rap music relates rap music to men and not to woman. But I think, and I am sure that, woman can talk about women stuffs, women problems, women things, more than a guy. So if I want to talk about abuse, and there is a rapper who is a guy who wants to talk about abuse, he can’t express why it really means as much as a woman. I can talk about it because I can feel it. Everyday I can feel it on the streets through insults, by words, by a lot of things. Women, they can understand what women want to say. I think that really we have to be a whole generation who is confident and ready to rap and go on stage and talk about those issues.

The must-listens:

Bonus: Watch Malikah perform with Omar Offendum in Beirut in 2010.

(Source: thepoliticalnotebook)