“We are all enraged. Why don't you arrest us?” chanted protestors in the courtroom during the trial of El-Haqed (the enraged), a twenty-four-year-old rapper from Casablanca. El-Haqed is an active member of the 20 February movement (Feb20), which extended the 2011 North African uprisings to Morocco.Footnote ¹ Many believe that the civil charges brought several times against him are related to his political activism with Feb20 and his daring lyrics. El-Haqed's song “Long Live the People” is thought to be behind his first arrest because it disrupts the phrase “Long Live the King.” In June 2014, El-Haqed was sentenced to prison for the first time for a period of four months. While attending a sports match, he was arrested on charges of selling tickets on the black market. His multiple arrests, and Feb20 members’ sustained mobilizations against them, reveal that the rapper is not only an iconic figure for youth protesters, but also one of their greatest rallying forces.

The uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East have certainly undermined established paradigms about the impossibility of democratization in a region caught between “authoritarian regimes” and “fanaticized” youth. However, little attention has been paid to the virtual and artistic spaces in which the revolutionary imagination of youth has long been active before surfacing onto the streets. As groundbreaking events across North Africa and the Middle East continue to unfold, analysts have yet to grapple with the importance of hip-hop not only as a subculture of resistance and a mode of contestation, but also as a place for the production of aesthetic citizenship in the region. Most commentators on the “Arab Spring” would agree that the chains of fear have been broken, but few have examined how changes in popular culture, particularly music, helped to break those chains before the “Arab Spring” began. I argue that it is through rap music that fear has been contained, domesticated, and “spat” in borderless clips disseminated on social media and YouTube.

My understanding of aesthetic citizenship is inspired by Jacques Ranciere's definition of politics as a reconfiguration of the “partition of the sensible.”Footnote ² As such, it is an aesthetic activity where dissensus can be displayed as spectacle. More than spectacle, aesthetic citizenship points to the formation of a subculture that cuts across the binaries of religious/secular to carve out a space for the political in everyday life, in this case through the rhythms and visual icons of rap music. This subculture was clearly articulated as far back as 2007 when rapper Tawfik Hazeb, alias L’Bigg (Don Bigg), wrote his song al-Khouf (Fear), which depicts daily life in Morocco to be controlled by corruption, oppression, abuse of power, and fear. His description of fear invites Moroccans not only to document it, but also to shout and echo it in order to domesticate it. Indeed, the song's opening bit is “fear, quit fear”:

Since the turn of the 21st century, a discourse of social justice and citizenship rights has become embedded in the “bit,” the word and visual symbols of hip-hop. Hip-hop “lifestyle,” as many Moroccan rappers describe it, has been widely disseminated and shared on the web through the rhythms of rap music, and is increasingly visible on the streets in the hairstyles, slang, and fashion of urban youths. Punk and afro hair styles started to become visible during the annual international hip-hop festival, L’boulevard of Young Musicians, also called the Festival of Urban Music. Launched in 1999 by a group of artists residing in Casablanca, L’boulevard brings together hip-hop artists from all over the country and the world for three days of free concerts and dance performances before hundreds of thousands of youths from diverse social and economic backgrounds.

For over a decade hip-hop has been at the center of the production of aesthetic citizenship through a widely dispersed and networked contestation.Footnote ⁴ However, the formation of youth political sensibilities through hip-hop has gone almost unnoticed in academic writings on youth sensibilities in Islamic contexts. The dominance of the Islamist “post-Islamism” paradigmFootnote ⁵ and the “public spheres” approaches to art and new media led many to miss the way in which this underground music is not only the expression of new acoustic and post-Islamist sensibilities but also formative of an aesthetic citizenship in the wake of the 21st century. “Urban music,” as Moroccan rappers call it, does not only combine art and “social critique” but also involves new epistemologies of belonging and citizenship that have been enmeshed with pedagogies of contained and domesticated “fear.”

Rap music domesticated state, symbolic, physical, and material violence by exhausting its everyday deployments, describing it, screaming it, and depriving it of its secrets, its invisible haunting face, as well as its “exceptional” and legalized features. Described, documented, and spat, fear became the affective space for fearless subjects’ production of a pedagogy of citizenship. For instance, in the wake of the Tunisian revolution, one of the most significant expressions of this “face to face” with power came from rapper Hamada Ben Aoun, alias El-GeneralVoice, of Tunisia. His video clip “Rais L’bled” (Mr. President) was released around the time when Tunisian fruit-seller Mohammed Bouazizi set himself on fire, in December 2011. The video clip opens with a picture in which we see ousted President Bin ʿAli leaning toward a schoolchild and asking him to talk freely with no fear. This public relations face to face became El-General's opening beat.

The song spelled out the various facets of oppression, subalternity, and lawlessness in Tunisia, holding “Rais L’bled” directly responsible for the hardship of Tunisians. El-General was arrested on 6 January 2011 but then released after the mobilization of the cyberspace and the streets.

In his December 2009 interview with Al Jazeera, L’Bigg explained the meaning of his new album's title “Mghraba hta Lmout” (Moroccans until Death). He stated, “I meant we will stick around, we are not leaving this country, and we will not leave it to you.”Footnote ⁷ While the “you” directly addresses the power elites, the idea of “sticking around” is a metaphor of a face to face between the powerful and their surplus populations. “Sticking around” is a pedagogy of resistance that is meant to annoy those in power and inspire the thousands of men and women who look to the heavily policed European shores as a deadly point of escape. At the same time, sticking around offers a grammatology of citizenship that addresses escape as disloyal and disengagement as unethical. L’Bigg's album invites his fellow Moroccans not to escape, but to stick around, face power, and seek change. Yet despite his calls to fight for change in Morocco and to overcome fear, L’Bigg shockingly opposed the Feb20 movement through his very controversial 2011 song Mabghitch (I Don't Want To), in which he criticized the movement for not representing Moroccans.

Unlike L’Bigg, other hip-hop artists including Muslim and Hoba Hoba Spirit supported Feb20 and even chanted for it. Muslim is one of the most powerful lyricists on the rap scene. In his 2007 album “Tammarud, Rebellion,” Muslim names all of the country's “stolen resources” using sharp lyrics and beats. In one of his hits, Muslim demands his share of the phosphates, the sea, the fish, the fruit, and the vegetables of the country, robbed through export and privatization. He describes that “robbing” in a contrast of oxygen versus fume, sea versus bottled water: “while you get the oxygen, we are left with the fume, while you get the sea, we are left with bottled water.”

These rappers may not be the articulation of the same moment of youth representational politics, but they all helped lay the groundwork for the youth rebellion by weaving art, metaphor, image, and sharp lyrics together in a way that embeds politics in a new aesthetic genre. The slogan, “we are all enraged, why don't you arrest us?” is a significant expression of this merging of politics and music. This merging became visible as early as February 2003 in street slogans during the heavy metal trial in Morocco in which fourteen heavy metal artists from Casablanca were charged for being members of satanic cults. Their trial triggered the first public controversies over the “right to sing” and the first conflation of politics and music in relation to questions of citizenship rights. In one of the sit-ins organized by the families and friends of the artists, protestors carried the sign “I vote I sing.” The sign signifies that the discourse of citizenship rights now encompasses hip-hop as a new genre in youth forms of self-presentation as citizens. The network of forty-five NGOs that mobilized in support of the musicians managed to attract public attention and to fuel debate over the status of individuals as modern subjects of taste, choice, and rights. The Moroccan press devoted several articles to the urban music scene, extending the debate to a middle-class public across Morocco and Europe. The sign “I vote I sing” is indicative of a new era in which national belonging and citizenship rights must include the right to rock, rap, dance, and dress in black. The signs and slogans used in these protests clearly indicate the opening of a new era of aesthetic citizenship, one that has also been indicated by women's decorated homemade food during the Yemeni uprisings, children's faces painted with national flags during the North African uprisings, and signs and colors imprinted on bodies during the waves of protest that swept the “Arab” region in the past three years.