Values That Pay : Complicity, Sincerity, and Hip Hop in Contemporary Moroccan Life

Abstract

Today, Morocco’s hip hop artists are vital to their country’s reputation as diverse, creative, and modern. But in the 1990s and 2000s, teenage amateurs shaped their craft and ideals together as the profound socioeconomic changes of neoliberalization swept through their neighborhoods. Values That Pay traces Moroccan hip hop’s trajectory from sidewalk cyphers and bedroom studios to royal commendations and international festivals. Kendra Salois draws from more than ten years of research into her interlocutors’ music and moral reasoning to explore the constitutive tensions of institutionalization, hip hop aesthetics, and neoliberal life. Entrepreneurial artists respond to their unavoidable complicity with an extractive state through aesthetic and interpersonal sincerity, educating their fans on the risks and responsibilities of contemporary citizenship. Salois argues that over the past forty years, Moroccan hip hop practitioners have transformed not only themselves but also what it means to be an ethical citizen in a deeply unequal nation. “Moving effortlessly between street-level ethnography of the rap scene and analysis of the political economy of transnational cultural flows, Kendra Salois offers a keenly observed, historically grounded, and eminently readable history of Moroccan hip hop.” — Hisham Aidi, author of Rebel Music: Race, Empire, and the New Muslim Youth Culture “Guided by her steady refusal to dismiss Moroccan hip hop artists and their fans as complicit with the state, as sell-outs to the market, or alternatively as resistant, Salois’s caring world of neoliberal subject making is alive with improvisations, debate, ethics, human dilemmas, fortitude, music, and young people having fun.” — Louise Meintjes, author of Dust of the Zulu: Ngoma Aesthetics after Apartheid